honestly, who cares. they could make the best recommendation engine in the world, but their catalog is abysmal. It's the Facebook of film/entertainment. My wife tends to watch some ai written slop on there as a guilty pleasure, but otherwise it's nonexistent to me and i don't bother opening up the app anymore
LinkedIn content is trash to be honest. If I were to put effort into a good post I would ever write it there, no matter how many eyeballs could I attract. The post could be good, but because I have been fed trash on LinkedIn for such a long time, I wouldn't spend a second trying to figure out if what someone wrote is worth reading.
At least for me HN provides me with high quality posts, hence me coming back here for new sources of information. Not saying that all posts on HN are top quality but most of the time the situation is exactly the opposite to LinkedIn. So there's a lot of value to build up your own thing and put work on it.
also have floaters. there have been moments in life where i overfixated on them for a month or two at a time and would think theyre getting worse. and then i would get busy with something (like having a child) and i would forget about this problem entirely and then randomly remember they exist. the brain is very good at ignoring things.
Your brain keeps ignoring like 25% of what you see -- your nose. Unlike blind spot, eyes really see the nose, and differently so depending on where you look.
i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
Bar is actually higher than bad. You have to be above mediocre even. As PC player I have decades of games easily accessible. You really need to get to at least top 25% of that if not much higher.
People complain that games get rated 7/10. But I think more so 7/10 is often bare minimum of game worth dedicating time for unless you really low the genre or specific thing. So while average game would be 5/10. An average game that is worth buying and sells is actually more so 7/10.
But I think this also goes the other way as well. Even the most reclusive dev hermit can get some people to try out their game, and people love a hidden gem, and love talking about it. It makes it quite impractical for a genuinely great game to remain just undiscovered.
During peak Covid, Vampire Survivors blew up as the hot game. It is a pedestrian dual stick shooter. There are hundreds of examples which do the same thing, possibly better.
Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.
No it's not. I'd highly recommend playing it - it's a phenomenal game. It's not a dual stuck shooter, you can literally play it with one hand. The entire schtick of the game is that it auto fires, so all the player takes care of is mobility. It was inspired by the exactly one other game that seems to have created the genre - Magic Survival. But Magic Survival was a mobile game so it was full of ads, spam, microtransactions, and all the other sort of stuff that enshittifies everything on mobile.
But the dev nonetheless thought it was a great and underserved idea. So he cleaned up the concept, got rid of the ads and other mobile crap, brought it to PC, and made $millions. His idea was then widely cloned, but games are much closer to art than commodities - so one can't expect clones to do as well as the 'original work' when they're being sold in the exact same gallery. That said, some of the clones also did extremely well when they meaningfully iterated upon the concept instead of just outright mimicking it. For instance Halls of Torment is another great game in the genre.
i mean even historically i've never heard of an amazing game that was undiscovered for ages and then blew up. maybe there's one currently festering somewhere, but i highly doubt it
If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make.
Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well.
If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
I am not sure Myst actually is a great game. And I mean that as a game which audiences enjoy or want to play. It is great as in sense it did something special at certain point of when technology was available.
I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...
It's worth pointing out that Cyan made 6 Myst games (not counting remakes), and people only really talk about the first two. That gives you some idea of the staying power of the franchise...
I recently played the remakes, and I have 8 hours in Myst and 12 in Riven. Compare that to 21 hours in Return of the Obra Dinn, 44 hours in Outer Wilds, or 90 hours in Blue Prince, or hell 35 hours in Terraformental (whose GUI is essentially a text adventure game). Compared to modern puzzle games, Myst is just so short; there's surprisingly little of actual substance there.
As a modern game, Myst does largely hold up. The puzzles are still quite reasonably by modern standards (indeed, in many ways, Myst did revolutionize the puzzle game genre). As an example of environmental story-telling, it's still one of the premier examples. But the game is extremely thin by modern standards. And the remakes never did a proper redesign to account for how unrestricted 3d motion requires you to change how to guide the player's attention to key objects (in Myst, the key "what am I supposed to do" letter to start the game is surprisingly hard to find, even when you know where it roughly is!). And puzzle games have never been a strong genre--Myst is more notable for its role as a tech demo than for its role as a puzzle game.
I don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.
> i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
That's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I point you to one of these games, you can just say "but it wasn't actually good, otherwise it would have been more successful" or "the fact that you know about it shows that it was at least somewhat successful".
And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?
The whole "visual novel" genre would say "Yes, we'd like more". They range from all sorts of gameplay though, from Myst-like to RPGs, and a lot in-between. Definitely a market for Myst-like games, the trick is to figure out so production costs don't overrun eventual profits of course, as always.
It's extremely difficult, but there are enough to show that it can be done. Most people just don't want to. The secret seems to be infinite playtesting of infinite variations.
Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head.
You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.
we're slowly moving towards a world where people can't afford homes so they'll just be living out of their cars. guarantee that some car manufacturers are already considering/getting ready for this.
i can easily see a world where this changes and some genius president will say it's a great idea, and look how great cars are now, they can do everything! live in your cars people!
> motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc
to be fair, the car mod people's end goal is just modding their cars mostly. there's no end goal like there is with software (a product).
I think people just get preoccupied with things that make them feel good and are simple and have immediate feedback. Not to be pedantic, but I would argue the more accurate analogy to this is the photography community. I had a period where I was really obsessed with photography and realized the majority of people love just...buying shit. All they did was just collect cameras and lenses and took extremely mediocre pictures. Turns out actual creativity is a lot harder and less immediately satisfying than the dopamine hit of buying some new lens, or changing your vim colorscheme and updating some alias for the 100th time. I'm sure there's some psychology behind people being too afraid to actually produce something because then they actually put themselves out there whether that's through some website or a photograph.
