Writing books, mocap, dating sim game dev
Joined September 2014
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Paul Shire retweeted
When skin pokes through clothing or a garment sinks into the body, @cvELD_info's ShellFit for Blender can help quickly fix those overlaps.
Purchase it here: 80.lv/articles/fix-body-clot…
Paul Shire retweeted
Very few know this, but I spent the majority of my early adult life suicidally depressed.
During high school, I was in and out of mental hospitals and rehabs for suicide attempts, drug abuse, refusing to get out of bed or eat for days on end, etc.
By my mid 20's, after thousands of hours journalling, podcasts, and reading; tens of thousands of dollars on therapy, workshops, and coaching; and effectively a complete overhaul of my life, relationships, and beliefs, I had mostly cured it.
I actually went back to school to become a therapist, hoping to share all the things I'd learned in overcoming my dysfunction. But within 2 years I dropped out after getting totally blackpilled on the prospect of ever making any measurable impact.
The statistics and my own personal practical experience on helping others with mental illness are abysmal. Almost no one who has depression ever gets better. And the few that do, don't really need revolutionary new strategies. The tools that presently exists are more than sufficient.
Upon reflection, I think I've figured out why this is.
It's because a pre requisite to having depression is almost always a deeply ingrained habit of obsessing over everything wrong with yourself or the world and rejecting any and all possible solutions as "not good enough". And more importantly, to consider this as the only logically correct and morally good way of seeing things.
If you suggest to a depressed person that this--or any other of their often numerous dysfunctional core beliefs, behaviors, or expectations--is irrational, unproductive, or otherwise unhelpful, it is at best ignored and more often seen as a personal attack and actively resisted due to how fundamental it is to their identity.
It is not until they are willing to ask themselves "what if my problem is my fundamental values, beliefs, and expectations about the world?" that they ever make a single modicum of progress.
And as soon as they do this, they basically always eventually get better. While pretty much everyone who doesn't, never changes. And more importantly, the former get better no matter what you put in their way, while the latter don't no matter how much you try to make it easier for them.
Maybe there is value in communicating this fact. But what people do with it once they hear it, only they have control over.
Paul Shire retweeted
quick thesis: "kids today aren't even playing videogames the way we were, millennial relationship to gaming is now a cultural relic, like listening to the radio or drive-in movies"
TL;DR -- Millennials are the new boomers, Halo is Woodstock, WoW is the iPod, Dad gamers are the only "gamers" left by their own definition (& they don't have time to play anymore), the kids are all cracked out on Live Service Slop platforms that they can't escape and don't want to, competition is dead, E-Sports is dead, creative content is dead, screaming down the mic is dead, couch co-op with your friends is dead, couch co-op with your Dad is dead, AAA games are dead, consoles are dead, Game Pass is dead.
And at the end of the day it's all because, if you squint, the kids don't play games anymore.
long thesis:
supporting industry stuff:
- industry publications say average gamer is now ~37, up from 29 in 2004
- they also note that kids <12 have seen the largest drop in videogame engagement post-pandemic of all age ranges (-6%)
- Pew's 2008 report says "Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games", whereas their 2024 report says "the vast majority of U.S. teens (85%) say they play them. Just 15% say they never do"
- Gen Z's favorite games are Minecraft, CoD, GTA, Fortnite, and Roblox
- PC gaming has a notably larger share of the overall market now vs. console gaming
- Console game sales were 4x-6x PC game sales back in 2004
- PC game sales were 1:1 with Console game sales last year
- Everyone being stuck at home in 2020 seemed to permanently inflect things here, with PC game sales stagnant from 2015-2019 but then becoming the dominant source of industry growth since
- Roblox (2006), Minecraft (2011), & Fortnite (2017) are top 5 gaming IPs for Gen Z....
- ....these are more live-service game-hosting platforms that actual games themselves
- Newzoo has a 2026 report saying only ~13% of gametime went to new releases!
- 2/3rds of gametime went to >6 year old games!
- That same report did an analysis comparing playtime concentration across PC/PS/Xbox platforms and their Top 20 Games vs. the long tail of their library (it's a really good report)
Note on the recent restructuring: for Xbox it was called out specifically that Game Pass caused a redistribution of playtime away from top titles and towards the long tail, without any actual expansion of the total audience/playtime.....basically, Game Pass nukes Xbox's ability to monetize it's big blow out titles without any offsetting gains from expanding the market.
oops.
supporting game stuff:
- let's call it the "Roblox" problem -- all the kids exist within a massively multiplayer online gaming ecosystem, with play, creation, socialization, and monetization all embedded in one platform
- the creation angle and the monetization angle also i think encourage parents to view these games as "educational" more so than, say, Call of Duty, and are therefore more willing to encourage their kids to play with time and/or money
- there is no clear off-ramp from this platform
- you can have totally new gameplay experiences within it, with low friction adoption
- as this platform captures a larger and larger share of player attention, it sucks the available playtime & monetization out of the rest of the industry
- this process naturally changes the incentives around making games, including what kind of games get made, for what audience, and targeted at what price point
- we got legions of "WoW killers" and "Halo/CoD clones" in the early 2000s because those games were platform beasts of their own...
