Discover how Ramen VR used data-driven game development to launch «Zenith: The Last City», which became the #1 bestselling game all major VR platforms—including Meta Quest/Rift, Steam and PlayStation VR.
Does a licensor offer the developer benefits beside the use of the IP, such as reference assets or facilitating the use of original voice actors?
Sometimes they do! Back when licensed movie games were a thing, I worked on one. The studio I was working for was actually developing two different licensed movie tie-in games at the time and the dev team relationships with the different movie studios …
Translating games: tips and best practices
Want to reach entirely new audiences and increase player engagement globally? Then let people play your game in their native language, but don’t fall into the pitfall of bad translation. Here are some examples and best practices for translating a mobile game.
If the relationship between publishers and developers is collaborative, what about other license owners they base their games or content on like Disney, Universal Studios, or even other game company owners? Aren’t they also driving forces to a dev’s decision for everything involving them as I hear?
You are correct — license owners are another set of requirements and approvals that developers must appease in order to ship a game. While the developer’s goal is to make the best game they can, the licensor’s ultimate duty is to make the most out of t…
American Mcgee is trying to get his new game greenlit. I know that his games are profitable and well received. However, it’s taking aver 4 years for a response, and I’m puzzled to why it is so. What exactly causes a company to consider greenleting a game? Does it require more than the creators reputation?
There are many reasons one would pass on a game pitch, many of which have nothing to do with the pitch itself. Finding a publisher is very much like dating — the game being pitched must meet a bunch of the publisher’s needs in order for them to run wit…
When it comes to microtransactions, how much data does it take to adjust prices? If a class of items (such as skins) is underperforming expectations is a price reduction considered or is it better to stay the course since there is no need to liquidate stock like in a physical store?
We don’t really do a lot of price adjustment of existing products, since it doesn’t cost us anything to continue to offer it at the price we ask. Usually we try to figure out why a particular product did or didn’t sell well, and then try to adjust it i…
Will the ideal matchmaking system give every player a winrate of 50% over a long enough time period? If it doesn’t, why would some players consistently show a better winrate? The Pokémon Unite community treats winrate as indicative of skill, but my intuition is that this can’t be true unless the algorithm is designed to make it so.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. The purpose of a matchmaking system isn’t to keep players at a 50% win rate, it’s to match players of roughly equal skill with each other in order to make for engaging games. The primary goal of matchmaking is to reduce the number of curb stomp games where the winners are bored and the losers are salty, because neither side really enjoys the experience all that much. This usually ends up stratifying players into skill bands, where the players within that band are generally able to give each other a decent challenge and minimize the number of lopsided games. Having a win rate close to 50% is a result of such a system but is not necessarily a goal.
Matchmaking systems can’t ensure every player has a 50% win rate because it breaks down when there are very small numbers of players within a skill band. Let’s examine an extreme example of this at work. Imagine the best player in the world, Neelo. The only player on Earth she cannot handily defeat is her rival Noriko. Between the two of them, Neelo has a slight edge and wins 55/45. If Noriko is online, Noriko can only ever be matched against Neelo and Neelo will win 55% of the time. If Noriko is not online, then no one can beat Neelo and she wins 100% of the time. There is no way a matchmaking system can ensure a 50% win rate for Neelo in such a situation.
This isn’t an issue for most skill bands because there’s often hundreds or even thousands of players playing in those bands at any given time for a sufficiently popular game. However, the very top echelons of player skill often run into issues with matchmaking because of the availability of qualified opponents. Professional competitive players playing normally online will tend to win more than they lose because there just aren’t enough players of their skill level online at any given time to match them with. Since there aren’t enough players that skilled to make matches, the matchmaking algorithms will necessarily widen the search as time passes and often match them with less skilled players often with fairly predictable results.
[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]
Got a burning question you want answered?
- Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
- Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
- Frequent Questions: The FAQ
Does crunch affect all team members evenly, or does it affect some more than others? IE Artists do crunch, but they crunch programmers the hardest.
Let’s take a step back and consider some context to your question. If there is too much work to do before a deadline, we either have to push the deadline or increase the amount of work done during the time remaining. Let’s assume that the deadline is i…
Meet with us at GDC 2023!
Heading to San Fran once again for the industry’s premier gaming event? Well then, great news! Our team will be at the conference to discuss the latest at GameAnalytics. If you’re interested in finding out more about the latest GameAnalytics platform developments, then book a chat with us today.
Ask a Game Dev 2023-03-07 20:01:14
When the motion picture became popular, the early filmmakers pioneered into a new medium and learned many valuable lessons. Their core takeaway can be summed up in three words: “Show, don’t tell.” It is almost always better to let the viewer see than i…