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literally this big posted:Our game is Europe In Ruins. It's existed in some form since 2007, but we launched on Steam last year.  I didn't realize it was a mod, I don't own CoH unfortunately but thought maybe I'd be able to run it for a few hours then leave a positive review. Instead I got this dialogue box which is pretty funny. e: Oh looks like if I leave up the window that calls me a dumbass it counts as the game running. Sweet. I hope other goons in the thread can toss you a positive review doing the same to offset your idiot reviewbombs.
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Aug 15, 2021 17:12
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VelociBacon posted:I didn't realize it was a mod, I don't own CoH unfortunately but thought maybe I'd be able to run it for a few hours then leave a positive review. Instead I got this dialogue box which is pretty funny. Such as this gem:  I never realized the AutoUpdater also counted as play time, that's neat. But I'd also be worried about looking like we're astroturfing our reviews, when I'm about to message Steam to look through our reviews for unusual activity (not actually owning a copy of COH might set off a red flag for Steam). But I do have one gift copy (from when Steam still had game inventory), and I'd be happy to buy a copy for anyone else who's willing to check us out. I feel that COH1 is still pound-for-pound the best RTS game out there, and we built upon that, so I earnestly think our game offers the most complex and comprehensive strategy gaming experience out there with all the features and such that we've implemented. So if that sounds up your alley, come check us out. COH Bros welcome. quote:I hope other goons in the thread can toss you a positive review doing the same to offset your idiot reviewbombs. TooMuchAbstraction posted:You should be able to report abusive reviews if you're an owner or moderator of the game.
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Aug 15, 2021 20:58
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literally this big posted:I think another dev team member did that already, but I'll also do that, in addition to sending their service team a message. I'm anxious because I have absolutely no idea how this process works. How effective is their automated system?, How helpful are their staff?, etc. I feel an obligation to resolve all of this as soon as possible. Thanks everyone. Personally I've had great experiences with Steam's support, like way better than I expected to. That said, when it comes to reporting reviews, I have exactly a 50% success rate, and I didn't even try to report several of the extremely biased reviews that my game got, on the basis that I doubted Valve would take any action to begin with since the reviews did technically cover content that's in the game. I expect they require fairly blatant rules violations before they're willing to take action. Just writing an extremely opinionated and bigoted review doesn't cut it. (What I did do was publicly mock one of the reviews, which got me a decent bit of publicity and hopefully helped drive other folks to leave more positive reviews. There's more than one way to deal with this kind of problem, so make a multi-pronged attack if you can)
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Aug 15, 2021 21:29
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Wamdoodle posted:Hey goondevs, I just came across a Twitter thread and wanted to present it and ask if anyone has come across a contract like this fellow has: Could be a bad deal, but not clear that it is. 100% of rev until make-up then 50/50 isn't just standard it's like boilerplate. It WOULD shock anyone in publishing if that freaked someone out and they'd probably think you're an amateur. You can always, like, negotiate in circumstance but the quarterly payments also makes sense if you're dealing with an actual business. I think maybe in this case the discussion would have to be about how much work went into the project pre-deal and requesting a make-up on that if they was full profit share. I'm also not sure it's a rev share, because you're recouping profits in most cases not rev. I don't know how those terms boil out, but it matters if the publisher is say, using it's own distribution alongside steam or has a publishing agreement or whatnot. But no, no one taking a money deal should ever expect to see a dime of profit until the project is actually profitable. If you need that to eat it should be factored into the money they give you. Selling 24k copies isn't a given, and neither is the game even getting finished. I don't know if these breach standards are out of the ordinary. They seem typical? The full breach costs appear steep over milestone delays, but what else should they be? If a company pays 6-8 figures for a publishing deal, and the Dev team fails to deliver, why would the dev team get to keep the product and just sell it to someone else?
