
Game Director @ Hintersight Studios | R&D in digital-physical hybrid board games | Working on an auto-battler hybrid game! | @Stexe on other socials | He/They
Lansdale, PA
Joined December 2008
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Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
This is what billionaire ownership of the media means:
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta shut down the No Kings account for hours during the height of their protests.
Meta suppressed accounts supporting Brazil President Lula da Silva in the recent election.
Larry Ellison’s TikTok blocked advertising for a documentary criticizing Elon Musk.
Fight back. Defeat oligarchy. Preserve democracy.
Happy Friday everyone!
As I keep watching the indie game space, there's so much changing so rapidly. But despite that, there's one thing that I think will stay a universal truth.
"Why should people play your game over other games?"
I see a lot of newer devs ask why no one is playing their game that is an exact clone of an existing game. Or a sandbox with no structure. This shouldn't be surprising. No matter the technology used to make it, the engine its built on, or the rules inside, all that matters to players is that there is a reason this piece of gaming entertainment should be enjoyed. What does it bring that is unique and worthy of the time to experience it?
And when you figure out what that unique thing is, that's what you need to lean into. Get players to experience it quickly and see what makes it worth their time. Even if it's niche, the same still holds true. If your game will be super loved by people who study roman history, fine...just make sure they will love it and see that quick.
Be creative. Come up with something that stands out. There's so many ways to bring that to life. That's how you'll find success in the industry. That's always been true, and I don't see that changing.
Ok, time to finish this last piece of content, lock in my milestone, and then enjoy the weekend. Going to try Castlevania. I hope it's good. Have fun, and take it easy :)
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
An explanation on why Big Walk isn't available on Xbox.
bigwalk.game/xbox
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
We have learned of a website (which we are not linking to) that is charging people to pay to play knockoffs of popular board games like Catan, Wingspan, Agricola and more - different names, crappy art, same mechanics.
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
The D&D and Magic the Gathering teams at Wizards of the Coast are forming a union! TTGDA lauds their efforts, and encourages people to sign the petition to express public support. @uwotc_official
actionnetwork.org/forms/uwot…
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
This is what Sheeran should have done and perhaps would have done if he’d grown up Irish. They’ve so much more to lose than he does, but immediately made the right call at great expense.
Support for human rights isn’t a political stance, it just requires intelligence & integrity
One of the hardest things in game dev can be accepting that something was a mistake, and cutting your losses.
In my current game, I built a whole feature to add some depth and give players some longer term progression. As the game as evolved, the need for this feature has basically diminished, and today I'm likely going to cut it completely.
I can feel bad, or feel like wasted work, but it isn't, I promise you. If you were efficient about it and learned about your game more because of it, it was still a good use of time. As long as you cut it quick and move on fast. If you let it fester too long, then it becomes much more of a sunk cost issue.
I have lots of stories of this over my career, but some of my best leadership moments was having the stones to cut/delete/end a feature that I was in charge of. And I find myself doing it again today. But the game comes out better for it.
Anyway, happy Thursday :) Hope you're having a great week!
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.
P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
“You never owned your games” is a dishonest way to frame this.
We never owned the copyright. Obviously. But when I bought a PS4 game, I owned that copy. I could play it forever, lend it to a friend, sell it, or give it to my kid 30 years later.
Digital storefronts take those rights away while continuing to use words like “BUY” and “PURCHASE.”
If what I’m paying $100 for is actually a temporary license, call it that. Use a word like RENT at check out.
Losing physical media is losing the ability to own a copy of our games in any form.
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
What if the rules meant to stop AI scraping also stopped us from saving the web?
The future of the open web is being debated this week in a conference room in London.
How can you help? Get informed ⤵️
cdt.org/insights/will-the-op…
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
Interesting, because Amazon would have me believing that in order to digitize a book you have to destroy the rare first edition version of it for your AI.
(thank you Internet Archive for archiving our internet and media <3, you are an invaluable resource)
We've been getting a lot of questions lately about how the Internet Archive digitizes books.
The short answer: page by page, by hand.
You may remember our viral 2021 video of Eliza Zhang scanning a book. That's still how we do it.
Meet Eliza, and learn how we scan books: blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/…
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
If nobody would give permission then maybe it's not a good thing? Basically putting AI over creators.
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
Replying to @Radalict
The original Concrete Donkey.
It was from my parent’s front garden, and still stands there today 🙌
Stefan Sain Lopuszanski 🔜 Spiel Essen & PAXU retweeted
I get that a lot of people follow me for "teehee funny internet guy dunks on bad guys", but I want to make something extremely clear about what has to come after that. This is something I talk about with people a lot.
The main reason I am here on Twitter talking with all of y'all is to make the game better. Part of that is listening and learning and connecting the community to the dev team in the ways that I'm able to, and I'll continue to do that as much as my time allows. But a big part of my day job is specifically focused on player behavior and toxicity, so I want to talk about that specifically right now.
League is too good of a game to let a small number of jerks ruin it for everyone else. Our best guess is that less than 1% of people who play League are just going to be jerks no matter what, and our view is that we should get better at getting those people out of the game (and we've been doing that for the last year, and that work will continue).
It is also obviously true that more than 1% of people currently playing League behave in ways that aren't great. Our view is that those people are NOT going to be jerks no matter what. They will be responsive to incentives and social norms and pressure.
I've talked with quite a few people who have said things like "I question why it's worth it to follow the rules when I see people break the rules without consequence." And when I see and talk to people who occasionally act out in ways that are antisocial, what they tell me is that they aren't always like this, and that they don't recognize themselves in the way that they're acting at their worst. Those people are 100% capable of change - both for better and for worse.
Part of why I'm out here doing a bunch of stuff in public is because we want y'all to see that we're actively working on improving these behaviors, and also: we're more effective if we do that together. This is meant to do three things:
1. We want to give energy to people who get tired of watching jerks do jerk things, and who get tired of reporting them and who get tired of doing the work of emotionally regulating themselves instead of ruining games or typing whatever comes into their mind. We want them to know that the good world they want to live in is the one we - the entire dev team, all of Riot - want to create.
2. We want to send a clear signal to jerks that their choices are not consequence-free and that we are working to make that more and more true every day.
3. We want to make it clear for people who are in the middle - not perfect, but they do their best - that being better is worth it. That being part of a community that treats each other with respect and fairness is work, yeah, but it's work worth doing, because the reward is that your community has shared values like respect and fairness, and you then get to expect to be treated with respect and fairness by those around you.
Part of doing that work is shifting social norms around the acceptability of doing antisocial things. We've seen people do that more and more, which is great. We love that. Ultimately, communities must enforce the norms that they want to be held to.
The next part is harder, and this is where writing this all is coming from. Part of what MUST happen in that process is that communities have to be able and willing to encourage and support the people who do reform. If people don't reform and keep doing shitty things, sure, dunk on them, call them out, whatever. But if someone is going to say "hey, yes, this was shitty, I'm going to do different things now", and then they actually change how they treat others? Encourage them! Social pressure works both ways.
We all, collectively, get to decide what community we want to live in every day, and our actions contribute to that. They shape who we are, and they shape the realities of the people around us, and they affect how the people around us think about what they can expect and whether doing the hard, right thing is worth it.
We want more and more people to see that there is lasting value in doing the hard, right things that make the League community a better place.
Replying to @Agurinlol
people need to reinforce what they want to see more. if apologizing to people and changing your behavior gets met with “so humiliating, what a loser”, don’t be surprised if people decide that the best strategy is to deny everything and quadruple down
change must be possible









































