The presentation alone on this is brilliant - it’s simultaneously something you’re controlling and interacting with in real time while also being the playback of an old video tape. It creates an interesting dissonance/contradiction that I’ve not seen any other game do. It goes beyond what Thirty Flights or Paratopic …

Yeah, Schilling ignored (and went against) business advice and game development advice, as well as being ethically suspect - he explicitly promised his employees that he’d not do things that he then went and did. It wasn’t so much that Schilling needed someone over him, directing him, but he needed to not be involved…

And what he was seeing was pure play.

But in some sense the amateur status is implicit in the word “play.” “Play” as opposed to “job.” The very term was coined in opposition to people in studios doing paid costuming work.

“Another women who has decided that he is guilty because he has a penis.”

“And then the safe, with Jeannie in it, was stolen by interns who tried to sell it for $50...”

And it’s not just copying, either - it’s a deliberate homage. It’s all about taking art that was located in the future or a futuristic, contemporary, urban America, and the juxtaposition of locating it in what is now the past, rural Sweden.

What, you’re saying that referencing the work of Syd Mead and Ralph McQuarrie is so original that only Stålenhag could possibly do it? ;)

Stålenhag’s paintings are very much about a particular aesthetic (itself referencing the work of Syd Mead and Ralph McQuarrie) and vignettes of advanced technology as an integral part of ‘80s landscapes, neither of which are on display here. And it’s not like he owns the idea of “robots in the ‘80s.” No doubt he was…

“they should be hashing locally on the device and only sending the hash”

“then deletes the photo within seven days”

Yeah, it’s absolutely true that concept art doesn’t necessarily have any relation to the final product, and game designs can evolve - sometimes radically. I’m just saying, even if neither of those things were true - even if concept art was perfectly reflected in the final product and game designs never changed from…

In this case having knowledge of game development doesn’t even help - with descriptions this short and vague, all we can possibly evaluate are our own imaginings, sparked by the sentence and concept art. It’s impossible for anyone’s ideas of these games to be the same as what the team would have come up with,…

“A message to game developers..... STOP CHASING FADS.”

“Player exceptations are a fairy tale”

“This guy I think does a good job in explaining how that isn’t entirely the case.”

“have you ever considered that they just spend more than they need to?”

You don’t think they’re trying to be efficient? They are. That’s the price with every possible cost saving already built in. $35 million is for advertising and marketing. Again, it’s actually low. (A $100 million Hollywood movie would have another $50 million spent on marketing, at least.) There’s a direct…

“they have to sell around 4.5 million copies making around $30 copy”

Yeah, I’m not finding the suggestion very convincing, either. The comparison with the movie industry isn’t much help, because some games are far more transparent than movies are, and that doesn’t help the toxicity of the responses. And if the argument is that if all games were more transparent, gamers would be…