After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires | Hacker News Reader

After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

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674 pointsrobin_reala423 comments

So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback.

Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was streaming it.

4 days later he quit working for me. Couldnt be happier for him.

The biggest thing I saw was that 2 guys, Unity, unity asset store and some upwork artists made a really pretty decent game. I love how this has come full circle. I'm 47 and back in the 8 bit days games were made by 1 or 2 people. 15 years ago this just wasnt possible, but now with unity, unity assets, remote for hire work, steam and twitch for marketing you can legit make it as a 2 person studio. I love it.

The distribution of Steam and viral marketing of Twitch have revolutionised indie development for the better. In addition to this, as an asset he now has a Discord server with 10ksss+ subscribers. I doubt he will ever pay for a $ of traditional above or below the line marketing.

That’s awesome. Would you mind sharing which game it was?

I'm not sure if he would be upset with me if I were to publish how small his team was, sorry! Maybe the reasons above will change this.

That's very considerate!

Fair enough! Great story though and wonderful outcome for him.

Yes probably better for them to tell. Still, you are on hacker news founded by a team of 2 using lisp to earn their first million.

If you are still in contact with the guy, could you ask him what the marketing learning actually were? Everyone has their own take on marketing and it's honestly really difficult to get the concept with most posts about it being so fluffy.

I'd honestly love some cliff notes or a bulleted list from someone who has actually succeeded, especially if they ( like me ) had no marketing experience beforehand.

Getting a big twitch streamer to play his game was the only marketing he needed. Although their time is up for sale I think some amount of them do genuinely enjoy gaming and will try out something that is interesting to them.

This story sounds like luck. That isn't marketing. It's like hoping that Kim Kardashian will use my new face cream and tweet about it.

Another idea: Bribe a popular streamer to play your game and tweet about it. I am sure it is common.

Bribe? It's just paying them. It's not like they have some duty not to take money or that its illegal.

> It's just paying them. It's not like they have some duty not to take money or that its illegal.

It is illegal in the context of radio stations that play music.

Legal in almost every other context; payola is one of the most obviously stupid laws we have.

People pay streamers all the time to play their games of course, but I think twitch TOS requires for the streamer to disclose that they're being paid, they usually have it in their title like "Playing {game}, !AD'

In my experience audiences are usually proud they got sponsored instead of resenting it too, though I haven't checked the numbers.

I've read on the /r/gamedev subreddit of people succeeding with even just doing cold-call emails to popular twitch streamers. Someone recently posted a breakdown of how many streamers played their game after he sent out emails, and he seemed to get around 5% turnaround.

There's a guide that was posted to this subreddit a while ago too, that gives what you are looking for I think. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/m74fcj/guide_to_ma...

I was playing Diablo 3 one evening (I use my real name), and the guy who I was grouped with was streaming on Twitch. Reasonably big name streamer. He looked up my name, found my personal resume website, played the small game on there. His viewers play the game. It is just some super simple stupid little space invaders game. Next day I wake up to several hundred emails in my inbox from various people just randomly talking about game dev and software development. Several trolls of course. Couple of "are you interested in a job?" pings. An interesting phenomenon.

You know, I've been contemplating whether I should lose the pseudonyms and start using my real name for all of my online activity. This story has convinced me that it's something I need to do. That's such a crazy sequence of events that would have never happened if you had been playing under a pseudonym that's hard or impossible to connect back to your resume. All these years, I've been sabotaging my "luck surface area" with my stubborn insistence of online anonymity.

This is a cool story and a lot can be said about it, including how authentic/organic it is. I think your exact scenario had a lot of luck involved, but I think what we call "luck" is the type of thing is more common than we would think. What I'm talking about is continuously getting in situations that allow luck to happen. If someone is consciously aware of this phenomenon, they can continuously expose themselves and increase their odds. I think some refer to this as the law of attraction, but that doesn't seem right to me given the law of attraction's magical attributes. It's more statistics at play IMO.

It's important that it's authentic though as people can see right through someone's BS. In your situation you were simply playing a game you liked, which is about as authentic as it gets. There are a lot of people out there grinding away at something they don't necessarily enjoy, for the end goal of making money or success, which sounds terrible to me. I'd much rather grind away at something I truly enjoyed and where it's a win/win whether success comes with it or not.