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Aug 16, 2021 05:52
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The most egregious part of the deal definitely seems to be in breach where the developer is responsible for new development costs in the case of non-delivery. That's pretty absurd. I'd be really interested in reading the whole contract, but I think outside of the above, I'd choose to negotiate assuming I'm not selling more than 24k and remove any language that would potentially put me in debt to a publisher, but that otherwise seems mostly fine. Depending on the specifics of the product, maybe I'd try to negotiate for ownership of the IP or something like that as well? Hard to say having not walked in those shoes.
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Aug 16, 2021 06:10
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:The most egregious part of the deal definitely seems to be in breach where the developer is responsible for new development costs in the case of non-delivery. That's pretty absurd. It seems exploitable without limiting clauses, but if I sign a contract with you to deliver a piece of software and you fail to complete it I'm not sure it's absurd for you to be on the hook for holding up your end.
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Aug 16, 2021 13:52
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Anybody here have insights on venture capital funding for game studios? I found it pretty surprising that VC is interested in small studios, but 1047 Games (makers of Splitgate) managed to raise a sizable series A on the back of what looks to me to be very early player stats. Would love to know how their terms compare to more traditional publishing deals, or more traditional tech startup VC. What is even the investment thesis? That a ten person studio making an arena shooter in 2021 has a shot at being a billion dollar company?
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Aug 16, 2021 14:48
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Coffee Jones posted:Speaking of beginner friendly developer tooling, I forgot https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMcr1s5MjsiTky6KB4ML-q_QoBE_ZYJk5 existed since I last poked around in it in the 2000's. On a bit of a personal note / rant, I have to say that I've been tinkering with RPG Maker MV for game dev for awhile now, and I have to say that I really like it. Not specifically because of the tooling or that I'm the biggest fan of its art style, but mostly because it really, really limits my scope. Most of my personal projects generally stall at some point, because I want to do too much or I get stuck in some programming issue that I just can't resolve. MV forces me to work with certain concessions, which in turns ensures that I don't overdo things. Because the end product is a HTML / JS product, and I'm a Web Developer by trade, I can alter the engine quite a bit if I want to(currently reworking the combat to be more like Griftlands), but I won't ever be able to really go beyond a top-down 2D game or a sideview turn-based battler. When building content, I can build my own small editors, but I generally want to be certain that it can fit within the main editor. This has resulted in me working on smaller things that have been able to give me a sense that I can actually finish them. Now I'm actually sorta curious about this. From what I've seen, managing scope is often a bit challenging and I'm not the only one who runs into this issue. Are there any examples of developers using a subpar or more rigid toolset to solve this issue? Or should I really just learn better to keep myself in check?
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Aug 16, 2021 15:39
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Baron von der Loon posted:Now I'm actually sorta curious about this. From what I've seen, managing scope is often a bit challenging and I'm not the only one who runs into this issue. Are there any examples of developers using a subpar or more rigid toolset to solve this issue? Or should I really just learn better to keep myself in check? Artificial retro-style "hardware" like the PICO-8 is another common way to do this kind of thing. When your platform has severe constraints on what it can do (typically in terms of graphics and controls), that helps keep you from trying to do too much with it. In other words: no, you're not even remotely alone.  Keeping scope under control is very hard, and even big studios struggle with it. It's easy to see the potential benefits of adding more to the game, but it's hard to see the costs that that imposes -- not just in terms of development time, but also in terms of what other stuff in the game won't get as much attention if you expand your scope.
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Aug 16, 2021 16:05
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literally this big posted:
I wouldn't worry about this too much. A ton of games include updating software as part of gametime, like every MMO ever.
