Game Development

"Wrong answers can be fun as long as you keep the wrong answer interesting enough that there is still some value for the player," Wasselin said. "Letting the player experiment is a great way to give agency, and allowing the player to find the right answer by themselves gives them a sense of ownership over the solution. It also creates more... See more

“[Y]ou can dislike parts of a game. You can hate on a game entirely,” Pagliarulo wrote several messages later. “But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad). Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made... See more

so long as Larian is generating enough revenue to make payroll, Vincke can operate the business in whatever fashion he chooses. The downside, of course, is that a single flop could completely tank Larian — hence the three years of early access.

I write games so ugly that I am showered with contempt, and yet I make money! I’ll have a full, lifelong career! If I can have so many flaws and still succeed, you can too!

Figure out what you are really good at doing. Sell that.

Make your dream real.

Get it out the door, whatever it takes, whatever corners you have to cut. If you’re better than me... See more

Gaming is a hits-driven business, where the biggest productions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need to find a way to recoup their sizable investments. As a result, the companies behind these massive games look for as many ways as possible to mitigate risk, either by copying popular trends (like the battle royale craze of the late 2010s)... See more

By becoming a PlayStation exclusive, FFXVI more or less ends up having the economic advantages of a first-party title. Sony has most likely waived most, if not all, of its platform fee for the game, so every unit sold is more profitable for Square Enix; it has also almost certainly absorbed some of the marketing costs for the game by rolling it... See more

The economics of a platform holder building games for its own hardware are just different, and the end result is that Sony is one of a very small number of companies that can afford to spend these kinds of budgets on development while still sticking to a relatively old-fashioned pay-to-play business model. Neither game features any kind of battle... See more

Sony earns a cut of the sales of third-party games on PlayStation, which of course it gets to keep with first-party games – meaning that its own games can justify very large budgets more easily, as they generate more revenue per unit sold. A further justification for taking this kind of risk on high development costs is that the games themselves... See more