In my younger and very introverted days I accidentally figured this phenom out. I was on a BBS site for a couple years, just hanging out with people with the same interest (motorcycle riding/racing). This led to IRL meetups, which led to me riding for a professional motorcycle racing team, where I lived my dream racing fully built Superbikes for several years. There was some luck involved of course, but it would have never happened if I hadn't participated authentically on some random website.

Since learning this important life lesson I've applied the same philosophy to my professional life. At this point I've had enough "lucky" situations happen where it's affirmed my opinion of statistics at play.

Not trying to be glib but the single most important thing is to make the right game.

1. Before you start the project, do some research and ask yourself what is unique about your game? Why would someone play it instead of the leading competitor? Don't settle for an idea that doesn't have plausible answers.

2. Build the game really well. REALLY WELL. Amazing artwork, great style, a visual feast. Fun, snappy gameplay. Depth. I'm talking hours of engrossing gameplay. Solid, performant, virtually bug free.

3. Along the way build moments into the game that really stand out, that would look hot in a gif, that would pique someone's interest if they heard about it.

--- most people get it wrong before this point ---

4. OK now you're ready to start marketing to people. It's easy, just tell them about your game. How? Break the game along different dimensions. The story. The game systems. The emotions players will experience. etc. For each of these, break them into smaller blurbs. You now have dozens of things to share, start recording gifs/video/screenshots to support what you've written. Now start posting to social media. If someone finds your Twitter profile and scrolls through, they should come away understanding what your game is and why they want it.

5. Next go to Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, websites, etc. and find the top accounts that cover / discuss games like yours. Follow them. Interact with their posts/communities. Especially keep an eye out for opportunities to share your work with them.

6. Advanced: come up with some marketing moments. E.g. announcing your game with a launch trailer, revealing the release date, releasing a demo, your launch day, etc. Put these all on a calendar. For each date, work backwards ~2 months. Coordinate social media posting, email with press/influencers using those dates.

I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it's really so so so hard to get steps 1-3 right. People delude themselves into thinking they're on the right track simply because making games is incredibly, super hard. It's outrageous how much work it takes to make something at all. But no one cares about that. Another reason I think people fail, myself included, is we tend to make very safe, hackneyed games. How many of us are guilty of making a game set in a vaguely DND/Tolkien world? That's tired. I know someone still manages to beat the odds every year, that's survivorship bias in action. Play with a stacked deck, make something truly original.

nit for 2.

A fantastic game doesn't have to be visually stunning to be successful. It helps of course but visuals don't make/break an otherwise fun game. What does matter however is that the visuals need to make sense and be consistent.

You can get away with "ugly" or otherwise unremarkable graphics but inconsistent or confusing visuals will interfere with gameplay and the game will suffer.

See Vampire Survivors for an example of a recent game with pretty atrocious visuals that's still done really well.

There's a whole genre of ugly fps right now, I don't even just mean boomer shooters, I can't recall the name but there's this one where your health bar is a little glass skull you hold, another hyper anticapitalist critique one, and I'm seeing gifs going around of some third one I haven't a clue about. Sorry this is a vague post I just think it's interesting these games are leaning heavily on non visual aspects and being rewarded with massively positive reviews.

I'd argue the opposite. They are executing their art styles very well. E.g. Cruelty Squad. Like you say, there's clearly something in the water right now. Kudos to folks making it work for them.

Trying to release a game with "ugly" or "unremarkable" artwork is playing on hard mode. Be ugly in a "visually stunning" way that's original. E.g. Cruelty Squad. I know there are counterexamples. Many of them are just plain lucky, like Flappy Birds. This very article is about a game that kneecapped its sales for decades on account of being ugly.

I mean... df literally wasn't for sale until recently. They only monetized because American healthcare is bananas (its mentioned in this article and discussed more fully earlier https://www.pcgamer.com/if-dwarf-fortress-sells-millions-on-...). Otherwise it sounds like they would've been content with the ongoing patreon funding they had. It was quite popular before the graphics version.

It's true, Tarn and Zach are very committed to their art. It's really impressive and inspirational, truly, and I'm happy for their success -- both critical and financial.

Personally, I'm willing to make sacrifices to make games, but I'm not willing to go as far as them.

