Horrible Things I Found Out When I Made A Video Game
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The reality is that to make money, you have to want money above all else. It's extremely rare to make a lot of money from doing something that you enjoy doing.
The vast majority of people are not fortunate enough - Passion is rarely aligned with consumer needs.
Its about swinging frozen dogshit-elexiers and be gone from the fair, before the first customer unpacks, and be not found related to yourself, the next time you do it on the same fair.
Then we built factories and distribution chains. This provided a solution to the problem. It offered more choice, and more customers. There were drawbacks, as with anything. It centralized wealth, which was worrisome. It decoupled the value created from the value the creator received. It made producing identical products easy, and custom products intractable. It built cities, and long commutes. But it was worth it.
A couple hundred years passed, and we built computers. We built the Internet. We made solving the Hard Problem so easy children could do it. But we forgot that there were drawbacks we took on. And instead of shrugging them off, we used the tools that could remove those drawbacks to expand those drawbacks.
The people who promote the idea that 'passion pays' like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc... These are not people I've met - They are rare; the lucky ones - One thing that they have in common is that these people never failed financially. Their idea of failure is not my idea of failure - My experience of failure has nothing to do with the glorified descriptions I read about in tech media.
I also know this because the less passionate and more cynical I become, the more money I make.
Don't get me wrong, he's a cool very-much-real-nerd-like-you, but Bill Gates passion has always been winning, and his passion after that has been making money. To the extent he sacrificed his ability to make money running Microsoft, it was to fuel his primary goal of winning and being smarter than everybody else.
Source: Gates: How Microsoft's Media Mogul Reinvented An Industry And Made Himself The Richest Man In America
The author should remember his insightful caption under Phil Collins' picture:
> Step One is a positive attitude. You have to believe you can escape!
I'm not denying that making games is complex. The things I've written for games are indeed complex and challenging. But once you start writing essays about how difficult and impossible everything is, you're not headed to a happy place.
Boiling things down to their essence, and eliminating the fancy alien hats in the articles example is crucial. Developing a mastery for how to succeed takes time and experience, but it can happen.
If you're interested in game design, here is something that will inspire you and fill you with ideas of how you can succeed. The book below took me forever to read the first time. That's because every few pages I couldn't resist putting it down and working on my designs because I was so overwhelmed with inspiration from its amazing wisdom. The book is the Art of Game Design, and it's one of my most prized books.
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Lenses-Second/dp/1466...
Another vitally important book about chasing your dream without getting bogged down in complexity and unhappy places is The Alchemist. It's a short parable, full of life changing wisdom, a little like The Old Man and the Sea.
https://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0061122416
The alchemist is available on audible too, but you'll want it in text as well.
Yes, this exactly. If the features of a game are too complicated to implement in the existing game's code base, that's a design problem, not an engineering problem.
The author is a moderately well-known cynical internet humorist; I think essays like this are his main line of work.
Ah, fantastic! Over the years I've worked with an astonishing number of engineers whose apparent main line of work is writing cynical essays!
If it's anything like regular programming or novel writing then I have to disagree. The best people I've worked with - the ones who were the most helpful, got the most done, and I suspect enjoyed themselves most - had an unending well of cynicism, an attitude of "everything is shit and our product is doomed and good work is impossible but I can make this small corner a little bit less shit". Positive attitudes tended to mean unrealistic planning and a much higher risk of burnout.
Most successful humor doesn't contain a joke in every sentence or two. Or if it does, it's an elaboration of the same joke, not random shit thrown at a wall.
This would actually be OK if Steam provided any rudimentary filtering/personalization system at all. If they would just take a users activity and feed it into a Bayesian system with 'disliked' games considered 'spam' and purchased or 'wishlisted' items considered 'ham', then put that content on top for that user, it would be much less of a problem. But as it is, they provide nothing like this and don't seem to ever intend to.
This is true of all media and true of consumer tastes in general. People like TV shows and movies that are like ones that have been done before. There is certainly an audience for things that are original, but a much a larger audience for things that are familiar. And in movies and TV, like games, your chances of achieving a viable product are better if you tweak an existing formula rather than innovate.
Lots of people make games because they love them, and then are disappointed that they don't make money. But in almost all other media there is an understanding that the "best" (most smart, most original) will not be the most popular because of the tastes of the audience.
I know this, the first game I designed was very innovative and I took my lumps for it.
However, we're facing an interesting time. Research suggests that the public response to media is actually random. Copycat movies and TV don't get churned out because they are successful or have a better chance of success, they get made because the people in charge of deciding what to create are executives who want to 'make their mark' and been seen as 'a tastemaker' in an environment where the only pattern is that there is no pattern. 'I know what people want' makes careers, and 'I got lucky' gets you nowhere.
The 'interesting' part is that this copycat system only works when there are a small number of players controlling the creation and distribution of the media. Once things open up and niche markets become viable, things get interesting.
(The book 'A Drunkard's Walk' runs the numbers if you're curious.)
The vast majority of casual gamers don't truely appreciate the depth in games these days. Just read the app store user reviews, they are replete with reviews such as: "Uhhh, Great way to kill time...", "Good time killer...". That's all these games are to them, just a great way to kill time in an utterly boring life. How sad.
I'm sure there's still a tiny audience out there, who enjoys games of depth, indie games and non-mainstream games, but you'll never be able reach them with the current app store setup.
Ideas are worth very little; ability to draw and code and execute is where it's at, and modern business is hyper optimized to exploit money out of suckers by strip mining the society we all have to live in.
Thought 2: I'm reading more than the numbered items? A Cracked article hasn't won me over like this in ages.
Thought 3: That was weird return to form.
Thought 4: Oh, it's seanbaby. That explains everything.