While it’s a meme and a joke, there’s definitely truth to it. As an industry, we’ve already moved in that direction without people really noticing. The truth of the matter is that live service games, the kind of games that have regular content updates,…
Alright, Dev. You know what I’m about to ask already… Let’s hear your thoughts on the EA buyout.
Here are some of my thoughts on the buyout in no particular order.For now — while the deal is still being finalized.It’s a good day to own EA stock. All of the institutional investors will get paid out quite handsomely. If I worked at EA right now, I w…
Following the recent news of the rumors of EA being bought: could this potentially impact upon EA dev jobs or cause job losses? And what does it mean for the projects of the games that EA currently has in production?
Note: As of today, [EA has announced the $55 billion deal to go private has been agreed upon.] In addition to the acquisition, this is a leveraged buyout — EA will take on an additional $20 billion in debt financing as part of this deal. This likely bo…
Maybe this is not a DEV ask, but I’ll try anyway. How much does it cost to acquire, even temporarily, the rights of a successful IP? I guess it does eventually generate the revenue necessary to make the inversting worth, or else companies would not keep doing it. Context and example. For instance I think EA had the rights to publish Star Wars titles. But my question goes more in the line of: could it be a profitable move for a studio like Kojima Productions to get the rights for the MGS series from a multi business company like Konami?
The short answer is «It depends». The long answer is the list of all the things it depends on. Licensing a brand has a ton of factors involved because IP has value. The more valuable a brand is, the more careful its owners become about making decisions…
How strongly do game crashes affect player retention? There are lots of reasons to avoid having a game crash to desktop/home but, is a game crashing a major cause for player churn?
Game crashes cause lost progress and build frustration in players. Frustration with the game is one of the biggest factors in causing players to drop the game. As such, the frequency of the game crash is directly proportionate to how much they affect t…
Why do you think so many gamers are so emotionally invested when it comes to fan games, mods, and other topics related to IP law when it doesn’t impact them directly? What mindset do you think these people should try to adopt towards?
I grew up in a fairly large city of around a million people or more in the metropolitan area. I went to school in another metropolitan area with multiple millions of people. When I started working, I continued in that major metropolitan area. Because t…
So, what’re the best tools, resources, etc. for both learning to code and for making games? I imagine you might get asked this a lot, but I don’t really have an answer yet.
Not everyone is the same, and everyone is different when it comes to their familiarity with how to do things. Here’s AAGD’s quick and easy algorithm to decide what you should use to build your game idea if you’re just starting out:Do I know how to prog…
You said in your recent AI post that AI only can replace low level workers right now until it can find and fix its own mistakes. What roles specifically seem to be at the most risk in game development and what ones are the most immune regardless of rank (say, concept artists likely on chopping block but back end devs making the systems for art assets are safe)?
I put some thought into this and I really didn’t like the conclusion I had to draw from the evidence. AI is fairly even across the board in what it does — as I said before, AI is like a super confident, super fast junior developer that is often wrong i…
Not so much a game dev question as it is game dev adjacent. But I’m noticing more and more games releasing that require the player to agree to some kind of user agreement or privacy policy thing before playing the game. I highly doubt most players (myself included) take the time to read through all of those terms, or even understand what they are reading before they agree to it. Why are more games shipping with terms and conditions us players have to agree to, and should that concern us?
The whole point of requiring players to agree to these documents before they play is the «cover your ass» part of the legal system. The vast majority of the time, the goal for all of these laws is to protect the publisher providing the service or produ…
So, I’ve been meaning to get back into game dev. Should I start with something simple and scrape by with what I have or go with a big and ambitious idea?
Always start small. Pay attention to what you learn, finish what you start, then parlay what you learned from finishing that project into another, bigger subsequent project. Take on progressively harder and more ambitious projects, which will result in…