>Build the game really well. REALLY WELL. Amazing artwork, great style, a visual feast. Fun, snappy gameplay. Depth. I'm talking hours of engrossing gameplay. Solid, performant, virtually bug free.

To be honest, this is really all you need. Now granted, REALLY WELL these days means competing with reputably teams (indie and AAA) with a lot of experience and/or manpower, so we're well past the Cave Story days. But if you spend the time pushing your craft and/or finding like minded people, it's not impossible to just focus on this.

But in terms of budget (time and money), your steps are probably the best to make a "good" game actually sell well. Personally tho I want to really try pushing the envelope with my project one day. One day far into the future after I really learn the 3D art pipeline.

Great on you for supporting his endeavors!

The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity. You really have to get lucky and go viral

But yeah, the entry fee for that lottery is at a historic low, which is still great (especially for hobby devs who don't care about the rest!)

Is it though? Show me a good Steam game that isn't selling well.

That's difficult to evaluate since "good" is subjective. So is "selling well", to be honest. I assume you mean a game that is reasonably finished and polished and not simply shovelware, but still not getting the sales to be profitable. There are tons. 30 games drop on Steam everyday. Just sort by new and see all the games that any little indie studio would be proud to release but have few sales.

Hellion.

This game?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/588210/HELLION/

Looks like it sold incredibly well and was abandoned by the developers and is no longer for sale.

A weird example.

It failed to sell well enough to recoup expenses.

4,000 reviews suggests sales numbers of 400,000, which is huge.

They sent out a notification that development had stopped, but they were still selling the game for half price. This resulted in huge review bombing.

Even 40 000 sales is still decent for an indie game?

It IS subjective. For a game of its kind it can have sold realy well yet not have sold enough to make up for a poor management and way too big of a debt. It wouldn't change the reality of "it sold well" but still validate "it didn't sell well enough"

Easy: Among Us, for the many months that it toiled in nearly complete obscurity to the point of the development team nearly giving up the ghost and quitting, until one specific streamer picked it up and gave it the critical mass attention it needed to go absolutely huge. Had the developers had slightly less resources and shut down the servers before that crucial moment it would have never happened, even though clearly Among Us is a fantastic game in retrospect.

Quality is necessary but not sufficient for success.

Also: a while back, I wanted to empirically test the "any good game will succeed on steam, and if it doesn't succeed, it isn't a good game" hypothesis by setting up a little metagame called "Steam Prophet". We would track upcoming steam games and try to predict which ones would succeed BEFORE they came out. We eventually disbanded the project when we got so reliably good (but not perfect) at predictions that we got bored and quit. Turns out that just a few leading metrics were incredibly predictive of day 1 (and thus day 30, day 60, and day 90, and year 1) success -- chiefly the number of followers the game had on Steam on launch day. It is a rare game indeed that can succeed on Steam without first having banked tons of high quality wishlists (of which followers is a public proxy metric for).

The spirit of Steam Prophet lives on today in the form of Simon Carless' Game Discover Co newsletter, which obsessively follows upcoming and newly released Steam Games: https://gamediscover.co/

The problem with Among Us is that it's an online game. Meaning you need a certain amount of actual people playing it before it's fun. So it's a chicken or egg problem; it's not fun without players, players won't join if it's not fun.

Most good single player games do well.

In other words it's a game dependent on network effects, which definitely makes for an uphill battle. You _have_ to go viral.

What was Among Us' marketing strategy like?

Most developers have very little understanding of marketing, and are very hesitatnt to pay for good marketing services.

Here's something most people won't tell you: the majority of online marketing is paid, either explicitly (i.e. you pay Google) or covertly (i.e. you "bribe" an editor at Forbes to feature your article).

If you got that good at predictions, doesn't that show that for most games, it's usually not a lottery at all?

Aside from rare cases like Flappy Bird, and aside from the usual vagaries of commercial, technological and artistic projects. And aside from special challenges like the minimum playerbase size required for an online game like Among Us.

During development, developers could set up a Steam page, release one or two trailers as soon as possible (with mocked-up gameplay if necessary), and try to predict the audience's interest by the increase of followers/wishlists (compared to other games). In case of a lukewarm reception, they could decide to drop this game and start developing another one.