- ...and so now we're years-deep into every financially motivated major game studio trying to figure out how to build a "Roblox" of their own, aka Live Service Slop 24/7, 365
- the fans might hate it but there's a giant pile of money labeled "Live Service Slop" in the middle of the room and it's clear to publishers & studios that the prize is there, if only they can be good enough to claim it
- [of course, all millennials know that WoW and Halo both killed themselves, nobody ever steals the crown by copying it]
- and so while all this is happening, it's opened up a previously under-served niche in the "lower-mid price point indie-to-double-A targeted niche game"
- Palworld, Enshrouded, Schedule I, Silksong, and so on, were all in the very top % of revenue-earners for newly released PC games in the year they dropped
- In console land, Space Marine 2 just blasted a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues of a budget way smaller than a typical AAA release
- If AAA studios had been dropping Halo/CoD/Gears-style games every other year chasing success, the niche for Space Marine 2 wouldn't have really been there, not at the same scale
- I think there's a similar effect even with BG3, whose awesome success likely would've been a little lower (though still great) if fans had gotten genre-adjacent Skyrim & Witcher sequels already
- but instead, we have the "Roblox problem" (Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, GTA), where cross-platform self-contained game-related live service platforms have monopolized huge chunks of (younger) gamer time and money......and warped the kinds of content big studios try to make in the process
supporting adjacent stuff:
- there's also a whole cloud of adjacent areas that are impacted as a result of the above
- picture everything as a big web and these nodes as farther out on the web
- but you see a related decline of "E Sports" and the rise instead of "Influencers", as community figures with large audiences they can monetize become higher status than ultra sweaty competitive pros
- the decline of competitive online culture has also coupled with intentional pushes by studios and their hardware platform partners to reduce online toxicity, changing the culture of online spaces
- the decline of forums & reddit and the rise of ig/tiktok/youtube has turned third-party game-content-ecosystems into more pyramidal "one mega influencer" structures
- chasing the Live Service dragon has led to a massive decline in couch co-op ("local splitscreen") titles, which reduces a certain KIND of gaming experience that, while not the norm from a playtime POV, was nonetheless an integral part of millennial gaming
- the above also makes Family Gaming a lot harder with kids, as what was once an expected default across most games has moved into a separate genre reserved for "Girlfriend Games"
- game-related content has been nearly totally evaporated by Twitch (which is itself in the process of being evaporated), short form video, and "creator talks at the camera" long form video
- "Machinima" and "Parody Game Songs" and "Montages" are both bizarre millennial cultural content that seems egregiously lacking in disaffected irony to the younger audience
- it's covered extensively elsewhere so wasn't worth jamming in here too much, but the explosion of MTX means in-game "status" derived from earned rewards & achievement, such as it is, has been nearly totally replaced with purchased status...and in so doing, game studios have *totally* devalued the actual status that playing their game used to convey
- we're already dealing with a young generation who is hyper-cynical, hyper-financially oriented, ""crypto-native"" and spammed with ""prediction"" markets 24/7...so to have yet another part of their lives see its earned status replaced with dollar-signs and a casino logo likely seems totally normal to them
Paul Shire retweeted
UBI advocacy stems from the naïveté and solipsism that because *I* am a deeply creative latent producer who is oppressed by my wagee job and would actualize my creative potential if only i could have my basic needs met, this must be true for everyone. Its not.
First of all, it’s not even true for these “creatives”. If you aren’t creation maxxing while waging, you wont do it under luxury communism either. Creative work is extremely taxxing and your wage job isn’t actually that hard. The problem is your neuroticism and lack of discipline, not your job. All your necessities being provided for will only make you weaker and gayer such that you’ll make up some new bullshit to get overwhelmed by and then cope by playing video games all day. But worse because you won’t even have “at least i did *something* productive today”, which will magnify
your depression.
Second, luxury communism already exists for the bottom 20% of the population. All their food, housing, etc is completely covered by the state. Entire generations of people who haven’t worked a job in their lives. Do they go on to produce beautiful art and build companies? Or do they go on to get high and kill each other?
