The starship graveyard section of DS3 ranks among the best of the series. Someone needs to do another one or another game just like it with a ship graveyard where there is a single threat that caused them to be there but the ships are of all different kinds and ages and all different backstories to them that you can…

I might note that the interview you guys linked to justify the rise of game development costs, is actually a great big fat lie. No game developer is paying all their employee’s 120K per year. Their highest value employee’s, sure I can see that. But for the most part, developers are rather underpaid, which is why the…

“Games haven’t increased in price.” other than slicing up games into DLC, season passes, legendary editions, etc.. In order to get all content in a game you need to often spend upwards of $100 and you then there’s still microtransactions in those same games.

#2 Ohh yay! Software development gender ratio strikes again!

Counterpoint to him stating that he’s not a genius- remembering the name Ionesco and correlating it to a fragment of a sentence inside a clue on the fly with thousands of dollars on the line sounds pretty genius-y to me

It’s his double jeopardy strategy that makes him so good. I’ve never seen anyone consistently bet as big as he does on them. People are usually WAY too conservative with daily doubles and he thinks nothing of betting $5,000 or more. He’s outstanding at getting control of the board and then going hunting in the second…

“Douche Douche Douche” 

Loved your book, Jason!

The problem is that its almost unviable to play without buying VC. Everything pushes the player into wasting real money: progress is slow as hell, the game is harder than before with low ratings, and you can’t even preview haircuts or tattoos. By the end of one season in the previous games the PC had competent ratings…

The problem isn’t so much that the microtransactions exist in and of themselves, but that their existence incentivizes the developer to demand more grinding from a player.

Jason, I’ve been reading your book, and it’s clear that a big part of game development involves deception. I’m sure developers consider it a necessary evil since they are constantly trying to get funding for their current and future projects, but they put no small amount of effort into spectacular (but unrealistic)…

I’m not sure how developers have the gal to blame gamers for toxicity, when time and time again they overhype their products, overpromise, overestimate their abilities and foster a cult like attitude in their communities.

Step one: Stop letting marketing people or “idea guys” like Molyneux talk about videogames at conventions and stop making access TO the places where developers talk about videogames so inaccessible to a majority of folks. If we treated “Gaming Convetions” the same way we treated anime conventions, for example, then…

Thanks for that news flash... there will always be people on the internet who act like dicks... I’ll write that down.

That one is on the devs/companies. Years of on disk DLC and similar bad practices really gave people a strong negative reflex. You gotta build that trust back up.

You could make that argument that a lot of these issues were caused by the secrecy. Decades of silence or false information about the development process created a culture where people don’t trust developers.

And many gamers are so toxic because developers are so secretive...

Just curious: are you married? And do you have a kid? Because the things you’re describing as not difficult, you’re also saying are like “herding cats” and require significant amounts of planning and rescheduling even to get 30 minutes in. Just that amount of coordination is difficult if you have a family AND a…

Well, Xplay always felt like an inferior version of Judgement Day (anyone else have fond memories of Judgement Day??), but it was still my favorite thing on the network. Now, I will only watch G4 three days a year: E3.