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Aug 16, 2021 17:44
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a slime posted:Anybody here have insights on venture capital funding for game studios? I found it pretty surprising that VC is interested in small studios, but 1047 Games (makers of Splitgate) managed to raise a sizable series A on the back of what looks to me to be very early player stats. Would love to know how their terms compare to more traditional publishing deals, or more traditional tech startup VC. What is even the investment thesis? That a ten person studio making an arena shooter in 2021 has a shot at being a billion dollar company? No unique insight but I've seen a multi year pattern of a bunch of well funded VCs targeting veteran backed startups. Veterans were looking to bounce from places like Blizzard and Bungie, and the usual route was a AAA publisher setting up a small studio for them to grow in their home market. VCs look like they wanted in, and established history folks likely want paycheck confidence. I also think more buyers have emerged. If you owned a game studio or had deals in place for it, you generally sold in a fire sale. Now you have bidding wars between Xbox, PS, Embracer and Tencent for billions and some of those deals are for pretty modest returns.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:07
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Personally I've had great experiences with Steam's support, like way better than I expected to. quote:Hello. I am writing to you today because unfortunately our game, Europe In Ruins, has recently been the victim of a coordinated series of review bombs. On August 9th and 10th, five players coordinated to all leave negative reviews at the same time specifically to tank our score and hurt our game. edit: Looks like they got one more person to leave a bad review. Time to update my message to Steam.  So what I've been able to piece together is that this is a group of players that used to play Operation Market Garden mod (the only other COH mod with persistent unit veterancy) together. The moderation team there drove them away, so they soured on OMG, and now they're playing our game and I guess souring on our game now. literally this big fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 00:10
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I haven't tried what you're trying, so I don't know if it'll work. My main thought is "this is a lot of text", though. I'd summarize what you're hoping to achieve and include the backstory and proof afterwards. For example:quote:Hello, I am one of the developers for X (app ID Y). I am contacting you in reference to the following reviews, which are a coordinated, malicious attempt to damage X's reputation, as proven below:
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Aug 18, 2021 00:51
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I haven't tried what you're trying, so I don't know if it'll work. My main thought is "this is a lot of text", though. I'd summarize what you're hoping to achieve and include the backstory and proof afterwards. For example: quote:I've had a look through these reviews. I completely understand [...] On the other hand, these don't actually break any rules - we allow everyone who's played the product to leave their opinion as long as it's not abusive or part of an organized effort to lower the score (bot accounts or paid reviews). [blah blah blah] Did this guy not even look at the reviews? Did I get a useless bot or something? Do I message back quoting the exact passages from the Steamworks documentation that each comment is violating? Do I point out that at least two comments are flagrantly abusive and 100% off-topic? Do I quote back Steam's own definition of Review Bombing, which fits this situation exactly? Do I quote back the passage that says that if the source of a negative review is "something that is unrelated to the product or provided service, the abnormal period of volume will be removed from the overall score." Do I link him to Steam's own User Reviews Revisited post, linked to on the Steamworks documentation page in reference to that last quote, that says "we're going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score", and define a review bomb as "a review bomb is where players post a large number of reviews in a short period of time, aimed at lowering the Review Score of a game. We define an off-topic review bomb as one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game, and hence not something that should be added to the Review Score"? Also unfortunately, on the 16th, a sixth member of the same group left us another bad review. So this has become an ongoing thing. Dragging us down into 'Mixed' really hurts us when we'd be at 75% without them, and now this one group makes up over one-in-ten of our total reviews. We need to muster 7-8 more positive reviews, just to break even with their 6. This is a no-win, uphill battle for us as for as long as they want to keep this up.
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Aug 20, 2021 20:18
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I would respond asking for clarification. E.g. quote:Thank you for your reply. I admit I'm a bit confused, though, because these reviews do appear to be in violation of Steam's rules. For example, the rules state that <X>, which these reviews violate because of <Y>. Could you please explain to me why that does not apply in this situation? Whatever you do, don't accuse the support staff of not bothering to read what you wrote, being biased, etc. And if they still blow you off, then about all you can do is try to appeal to Twitter or other social media presences.
