Procedurally generated games is a terrible title because procedural generation is used almost everywhere in the field. It also excludes some pretty pivotal aspects of a roguelike design, such as the idea of casual death/restarting and complex, often intentionally underexplained, interlocking systems that become more…

Lite vs Like - Does the act of death require you to begin the next run with no in-game advantages or consequences from previous runs?

MS, Sony, Apple, Google and Nintendo all offer digital services that allow you to buy and download software. They are all part of the software industry. They all take the same cut of 30%. Therefore, 30% is the industry standard cut for digital software downloads.

Valve, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony do not belong to the same industry. At best, they belong to the same sector. An industry can be reasonably defined either by competing interests in products or by competing interests in customers for those products. Each operates as a relatively closed ecosystem so…

So whether a given developer finds value in them is less important than whether a consumer finds value in them, and consumers have spoken loud and clear that they do.

Fair point. As valid as that is, I would counter that since they have been operating as a defacto monopoly for digitally-released PC games for over a decade and have been confronted with the 30% cut and chosen to defend it multiple times over the last five years, at this point it is the industry standard for PC video…

I’m not suggesting a plan of action at all. I’m stating that options exist, and Valve will need to continue to consider if their can defend their 30% cut, particularly since they’ve already demonstrated with their initial counteroffer of decreasing that cut on the most valuable properties that it clearly isn’t…

Selling gift cards in stores is nowhere near the burden that you might think. As a small business paying a much higher cost per card, I would pay approximately $2USD per card to be generated with an average revenue per card of $10USD. Even if we assume only a quarter (disastrous) sell, I’m still making a 25% profit…

Not really. Functionally Itch has to answer many of the same questions Steam does in terms of basic ability to deliver a digital good and represent the product. Nobody here is arguing that Steam doesn’t do more far more for people. The question is : Does the number of consumers or breadth of features validate taking tr…

Right, and as economies of scale and market share start factoring in, Steam’s stable of games and customers should reduce the cost per capita, not raise it. As for the networking backbone reducing latency, that would be exactly what I’m talking about for things that they can do since they are rolling in spare cash.

It is clearly sustainable as evidenced by the fact that Itch.io has always offered better. the question is “does Steam want to adjust their business model around the idea of not rolling in spare cash?”

Did you just whip out your degree in computer engineering to prove a point about software development? Get out of here. Try that crap on someone who didn’t major in Computer Science to know better. Unless we’re talking about embedded systems or your degree is 40 years old, you don’t know crap about the field from your…

There are so many problems with what you just said.

The term “design principles” with regards to the arts is a completely different concept than design principles as they relate to engineers. The closest engineers get to artistic design principles is Human-Computer Interaction and Ergonomics and only a limited subset of engineers are even exposed to those concepts.

If abstract silicon shapes that could pass the FCC guidelines for obscenity aren’t discreet enough a subway service that has had a rash of used condoms decorating their trains, people having sex in public, and bodily fluids on virtually every surface.... we need to discuss standards.

Hate to break it to ya, but dildos promote safe healthy living as well, and all of the sex toys they picked to display would meet the critera for primetime television censorship rules so... not x-rated.

These ads are no worse than ads they’ve had for condoms:

We have Trump for a president. At this point I do not react to anything as a joke. Call it societal PTSD.

Okay, how about you describe how you would run a falsifiable study with approximately ten percent of the working population and a surveying process that introduces no bias and that does not invoke some variant the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s fine. Take your time. We wouldn’t want to rely on qualitative data like…

Shoo. Games are not like FinTech. I know. I’ve done both. As a game programmer with credits, you can take that opinion and shove it. The sheer quantity of code that you’re required to write and keep in active memory is several orders of magnitude larger and the amount of time you have to effectively live in that code…