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Yeah, this reads like someone has some internal problems to investigate… She literally has a bag over her head as some sort of breathing system? It looks terrible & creepy, not in a good way. The trailer seems to keep this trend of female fashion, whereas every dude is in full battle regs.
Also, it reminds me of the Peter Molyneux game from 2012 with a giant cube.
Yup. For most kids, it can be exploitative because of the restrictions around withdrawing funds, the super vast majority of the audience is under age, many games have gacha models (gambling). I did get to make & work on games relevant to my kids, so that was very cool.
On the whole, I’m glad I’ve left that area of the industry for now. I’d prefer not to go back (only did about a year / 12 in my career). There are great companies in that space trying, but it’s not easy.
I’ve worked at a professional studio (+100 employees) that specializes in Roblox.
It’s very strange how that side of the industry works. Some people can make a killing just on the marketplace side, like providing assets for others (e.g. someone told me they made $200k/yr independently creating assets).
However, the vast majority of games & creators make nothing, or they make Roblox but now enough to withdraw funds into real money (something like 95% of creators fall into this category). It’s also hard to design for Roblox, because it’s like TikTok for games. What works there is somewhat unique to Roblox itself.
It could have changed since I worked in that field, but it’s a very topsy-turvy side of the industry.
Out of the games I’ve been fortunate to work on, 1/7 require internet, and the 1 was my first industry job as QA. Everything else has been mobile, online required. 5/7 are no longer playable / removed from the internet.
It makes me sad because my kids will never play a bunch of things I made. I can’t revisit them nostalgically. If I had made something in the 90s, it would be preserved still.
I played the cards dealt to me to follow a dream and make a living, but I wish the industry wasn’t like this. The money has always been a role, but nowadays, it’s distorted so badly.
You are correct, but as someone who has worked in F2P mobile for a decade, it is true that most profitability comes from whales, at least in this market. You might have hundreds of thousands who spend as you mention (dolphins or minnows), but as a percentage of revenue, that aggregate is considerably smaller than the aggregate of whales: I’ve seen that ratio as high as 5:95 on a financially successful mobile F2P 4X strategy game, meaning 5% of total revenue coming from players with a lifetime spend of less than $250, 95% of total revenue coming from those above that. The populations of those groups is usually the opposite (very few whales vs. many dolphins and minnows).
Not all F2P models swing heavily into “whale-based”, but the traditional wisdom is similar to the casino industry. Large corporate companies often have small teams dedicated to servicing VIP players, ensuring they come back to the game through attractive offers or other gifts (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales-this-week-in-business).
Another component that people don’t understand is that often these aren’t “normal people” in terms of their income. We had geo-tagged data, so when you’re looking at your high level VIPs north of a million in lifetime spend, you’re talking about someone in UAE, someone in Petersburg, someone in Hong Kong, or someone in the Texas oil fields. That’s not to provide moral ammunition, but it is a different viewpoint from these games preying on people who don’t have money. A lot of whales have so much money, they just don’t care about spending $100s or $1,000s at a time.
Finally, I personally know at least 1 divorce caused by a game I worked on: the husband couldn’t stop spending, and it led to a separation. There are likely more. By the same token, I also know marriages caused by that same game.
If people are having issues with spending, please stop playing, stop spending, get help. If people don’t want this to be the dominate model, they need to support with their wallets. Having said that, there’s more free games to play than when I grew up. I do think that is pretty cool.
Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest 3 is the sequel to rocket slime. It’s a great series and mechanic.
I’m really surprised Viva Piñata has vanished, given the recent surge of chill farming games. It was unique, cool designs, universe, characters. It feels like it disappeared, maybe due to licensing or something.
Maybe more obscure would be something like Graal Online, which was an early MMO, UGC focused top down Zelda game. I played a bit for months. Similar story with Gunbound.
The architecture of Doom was specifically designed for portability. If you’d like to learn more, check out this video. For those that don’t know, tl;dr, the game’s structure is compartmentalized with specific connections (interfaces). The game logic runs separate of engine logic. If you write the specific engine hookups, the game logic should then run. Also math & clever level design implementation.