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Aug 20, 2021 22:15
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Whatever you do, don't accuse the support staff of not bothering to read what you wrote, being biased, etc. This. You'd be right, but that's not too useful on its own. (As an aside, is it just me, or is about a third of people in support barely sentient? I know they are underpaid and don't give a gently caress, but I am down to sending 1 sentence and 1 questions emails and it still isn't enough)
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Aug 21, 2021 08:03
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farmed out to non native english speakers, more like
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Aug 23, 2021 07:09
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I want to get into game development mainly to become a better programer and I wanted to know how I can publish games. Do I need to make an LLC? Am in the US
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Aug 24, 2021 19:56
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Edgar Allan Pwned posted:I want to get into game development mainly to become a better programer and I wanted to know how I can publish games. Do I need to make an LLC? Am in the US Depends on the game, really. Just make a game and post it wherever you can. Steam is a nice platform, but you can start by hosting simpler stuff on something like Newgrounds, or even your own site. Assuming you're wanting to work solo on a small project. Incorporating into an LLC is only something I'd worry about once you start making a significant amount of money ("significant" is subjective, talk to a lawyer and/or accountant). If you just start doing 'business' in the US (any industry, not just games) then you're by default operating as a 'sole proprietorship'. But you can start uploading games and start a Patreon and such without having to 'officially tell the government' or anything like that. literally this big fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Aug 24, 2021 |
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Aug 24, 2021 19:58
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You can also get an android license and publish to the app store, I think it costs like $100
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Aug 24, 2021 20:09
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Edgar Allan Pwned posted:I want to get into game development mainly to become a better programer and I wanted to know how I can publish games. Do I need to make an LLC? Am in the US A few kneejerk thoughts: 1. Generally speaking, game programming is not good programming. This isn't necessarily the case, and of course getting lots of practice at something will make you better at it. But most game programming, especially as an indie, involves writing one-off scraps of code and assembling a big ol' tottering mess of barely-functioning logic. If you want to make games, make games! Just don't necessarily assume that making those games will set you up well to transition into, say, enterprise software development. 2. To publish a game on Steam, you pay Valve $100 and set up your store page. Then once they approve the page and your game, you push the launch button. Congratulations, you've published a game! Of course, this makes no guarantees that anyone will see or play your game, and it doesn't touch any other platforms. 3. If you're doing business with anyone in any formal capacity, you should have an LLC. If you get into legal trouble for whatever reason, regardless of whether it's legitimate or not, they can only touch the assets in the LLC. Whereas if they're doing business with you as yourself, they can go after all of your assets, like your car, home, retirement savings, etc. If you can't afford the LLC fees, then honestly I feel like you should stick to strictly hobby stuff (release games for free on Itch, that kind of thing) rather than try to turn it into a business. 4. On a related note, figure out what your goals are here. Do you want to make games? Do you want to learn to program? Do you want to make a living making games? These all require very different ways of thinking about what you're doing, and they don't necessarily mix well. For example, if you're interested in the artistic pursuits of game development, then you'll probably not want to make the kinds of hard decisions that a career game developer has to routinely make: around what kind of games they make, what content is and is not in them, how much of their day they spend on marketing, etc. In any case, you should not try to strike out as an indie game development business until you understand what you're doing and are confident that you have, or can hire, the skills you need to complete your games. If you're still learning the craft, stick to hobbyist-level stuff.
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Aug 24, 2021 20:10
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Edgar Allan Pwned posted:I want to get into game development mainly to become a better programer and I wanted to know how I can publish games. Do I need to make an LLC? Am in the US If you want to publish games on Itch.io for free, nah. If you want to put games on Steam and charge money, probably smart. TooMuchAbstraction posted:1. Generally speaking, game programming is not good programming. Yeah I was tempted to say the same myself. Games can be fun learning programming projects, but typically speaking you'll spend more time learning how to design and build games and less time actually becoming a good programmer.
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Aug 24, 2021 21:33
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Game dev rant: I now have 8 devkits in my second bedroom, it's too many. It is nice that Big Console A and Big Console B's new devkits don't vent on the top, so you can actually stack them. Well, Big Console A's has a weird cutout on the top with vents that point towards the middle, but you can still stack a Big Console B devkit on top of it. This rat's nest of cables isn't getting any better, though.
