pursuant of divine inspiration trying to make a game
Embelyon
Joined February 2023
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Knightly sword reclaimed from the sea, its grip rewound in tarred rope by some later, humbler hand. On occasion, a salt brine seems to weep from the blade.
Its only been 3,067 days between this and that 20 seconds of CGI hill footage we got, game should release any day now
ulrykh retweeted
Hey I work on this game now
Gotta thank the Leading Lines twitter discourse from the 2010's that got us to this moment and thank @TafferKing451 & the team for the cool welcome. 🤠
ALT Key Art of the game Gloomwood
ulrykh retweeted
My new game 'The Charity Shop' is out now on Steam!
An atmospheric and surreal first-person puzzle game where you use a digicam to capture the essence of a life lived.
Buy it now, link below ⏬
ulrykh retweeted
Replaying dao. The jargon?? The language used. The greetings and the swear words and the goodbyes. From blessed andraste! To andraste's tits. The maker watches over you. May the maker be with you. Maker's breath. Heck even his balls. The immersion bro.
ulrykh retweeted
You can reject, skip, exile or kill most of the cast in Dragon Age: Origins and miss all content relating to them as a result. It's part of why it's such a good RPG compared to Veilguard who forces all 7 of its unlikeable companions and their shitty dialog onto you.
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Being able to recruit Loghain to your party, the instigator villain who killed the king and your mentor and tens of thousands of others, is such a baller move no-one but old BioWare could have pulled it off.
If you tried this in a modern AAA studio you'd get drawn and quartered
We've been talking a lot about how brilliant Dragon Age Origins was because of the story and the gameplay and the characters, but another string to its brilliance-bow was how your decisions really mattered.
There were significant and sometime catastrophic consequences to your choices and actions (or lack thereof) including individual lives and leadership, up to the decimation of entire factions.
It was beautifully intricate and meaningful and really tested you as an individual.
Every game from here is "life and existence is so horrible and I have no agency" (and it's certified ultrajank kino 90% of the time)
That or tetris.
ulrykh retweeted
📢IT'S HERE. Divine Frequency EA is finally RELEASED! ON STEAM NOW!
We had some hard times along the way but the support was INSTRUMENTAL. Thanks to everyone who believed in the soul of the project! We can't wait to show what else is to come!
store.steampowered.com/app/2…
Min-maxing game complexity to an attainable level, while at the same time calculating how long of a marketing window said complexity gives you before AI bros can scrape your twitter account and clone the game
ulrykh retweeted
all these Epic Games guys do is whine and cry and whine and cry about Steam. They cant make a better service, and they dont think they should be punished for their aggressive AI positions, and so all that's left is crying to the teacher about it- it's infantile
I'm gonna spell this out because this issue is deceptively subtle:
1. The Steam client and infrastructure is somewhere between "not that hard" and "trivial". It's a download service attached to a payment processor with a smattering of services on the side. Cloud providers handle all the infrastructure these days.
2. Steam takes 30% of gross revenue; ostensibly for the privilege of using these services, but in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase.
3. Steam users love Steam and having their whole library in one place. It works. It's dependable. It has sales and cards and achievements, oh my!
4. PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales. Not releasing on Steam destroys the business model.
5. Therefore, no amount of competition will ever unseat Steam. People post-hoc rationalize this with memes about how gracious Gabe is. And how brilliant their services are. But realistically, no avid Steam user wants other stores to succeed.
The mere existence of other stores risks splintering their precious collection. They are "all in" on Steam. Invested.
Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users. They would in fact find it to be a problem and a threat to their investment.
Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it's actively denigrated!
The CONSEQUENCE of this situation, is that 30% of all gross revenue is siphoned out of the PC games industry into a black hole.
It doesn't recirculate into studios.
It doesn't pay any bonuses.
It doesn't fund any sequels or DLC.
This is a particularly insidious tax because it's well hidden. It's a second order effect. Most Steams users don't know, and the few that do never consider the aggregate effect this has on their favorite hobby.
It's undeniable that, at this point in history, Valve could EASILY lower the distribution fee while maintaining healthy margins. But they don't have to.
Users are locked into Steam and therefore developers are stuck paying 30% of gross revenue to Valve.
The irony is that Steam users, the very ones maintaining this unbreakable stalemate, would benefit the most from a better financed game development ecosystem.
I don't think this is fixable. It's just sad.