Like many things, launch parties scale with the size of the release’s budget. Launch parties are usually reserved for the release of something to the public, we don’t usually hold parties for reaching internal milestones. The biggest launch (and there…
Do sales really necessarily effect the decisions of post-release content adding support? Like for those types of games, do high sales guarantee more support, and do lower sales risk less-to-no more support? For a couple games I know that do this for several years after initial release, forum discussions use sale numbers to imply or get ideas for the future of post-launch content adding for those games. But I haven’t seen any proof of that being the case for past games. So is the rumor true?
It may help to reframe the situation a little. Let’s establish a baseline first. In order for us to provide support for a game or service, that game or service needs to generate enough ongoing money to pay for all costs associated with the continued su…
Debugging Complications
Sometimes a bug is easy to catch. You do some normal set of inputs and the aberrant behavior appears. Sometimes a bug is difficult to reproduce. Here are some of the qualities that can make a bug difficult to nail down:[Build-specific] — The bug only s…
How long is the scoping process for a game development typically in the industry, and does it vary greatly depending on what type of game, like from an open world PC game, to a mobile game, to a game based on a Hollywood IP?
Scoping is an ongoing process and not a particular phase of development that we finish. Even though we try to figure out what we can do early on, we still have to make scope adjustments as we follow the schedule. If higher priority tasks fall behind, i…
How do you expect MS and Nintendo to respond to the legal leaks of their future plans? What considerations are weighed when responding to any leak?
I expect them to deal with the leaks the same way the rest of us deal with leaks. We might acknowledge the leaks exist, but we don’t talk about the content of the leaks publicly and we adjust our planned information rollout to take the leaks into accou…
You’ve said before that modern games, even single player, will track player data. What sorts of things are actually logged? What do you think are some of the things players would least expect to be tracked?
We mostly track all the things that players choose to interact with. This means where they go, the things they spend time looking at, the NPCs they talk to, the things they buy, the recipes they craft, the menus they spend time in, the characters they …
Ascendant Studios just cut close to half of their staff within a month of release of their debut title Immortals of Aveum. You’ve shared before that devs will have down time between pre release to post release if new projects isn’t in full production. Is this timeline normal or what else can you infer from the cuts?
Usually when a game launches, we know really quickly whether the actual sales are trending at, above, or below the expected numbers and roughly by how far off we are. After the first few days, we can extrapolate the estimated sales trajectory the game …
About Unity these past few days
A lot of people have asked me about Unity and their strange new per-install charges policy that they rolled out on September 12th, 2023. I wanted to give them at least 24 hours before I posted my take on it — let the dust settle a bit so I could get a …
With the stories we hear about how toxic or downright dangerous public backlash can be towards gamedevs, what advice do you have for younger devs/people looking to get into the industry when confronted by this unfortunate reality?
There’s two major pieces of advice I have.For people who have not yet broken into the industry, reach out to devs and learn what you can from them. Ask them questions if you don’t understand something and try to figure out what they mean if they answer…
A report from Eurogamer and VGC stated that Nintendo showed their next console to a select few developers at Gamescom behind closed doors. Do you think the report is plausible? And is it generally common for console manufacturers to talk about their next console to developers privately towards the end of a console generation?
Is it plausible? Of course it’s plausible. The Nintendo Switch started development around 2012-2013, was unveiled in 2016, and was released in 2017. It’s been six years since the Switch launched. If Nintendo started developing a new console shortly aft…