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Aug 24, 2021 23:08
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:most game programming, especially as an indie, involves writing one-off scraps of code and assembling a big ol' tottering mess of barely-functioning logic. I have extremely bad news for you about the rest of the software industry, heh. Serious post though, game programming (especially the, "finish the last 10% to make it shippable" part) is quite a bit harder than any other type of programming I have encountered, and I have encountered a lot. It's mostly not "good" for aesthetic or maintainability definitions of good, but if you ship a few games you will be a much better problem solver with much greater mastery over your chosen platform and language.
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Aug 25, 2021 05:25
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more falafel please posted:Well, Big Console A's has a weird cutout on the top with vents that point towards the middle, but you can still stack a Big Console B devkit on top of it. I can't really fathom why the Big Console A devkit is like that, it looks like a prop from some Star Trek episode. So did the previous generation one, but at least that one had a reasonable shape. But my "favorite" in terms of things like cooling is Last-Gen Console C, which if you've ever encountered it, will recognize as a big boxy brown monstrosity made out of the cheapest folded metal available, with ports and lights on the front like it came straight out of the 60s, and a fan so loud you have to turn the whole thing off between test runs lest the noise drive you insane.
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Aug 25, 2021 07:32
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DancingMachine posted:I have extremely bad news for you about the rest of the software industry, heh. I have plenty of enterprise experience, which runs pretty much the gamut from worst* to best code. So sure, I will grant that enterprise has no guarantee that it will be higher-quality than game code. But at least it has the possibility. (Game engine code has that same potential for quality, for what it's worth) But yes, the more practice you get at programming, the better you will be at programming. And game programming does tend to shine a spotlight on a few relatively niche things that can get you into trouble in any domain. You know, little things like performance and memory leaks. * I worked for a university for awhile; they had a big ol' program that multiple labs relied on that had been written by a succession of grad students and postdocs. Not a one of them had any formal software development experience, and the whole blob was around 50k lines of Python and C++.
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Aug 25, 2021 15:34
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:I can't really fathom why the Big Console A devkit is like that, it looks like a prop from some Star Trek episode. So did the previous generation one, but at least that one had a reasonable shape. But my "favorite" in terms of things like cooling is Last-Gen Console C, which if you've ever encountered it, will recognize as a big boxy brown monstrosity made out of the cheapest folded metal available, with ports and lights on the front like it came straight out of the 60s, and a fan so loud you have to turn the whole thing off between test runs lest the noise drive you insane. You mean the same manufacturer as Big Console A, but from like 2006? I am very familiar with those 2U rack mounted boys. If you mean the fabled Third Big Console, I never had to work on their stuff until this generation, but now I have to keep the devkit on top of my desk with power/Ethernet running to it, because if it's not on top of my desk it won't pick up the wifi that's 9 entire feet away.
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Aug 25, 2021 15:58
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What kind of work do MBAs that get hired by big video game companies do? I've been a huge video game nerd my whole life and I'm starting my MBA next month here in Seattle. I noticed some recent graduates went on to work in some of the local video game companies which peaked my interest since I was originally planning on just pivoting into the tech industry. My previous work experience is mostly as an Army officer.
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Aug 25, 2021 17:04
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more falafel please posted:You mean the same manufacturer as Big Console A, but from like 2006? Oh, ha, no, but that is one chonky devkit too, although I never had any personal experience with it. The one I'm thinking of isn't quite as big, it just looks and feels like it was designed to be as ugly as possible, with big plastic bits sticking out of the sides for no discernible reason. All of that manufacturer's devkits prior to present generation are similar folded sheet-metal atrocities.
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Aug 25, 2021 17:11
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Mustang posted:What kind of work do MBAs that get hired by big video game companies do? I've been a huge video game nerd my whole life and I'm starting my MBA next month here in Seattle. I noticed some recent graduates went on to work in some of the local video game companies which peaked my interest since I was originally planning on just pivoting into the tech industry. My previous work experience is mostly as an Army officer. Mostly they help shift paradigms to evolve new agile solutions for pivoting to what exciting new challenges lay ahead, moving forward with that piece.
