Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.
Late-stage capitalism (specifically public companies) are rather incompatible with singleplayer or “one-off” games that don’t have a long revenue tail of a live season or multiple DLCs/expansions. That really sucks for the whole games industry, players and developers alike.
I quite liked the concept a few years back when Apple and Google were talking about a Netflix-style subscription model for iOS/Android… a bit like Xbox Game Pass. The subscription would give you access to a bunch of games, and developers were paid royalties based on a mix of metrics like the game review score, number of downloads, average total time spent in game etc. It seemed like a good idea in that it aligned developers and players in the desire for genuinely good games, regardless of the game style or genre. It threw away the need for each game to find a way to monetize their players (which nearly always ends up in multiplayer endless cosmetic MTX nonsense).
I’ve already installed Arch on a spare laptop to assess the difficulty of switching over. So far I’m very impressed!
arch-install made the setup pretty easy, and KDE Plasma feels very natural for someone migrating from Windows. Flatpaks make installing/updating apps a breeze, and there’s way more apps available than I expected, including commercial ones like Spotify.
Most of the “muscle memory” habits translate across too, for example pressing Meta and typing “notepad” shows KWrite in the start menu. That was a nice surprise.
I can already tell it’s going to be viable for 90% of my needs, and the fact that there’s good free software to do everything from video editing to office tasks is really amazing. Linux desktop has come a LONG way.
Tech bros reinventing things poorly… a tale as old as time.
And yet Fallout: London - a community-made singleplayer experience - just hit 1 million players. It feels like there’s a huge mismatch between what many players want and what public game companies are chasing… they’re all going after online MTX and completely discounting singleplayer because it makes less money overall.
This reminds me of the time the Zoom CEO announced he wanted employees back in the office because remote work wasn’t as effective. It’s easy to assume the people running these companies are competent…
It sounds like you’re in the right area by focusing on C. Have you got a GitHub profile? I’d start looking for open source projects in that space and get involved. Many of them have beginner bugs and tasks. Some projects are better than others at welcoming juniors, so check their readme to see if they have any advice.
If you’re interested in low-level languages like C and C++, I would take a look at Rust. It’s another performance-focused language that complies to assembler like C, but includes some clever design principles to prevent a lot of common C/C++ bugs from being possible at all. Even if you don’t end up using it much, it’s quite interesting to see a different way of thinking about things to achieve a similar output.
Beyond that, I’d say you need to think about the job opportunities you’re interested in and learn what tech they use.
It’s just such an odd thing to remake. The old version still held up fine and can be played on PS4 or PS5, plus plenty of people would have gotten it for free with PS Plus. They must have really been banking on the PC platform selling well for all that effort.
The one thing that could cause serious porting pain would be the need to support high/variable frame rates. That could require a whole bunch of code to be refactored.
WhatsApp has been exploited before with a zero-day, check the Complaints section in this link:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
The reality is WhatsApp and Signal will continue to be high-value targets for exploits given the number of users, cloud infrastructure reliance and promise of secure communications, so it’s a wise idea to avoid them for defence matters.
If they only released RDR on PS3, this explanation might make sense as the engine would be heavily optimised for PS3. But they also released on Xbox 360, which is the closest console platform to Windows in terms of architecture. It wouldn’t have been that expensive to port.
It’s just so insane to me that the community is having to make singleplayer Fallout games now because Bethesda aren’t interested.
Horizon Zero Mean Girls
Pretty massive screw up from the marketing team involved. To try and sell a hero shooter for $40 upfront from an unknown dev studio in a crowded market of free-to-play hero shooters is pretty risky. Even Overwatch 2 saw the writing on the wall and went F2P.
This article seems misleading. It uses the loaded Western term “selfie” to generate these images of different cultures smiling. If you use the term “group photo” instead, you get much more natural looking results, where certain cultures are smiling and others aren’t.
I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?
This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.
No, see you’ve fallen into the exact trap I just described. The “exact same binaries” is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won’t. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you’ve still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).
For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.
Edit: btw I’m not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I’ve been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.
Piracy is a service problem.