hirogdev

The key point I took away from this was that at the end of Barnes and Noble’s first life, someone had the wisdom to appoint a CEO who clearly understands AND loves bookstores, and the experience it brings to those who love reading.

Just shows that maybe big companies need to completely fail before the greedy money people lose interest and get their grubby hands off from everything good in the world.

When you worked in games, how did your team deal with the unplanned scenarios where a feature, or even the core game, wasn’t fun and you needed to go back to the drawing board?

You’re completely missing the point I’m making - it’s nothing to do with how matchmaking works or how to get self-hosted servers to work.

Your quote about “every game before the mid 2000s” is just reinforcing what I’m trying to tell you: no modern PvP game can get away with it anymore.

The current average player who’s played any modern PvP game in recent memory expects to be able to click a PLAY button that puts them into a match. That is your default user experience expectation.

If you require players to have to dig through a server list like people had to during the pre-mid-2000s, you lose players FAST.

You dilute your player base by allowing people to play in self-hosted servers because your default user experience of clicking PLAY and getting into a game gets worse (less players means less diversity of player skill and longer queue times).

For a game and studio that has no existing reputation and players who will jump on their stuff, you don’t have the luxury of splitting your already potentially small player base.

Modern PvP games that allow you to have custom games are all well-established and already have a healthy player base.

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That’s why I specifically pointed out PvP.

While this sounds like a good idea, in the modern landscape of PvP games, it would never work.

Current player expectations for PvP games are now “click play, get into game”. Every layer of friction filters out players who don’t want to go through the hassle of being able to just play the game they bought.

It seems easy for you because you played multiplayer games in the 90s, but anyone born after that era will have to learn to filter through a megalist of servers with names like “BoB’s L33t S3rv3r”.

But let’s play devil’s advocate and say the devs could still add the self-hosted servers to their game in a couple different ways.

If devs added it to accompany the default matchmaking, there’s now the problem of their player base being siphoned away from the main matchmaking pool, which further destroys the default player experience.

If devs added self-hosted servers as a way to supplement their own matchmaking servers (e.g. officially hosted servers + player hosted servers), the player experience can now wildly vary depending on which server you connect to, especially since devs can’t guarantee the same experience on random Joe’s home ISP connection and server hardware.

There’s no winning for the devs. While your sentiment is valid, the practicality of doing it is not feasible anymore.

The sunsetting idea is good though and I wished that happened more too.

Genuine curiosity: are you a professional game developer?

Arco.

A recent and lesser known game - unique turn-based tactical combat, and a heart-wrenching story.

It’s all fun and games until the scammers use AI themselves to massively scale their operations.

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Because the truth is worth knowing

This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.

What is the in the point in the truth in this article’s reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what’s ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to ‘chase the trend’? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn’t believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?

If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you’ve gleaned.

Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it’s bullshit.

But even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

News like this doesn’t do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim “I can’t believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!”

All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.

The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.

Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.

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This is absolute bullshit.

Firewalk, the studio that made Concord, used to be a part of a parent startup called ProbablyMonsters. Firewalk was sold to Sony last year, in April 2023.

ProbablyMonsters only had a total Series A investment of $250 million, and Firewalk was not the only studio that it was funding - it had multiple.

But let’s just say all $250mil went to Firewalk (of which is impossible because ProbablyMonsters still exists and has other studios). In order to hit this mythical $400mil figure, Sony would have had to spend $150mil in ONE YEAR.

The most significant cost of making a AAA game is paying for the developers, of which Firewalk has about 160 of them. In what world would Sony pay over 900k per developer to see Concord through to the finish line?

The more likely figure that each developer got paid on average is about 180k, that’s still just short of 30mil for 1 year.

Firewalk didn’t start with 160, so you can’t extrapolate that cost to its 8 years of development.

Don’t believe this horseshit.

“Forever Pay For Your Mouse”

Conversely, I’ve only ever seen “make do” used.

“Make due” would make sense to me in the context where debt is a factor, for example, “make due on rent”.

It doesn’t make sense when you apply that meaning to how the sentence was written in this article.

While writing this angry comment, did you stop to consider that maybe they did their job right and you’re wrong?

https://www.grammar.com/make_do_vs._make_due

Unless you’re living in the early 1900s, “make do” is correct for today’s English.