I’ve found that communities that are both mainstream and related to technical subjects to always get filled by people who know just barely enough about the subject to spread self-assured disinformation.
You won’t really have this problem with super-niche stuff, or stuff that isn’t mainstream enough like a pilot community. Gaming in social media is definitely cursed.
I love Valve, but I really don’t understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don’t truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small studios to pay. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.
Don’t get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it’s been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don’t need the money as this point. They don’t need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.
What if you make an app or a game and sell it for 2 Billions dollars?
Makes sense that suddenly becoming billionaire with every intention to not remain one by turning into a force of good is arguably one way to be a decent human. In other words, the only good billionaires are those not trying to be, or remain billionaires.
There is also a point where you have to be smart and patient with how you distribute your money, or else you simply risk some other greedy asshole to pocket it.
I mean, losing the Twitter brand recognition is such a bad fucking move that I bet a lot of people are more than happy to indulge him in the name change. He paid billions in for the brand and basically just decided to make a generic website out of it.
No, it was a big international corporation. But afaik the forced positivity was universal.
Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.
Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.
Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.
Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.
So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.
Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your “bosses” in earshot, in every situation. There wasn’t a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn’t listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It’s all great!
Now let’s play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart’s law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss’s job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.
Because that’s the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you’re the only one to do it it’s gonna raise “red flags” and you’re gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.
I did not really mind when I worked at a ~10 people company, it kind of made sense. Working on a floor with over a hundred people in an open office was miserable. There was always someone on Zoom or people having live meeting in earshot.
Blow my mind that all those office managers and floor planners and supposedly expert at organizing a work environment think that it make sense to cram in hundred of people working on wildly different stuff together at earshot distance. How hard would it be to create big divisions so that you only get to hear the 10 or so people which you’re directly involved with. Anyway, there was clearly an “everyone must be an extrovert” culture thing going on. The higher ups sure seemed to enjoy hearing and seeing everyone everywhere all the time.
Open offices are a mistake.
Having to reserve conference rooms to have a semblance of quietude is a terrible system. I don’t miss that shit.
We had a loud talkative guy at my place. Fucking deep voice that he was projecting like he was on a stage or something. It was not possible to have a conversation near him when he was on Zoom. We barely spoke in the open area anyway, but some people just wouldn’t shup up. I can still hear their stupid voice when I think about it.
Indeed. What sucks is that it is off by default, I figure most small-time devs simply need to be told it exists. I definitely wouldn’t excuse the big players though, most AAA game companies can get fucked for all I care.
A bare bone program with rendering and movement is not a game, it’s a prototype, and this demonstrate nothing about modern game development. Of course a prototype with nothing but rendering and basic inputs coded in c++ is gonna be multi-platform by default. Hell, it is just code on a repo, you don’t even need to build it and test it and deploy it for all platforms as it is up to the user. I don’t think you understand the scope of making a fully-completed game. I had dozens of unfinished prototypes on my computer, some of which I made decades ago, some are multi-platform because of the language and tech. Still, this means nothing. It still cost money to support multiple platforms. Only exception nowadays is if your game happen to be compatible with Proton. But yeah, supporting Mac and a bunch of other platforms? It is not free my dude.
Valve is definitely an exception. I am not sure why, but it is pretty much in the open that Gabe Newell has a bone to pick with Microsoft and he has been throwing money at Linux for over a decade to break their monopoly on gaming. I’d argue that this has nothing to do with their love for the community and more so with Gabe’s personal vendetta against Microsoft.
Reality is that most game devs, most executives and most people in marketing don’t really care about Linux. It is good PR to support Mac and Linux, and some of the geekier developers will go the extra mile to support it, but I think it is common in the industry to assume that Linux users are not gamer, or that they have enough knowledge to install a dual boot. They don’t care in the sense that they don’t even think about it, its not even on the radar for most game companies. Most studios probably never even had a discussion about it. That is how irrelevant Linux has been to gaming. Hence why Proton is such a tour de force.
Not sure I want to name the game because this would make me very easy to identify from my post history. It’s a game on Steam that sold over 250k copies. My boss promised a Linux version very early on because they thought it would be easy, but we ended up being stuck with that promise.
Yeah, somehow it was just declared over. I hate the conspiracy crowd as much as the next sane person, but it is pretty crazy how quickly the public opinion can be manipulated regardless of reality.
In an ideal world everything would work out, but for some business it is a pretty huge commitment for what was less than 2% of the market just a few months ago. We certainly lost money porting our game in Linux at that last place I worked. It was before Proton though. Obviously each case is different, and some games work on Linux out-the-box due to Photon so this become a non-issue.
Virtually no anticheat worked on Linux just a few years ago except maybe Valve and Blizzard in-house solutions. Games that are out and already committed to a specific anticheat can’t do much but to wait, so it is not really on them. Changing the anticheat solution mid-way on a released game would piss off so many people you can’t imagine. On a brand new game though, I would agree that this should be considered.
Well, first of all I know multi-platform game exists and in some case it will just work out of the box. If it doesn’t though, not all companies have the money to hire QA for other platforms or devs to look into issues when stuff goes wrong on Linux. Most game companies fail and run out of cash, only the top survives. They don’t have that sort of money laying around to mess around a platform with 2% of users. My previous company certainly loss money on Linux and it was a cause of tension internally.
Secondly, a Minecraft prototype written in c++ and using native OpenGL calls is a terrible example. Even though I understand the dev volunteer his time so money isn’t an issue, it would cost a fortune and take years for your average studio to make a game from scratch like this without a game engine.
There are tons of reasons my dude. You can still have platform-dependant technologies in your game even if the base engine itself supports linux.
I made games primarily for Windows which we also compiled for Linux. It is mostly input/output stuff, aka hardware issues. That is, audio issues, input issues, storage issues, dependency issues. Modern game engine mostly handle the rest. It wasn’t such a big deal to fix, but most gamedev lacked experience with Linux, and most projects are already over budget and late, so fixing Linux for an extra 2-5% of sales didn’t make much sense at small scale. Proton kind off fixed all of this tho.