In Washington alcohol is so expensive that any reasonably sized party of alcoholics it’s cheaper to drive across the entire state to buy in Idaho (forgive this disaster of a sentence structure I’m awake like 5hr early because of cats)

Then there’s me, in my 30s, some professional dev experience like 10 years ago that ruined me for years, looking to get back into the industry because everything else I’ve tried makes me feel hollow

Morrowind, Factorio, Terraria

I switched to playing subnautica on steam deck because the full PC setup was too much for my phobias. Now I can actually enjoy the game instead of spiking my panic. But like Factorio, what a mess on controller imo it’s so much better with kb/m and the ability to quickly switch windows to look stuff up. I used to be team PC 100% but since I got the deck I’ve been branching out and even some PC games are just better on it

It’s like MOO2 in that way, the difinitive 4x space game. I had a bit of fun with Stellaris but most the mechanics feel complex for complex sake, while MOO2 has fewer and simpler mechanics but somehow more depth

Fuck yessss, I hope the support is good. They put so much love into that game now I want to see how extra the modding scene will get

Ah taking notes from how Unity fired people. Slow and steady to ensure morale is as ruined as possible

MOO2 is still one of, if not the, best 4x space games and part of that is how clear cut it is. The systems play together well and it isn’t a bloated mess of complicated mechanics for the sake of being complicated. The depth is very emergent and not artificial feeling which gives it an incredible timelessness

You can add map markers with custom descriptions in Morrowind. I use them to leave little “what the fuck am I doing” notes for myself before leaving the game if I don’t know I’ll be back on within a couple days

For real though it can be a hard game to jump back into if you’ve had it on pause for a while. I usually just make a new character at that point see where the new adventure goes. There are so many factions and places to explore no one character can experience the game in full anyway

Billions of queries becoming way more energy intensive for a feature almost nobody asked for, now the default. What the fuck are we even doing

Sure but that still leaves a lot of unnecessarily broken mods. I don’t know how backwards compatible a lot of the main mods are but doesn’t this risk forcing players to either upgrade and uninstall some old mods, downgrade and uninstall some new/updated mods, or downgrade and play the guessing game of which versions of which mods are compatible where? And after the backlash of the first update Bethesda went ahead and did it again so clearly they don’t care about steamrolling modders’ work and they might do it again. Modders going to give up eventually and go back to New Vegas lol

Or they’re a small team who literally can’t afford to switch engines without killing their studio so a switch has to be carefully planned and could take years. It isn’t just greed and sacrificing morals keeping people using Unity

It’s not that simple but yeah if things keep going this way more people will keep moving away. The ones that remain are likely to get hyper focused on to keep the user base in the same way you have to increasingly cater to whales in a game after the community at large leaves

I’m in the game industry. This is entirely person observation I have not studied this topic so can’t source anything

The people I saw going to early mobile market were a lot of handheld console and flash game devs and companies. They were adapting the closest existing game designs and brought with them a “small game small cost” philosophy. It also wasn’t really known yet how impulsive people are on phones. So it was an unproven market with smaller teams and people making yester era design choices. There also used to be a few bigger games with bigger price tags but people didn’t buy into those because anyone willing to spend that on a game at the time would have had a console or PC and could buy a better experience there for the same price.

The only mobile game experience I have was back in like 2012, smart phones were really taking off, and the market for mobile games was proven. The company I worked for we built a release ready game but it never got released. We couldn’t sell it to investors because the monetization was never aggressive enough for them (the investor money at that point was less about making the game and more to fund marketing and stabilizing the studio as a long term business). I quit when my job stopped being dev work and started being round tables about how to psychologically trick players into paying more. Anyway with so much focus on heavy monetization it stopped being economically worth it for a lot of startups to actually make good games when thinly veiled skinner boxes pleased the investors all the same

This is such a bad time for me to be trying to get back into the game industry fml

Linux guy is fine, definitely better than JR. Really they’re just a face being used to chainsaw through the company but he’s been pretty honest with us which I like

This isn’t at all how they told me being in it together would be lol. Congrats on surviving the mass firings at least, and I hope some good opportunities come your way

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just because stress from burnout is causing me to average like 4 hours of sleep a night and sometimes forget to eat or drink for an entire day doesn’t mean it’s bad for my health

Will do, thank you. I’m almost there

Isn’t it great? I love it. The whole situation is amazing. So insurance covers this surgery, but they don’t do it directly because reasons and I had to enter a self pay agreement with the hospital. After surgery the hospital takes my money, bills insurance, insurance reimburses the hospital, then the hospital reimburses me. And if anyone says no during any of these steps I get to start suing people. I had to save a down payment on a house amount of money for something that insurance is supposed to cover, and if I have any kind of insurance changes along the way I risk being out the entire amount