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Aug 25, 2021 17:32
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Oh, ha, no, but that is one chonky devkit too, although I never had any personal experience with it. The one I'm thinking of isn't quite as big, it just looks and feels like it was designed to be as ugly as possible, with big plastic bits sticking out of the sides for no discernible reason. All of that manufacturer's devkits prior to present generation are similar folded sheet-metal atrocities.
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Aug 25, 2021 17:37
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We got a bunch of alpha kits for Big Console B back at the beginning of last generation, and they were just PCs in regular tower cases. They didn't want them back, which meant we got a free build farm once we got the beta kits.
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Aug 25, 2021 18:05
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Mustang posted:What kind of work do MBAs that get hired by big video game companies do? I've been a huge video game nerd my whole life and I'm starting my MBA next month here in Seattle. I noticed some recent graduates went on to work in some of the local video game companies which peaked my interest since I was originally planning on just pivoting into the tech industry. My previous work experience is mostly as an Army officer. MBAs usually are trained to be executives or have high positions in a company. Indie studios don’t usually use them optimally but larger studios definitely have uses for them as CEOs, department heads etc.
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Aug 26, 2021 16:14
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more falafel please posted:We got a bunch of alpha kits for Big Console B back at the beginning of last generation, and they were just PCs in regular tower cases. They didn't want them back, which meant we got a free build farm once we got the beta kits. How big of a studio do you have to be for the console companies to provision you with alpha builds for dev?
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Aug 26, 2021 18:44
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VelociBacon posted:How big of a studio do you have to be for the console companies to provision you with alpha builds for dev? We were pretty small at the time (50ish?), but we got early kits because we were doing a project to port UE3 to the new console to help some of their internally produced games ship on it.
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Aug 26, 2021 19:25
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Out of curiosity, are there rules about those dev kits not being allowed at employees homes and stuff? I know there would have been before release but just wondering if that's the case now because I'm quite averse to coming into the office again but we are going to have to test our poo poo on the new consoles I guess. I know our CEO has had one of them at his house while everyone was working from home when we couldn't do anything on it anyway but wondering if there's any reason I or people on my team couldn't, might be cynical but I feel like they might say there are rules just to give us more of a reason to have to come back into the office shortly.
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Aug 26, 2021 19:56
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thebardyspoon posted:Out of curiosity, are there rules about those dev kits not being allowed at employees homes and stuff? I know there would have been before release but just wondering if that's the case now because I'm quite averse to coming into the office again but we are going to have to test our poo poo on the new consoles I guess. I know our CEO has had one of them at his house while everyone was working from home when we couldn't do anything on it anyway but wondering if there's any reason I or people on my team couldn't, might be cynical but I feel like they might say there are rules just to give us more of a reason to have to come back into the office shortly. One of the console first parties was very strict about taking home devkits last March, but within a couple months they relented, and we got to bring our kits home. We do still have to whitelist individual IPs for their dev network, including the website with the docs and SDK downloads and stuff.
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Aug 26, 2021 20:04
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Yeah, from the chatter I've seen over the past year, it's freed up a bit more (a bit easier now that the new consoles are released) but you do still have to manage ip addresses or get VPNs for dedicated ips or what not.
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Aug 26, 2021 20:13
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This too varies between manufacturers. At least one of the big ones doesn't even do IP whitelists, I could go download the SDK right now on my home computer if I wanted to with nothing but my login credentials, and the SDK even works without Visual Studio Pro or anything. Another manufacturer is relentless about whitelists (and spams my inbox about them expiring every other day, jesus, calm down).
Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Aug 26, 2021 21:21
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Yeah. One of the platform holders was fine with people having prototype kits at home, which was nice when they could be turned into retail units at will 
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Aug 28, 2021 08:36
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