Doom 2016 is a $20 game. And most people aren't even going to pay that, they'll wait for a sale event and pay even less.
Unless you're going to fight that on price, you probably shouldn't try to simply match it for production values.
With that quote about Id being "the same size we were when we made Doom 2016" going round, it reminds me of a great piece of advice about why you have to be bigger, better, and 'new' when making games:
"You are competing with the best game that the player didn't buy from 10 years ago. Which is on sale for $10." [at the time, it wasn't 10 years ago but the window is always growing]
Sure, maybe Id could make something of similar scope to Doom 2016 now. But MS/Xbox would want to charge $70 for it.
I wish people cared more about who developed games. Not the publisher. Not the owner of the IP used for the game. Not the producer who wrangled developers.
The developers (the human beings who made the code and art and everything else that makes up an actual game).
RE: https://mastodon.social/@concretedog/116976794778175500
"We want to give developers agency over their source code by letting them decide whether or not it should be used to develop and evaluate machine learning models."
Consider using this defence for taking the compete works of a major AAA publisher or a RIAA-aligned music publisher. How would things work out for you if you steal everything and then put up a website asking anyone who doesn't agree to kindly ask to have their data removed.
During the first month of development of our PhD project, which was in automated repair of threaded C code, we had a tool that randomly picked a line of code and worked on the assumption that this was the defective line (and that the visible failure was caused by a single faulty line of code). It could even propose repairs (that almost certainly would not work).
This tool, it is fair to say, had almost no value at this point. It *could* identify root causes and fix code... but not often.
"These tools can read, reason about, and generate source code at a level that makes them genuine force multipliers for complex engineering tasks." [citation required]
"Give an LLM direct, structured access to the AMD GPU crash dump through a purpose-built interface, and point it at the application’s source code, and it can identify the root cause in minutes and propose a fix in high-level source code, all without debug information." ['can' or will?]
https://gpuopen.com/learn/post-mortem-gpu-crash-debugging-with-llms/
Dealing with a very wet country that doesn't have enough water for four months of the year (due to the water infrastructure being privatised decades ago to "bring in new investment" and then it got stripped for parts by profiteers who didn't invest in new infrastructure) is making me appreciate how much water we could reclaim if we just did things slightly differently.
Of course, much of that is not automated and would require some redesigns to make "easy". But the water is there.
A game publisher who has been collecting studios like they were EA in previous decades are slashing 4,800 jobs (including 3,200 game developers) while saying "These changes are about a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one".
Meanwhile, the entire consumer computing revolution of the last 40 years is under threat while the profiteers who make memory chips look to make more profit today than they have for the entire history of that 40 year period.
We literally can't keep on going like this.
The problem with "don't moralise about AI output" is that this is a moral issue. These non-deterministic boxes only work because they have been fed huge volumes of stolen content. They are not like a small deterministic script that can emit specific code because it is coded to do exactly that (a form of compression). They are "large" because they don't work if you don't slam so much data into the training that you have to steal to get enough.
This is the latest stage of the second enclosure. For all the talk of "open" AI and the way it stole from existing corporate IP troves as much as it did from the public, this stuff and the extreme costs to train and even run these models makes it clear that there is no "democratisation" possible when the levers of functionality will be collected towards centres of extreme wealth and power. Just as anyone selling NFTs on "good for artists" was just grifting.
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol66/iss1/2/
Every time someone ticks a box "yes, all of this work was my own and I have rights to distribute it" when it includes GenAI, they are lying. We should not accept that the plagiarism boxes can successfully launder their theft. None of these massive generic models (which underly many of the ones sold as "trained on our own data" because that's only a refinement pass to a base model) are anything beyond the fruits of the largest IP theft ever undertaken by corporations.
I wonder how far away we are from a gacha takeover of open world driving games. Presumably not while MS can get away with charging $120 for a game that almost runs out of content before you get to the end https://www.gamerguides.com/forza-horizon-6/reviews/trading-paint and with a long plan for future updates that will flesh that out (monetised by endless car packs that will boost the 550 vehicles at launch past the 900 total the previous game ended up containing).
Also reminded that previous games already had you spin a wheel for cars.
People will complain that "modern games" run "poorly" and can't even do "good lighting". When explained that today far more is real-time, they'll claim it always was then point at something like Donkey Kong 64, not understanding why you're laughing.
The key phrase in that is "retell your old stories and make that new content".
You need to get your existing player base to also be hyped to go back & play your new expensive content (maybe a tick-tock cycle between a new chapter then a retold one - some games do this with side-/main-story updates). So you need to not just refresh your old stuff to bring it up to modern standard but also subtly tweak it so it's still engaging for someone who already played this storyline once before.
Tough sell.
One game, eventually (you would never do this before your 2nd anniversary because have you even grown as a studio enough before that to go back and do major upgrades?) that's drawn my attention is Rewinding Cadence. The lore itself begs you to retell your old stories and make that new content. There is also Chaos Zero Nightmare, which promised to rewrite their base story to focus it on protag more (maybe just as an attempt to get protesters to stop turning up outside their offices though).
Have any RPG-as-a-service actually gone back to completely rebuild their old content?
I assume that only a successful game would have the budget to even try that and also the incentive to remake their early content (as this is your first impression for new players you need to route through your ever-growing campaign). So far I've only seen games that offer skip-ahead & basic QoL that impacts the entire game.
I can't keep saying "WuWa is amazing... but you need to get to Black Shores first".
I have been looking to finally move my old Lightroom 4.4.1 workflow onto something more modern (because eventually I will get a new camera with a new RAW format it doesn't import; it's also been a while since Adobe purged their downloads so even though they know my account owns the software, if I ever lose the installer then I will not be allowed to download it from their servers) and I already used Resolve for color grading video. I'll give it a shot. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/photo
Just heard an advert (inserted into a podcast) that stated "your energy prices with [company] are guaranteed to always be below the price cap".
Yes, that's the government mandated maximum price you are legally allowed to charge a residential customer. If you charged me more than that, you would be breaking the law. No claim they would always be significant below the cap of course. All part of the totally broken "energy market" we have here.
Amazon busy "doing a Stadia", turning Luna into an ex-store where all the games people purchased are vanishing (also removing the "bring your own games" stuff tied to other stores & subscriptions. The only thing left you will be able to play is if you subscribe to their own monthly package.
> "Previously purchased titles will remain playable through June 10, 2026, after which they will be removed from Luna."
This is teaching players to never buy digital games as they will be taken away.
If we are to believe the AI execs, GenAI for coding provides the work of a team of junior programmers to be deployed when managed by an existing human coder. And this is the promise that mgmt/your execs expect you to live up to when they mandate heavy GenAI use in your coding group.
So why have they not doubled your pay? You used to be a coder, singular, in a team. Maybe you had an intern but not much. Now you are being asked to manage a team of junior coder (AIs). And should be paid as such.