The truth is that we are close enough to UBI today that most of the people who will ever become great artists and inventors are already going to do it, and as we get closer all that will happen is the people incapable of anything more than wage slavery (most people) will simply become dysfunctional parasites.
Paul Shire retweeted
I do this all the time. There is nothing more satisfying than saying “I accept all your premises for the sake of argument. Now watch me destroy your position using your own premises”. It is the ultimate intellectual mogg.
Paul Shire retweeted
You have to accept that, for whatever reason, reality is a kind of game where things are almost never what they appear at first glance and the truth usually seems to be a paradox in which the answer is the exact opposite of what seems to make sense. If you want to win the game you have to be clever and see the solution to your problems in inherent contradictions. It wouldn't be a fun game if anyone could win, after all.
So when it comes to soul crushing loneliness, part of the solution is you have to accept that no matter what you do, you are going to feel soul crushing loneliness. You will feel it until you die. Soul crushing loneliness is just a part of having a consciousness and the responsibility that comes with being a human being that has been given the burden of agency that cannot be given away, stolen, borrowed, or avoided.
When you truly, actually accept this fact, and can hold the knowledge of this loneliness in your heart without it overwhelming all your rationality, is the moment when you'll feel the burden of the soul crushing loneliness lifting enough to begin to cultivate yourself and create positive, soul-enriching relationships with others. The acceptance of this loneliness makes it inconsequential to your movement through life, and thus frees you from it.
Paul Shire retweeted
Someone dropped that the games industry woes boiled down to landlords raising rent so everyone can't afford shit kinda made me wanna Sit Down even though I am already sat down.
Paul Shire retweeted
Something something feminism benefits men the most something something husband material
Paul Shire retweeted
Learning gamedev is hard. It combines multiple creative and technical disciplines, many of which have punishingly steep learning curves. So motivation is often a problem early on. It's easy to feel defeated every step of the way, and giving up is the norm.
Having a "Dream Game" can be useful for learning in this regard. A Dream Game can provide that boost of motivation you need to get through the hopeless times. You can channel your passion and vision into the determination to learn. Conversely, working on small games can be massively demotivating. I don't want to make Breakout or Flappy Bird, I want to make Chrono Trigger. I want to flex my creativity and my game design intuitions, I want to build something amazing. And here I am, struggling so hard to make a game I don't even care about. What's the point.
This is why it's so common for new devs to work on huge dream projects as a vehicle for learning the craft. And as long as you're learning, that's great. But you must understand that this game is your sacrificial lamb. You will never finish it. Granted, some devs do manage to succeed at the "learn while I build my Dream Game" strategy - Stardew Valley comes to mind. But almost everyone else will fail, and for a few reasons.
The first is that you cannot size a project unless you know what it takes to finish. How long do you want to be working on this Dream Game? 4 years? Okay, so how are you supposed to know what a 4-year game looks like? Unless you've finished a game before, you cannot know. You've likely misjudged the effort it'll take by an order of magnitude.
Secondly, finishing a game requires its own set of disciplines. There's so much to learn about putting out a commercial product. Have you considered graphics options? Resolution, framerates, vsync? Audio settings? Accessibility? Localisation? Do you know what it takes to QA a game? Do you know how to configure builds and depots on Steamworks? Do you really want to be encountering all this stuff for the first time at the very end of a giant 6-year project?
Thirdly, it's easy to get bogged down and stymie your learning when you have such a large game to make. You can lose six months working on animated cutscenes before you've even learned how to make a pause menu. Everything gets dragged out, and inevitably you end up remaking huge chunks of the game as you come to realise that your early work was amateur trash - as is to be expected.
Lastly, dream projects provide far too many distractions from actually learning game developement. Writing lore. Drawing concept art. Dialog. GDDs. These are low value tasks, but they're so much fun that you can easily spend all your time on them. And before you know it, it's been weeks since you opened your project file.
Finishing and releasing small, simple games is the remedy to all these problems. Make a warioware-style minigame, make tetris, make a shmup, make a 10-minute avant-garde experimental FPS hallucination simulator. It doesn't matter, just make a game that people can download and play, then make another one.
You can still build your Dream Game. Just later. If anything, it deserves to be tackled properly, by a dev who's got some real holistic experience under their belt.
Paul Shire retweeted
This side hustle makes me millions:
Putting an Ozempic vending machine outside your mom's house
Paul Shire retweeted
Jesus was crucified and buried in a tomb for 3 days
Then he arose on the 3rd day
Luckily, he had set himself up with passive income vending machines, so he still made money even though he wasn’t actively working during that time
That’s the power of passive income