Did you write about the leading metrics and your insights somewhere, aside from this article, which seems to be from the beginning of your "Steam Prophet" project?

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/what-i-learned-playin...

I've seen many. Wuppo didn't sell well until it was called out by an algorithm as the most underrated game on Steam or something like that. Of course, "good" is very subjective. I personally don't think the most popular games are any good.

Is it a straight lottery (random chance), or does marketing play a role along with the game itself?

It's all about getting picked up by an influencer of some kind, or going for the long haul with social connectivity.

Marketing definitely has an impact, even just social media stuff, but unless you've got a AAA-sized marketing budget there will still be a significant amount of chance involved

Of course it's not just a lottery, it's a lottery weighted (at least to some degree) by a variety of factors like the game itself and the marketing you put into it.

The point I think people usually mean to make is that the odds are low (really, extremely low) so it's not really a prudent financial choice unless you have other ways to support yourself and don't care about potentially throwing away the time/effort if it doesn't work out.

Marketing matters more than the game if you're an indie, and I don't say that in a cynical way.

Unfortunately I've seen so many people pour their hearts and souls into a game thinking they can just start marketing it when it's ready: You should be engaging with your future audience well before then.

You don't have to take money from them, you don't have to make empty promises, but in the current landscape you need people to be waiting for your game, not you waiting for players, because odds are they won't come.

For every lucky game that gets the right streamer there's 10 more that are truly great games that just never get traction and die.

Eh, I have a friend who is incredibly talented and when their indie game became iPhone game of the year it couldn’t have been anyone else I knew, the guy was just that stellar. Definitely a combination of ability and persistence and a little luck.

I don't think it's lottery. I think that we don't want to admit that most people are just bad at designing and developing games. I hang about on /r/gamedev and I've seen a lot of posts complaining about low sales and not a single one of those games was compelling

its hard to be critical. ive never seen a great game not do well. even games that might seem pretty not doing well if you look closely enough are often still missing something.

I challenge anyone to provide a link to an actual great indie game that hasnt done well. that flew under radar.

"Great" and "haven't done well" would be subjective, but here's my list of amazing games that are underperforming in sales: The Hex Eliza Suzerain Know by Heart (and all Ice Pick lodge games for that matter)

Lottery implies its entirely luck based.

When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.

Sure, some streamer randomly picking up your game is beyond your control. But you can certainly create conditions that would make it easier for your game to be picked up by a streamer (build relationships with journos, streamers; get paid marketing, etc.)

Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.

Except that creating games and marketing games are two separate things, so calling it a lottery is an insult to marketers, and game developers would do well to recognize that simply building a game and not marketing it should be a conscious decision to shoot themselves in the foot.

> Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.

I think that both for simple and complex games there are those that nobody cares about and those that end up really popular. Sometimes it's about good marketing, sometimes it's about making what people actually want to play (instead of what you want to make), sometimes it's about developing it really well, other times it's just about being at the right place at the right time.

Those aren't mutually exclusive qualities, for certain titles you might need lots of one of them, or maybe a mix of all of them. In regards to what you actually need, it can indeed be a lottery and thinking that hard work (or marketing) is all that's necessary in ample amounts (or even is a pre-requisite) might be misleading, because it's not the full story.

For an example of how any mix of those aspects can lead to failure, look at the launch of Brigador, a well made game that was a flop: https://youtu.be/qUsuusNLxik

Then contrast that (years of development) with something like Vampire Survivors. Or maybe 2048, or Flappy Bird, or Wordle for examples of even simpler projects that were also easier to make, that still were immensely popular and much more successful.

Here's what I learned in life that's applicable to many areas, this being one:

Not sucking isn't enough. Even being "Great" isn't enough. And even being "amazing" just isn't good enough to be successful. You need people to notice and care and help you and carry you to success. Mediocrity with a lot of public and positive reinforcement beats quiet greatness. Truly great things die every day from lack of attention and the willingness / motivation of others to help you carry that greatness forward. No greatness succeeds on its own, despite how great it might truly be.

> Mediocrity with a lot of public and positive reinforcement beats quiet greatness.

Great point.

> When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.

If every creator does marketing, then everyone is in the same position and nobody has control. Also, check out this research paper, published in Science, showing that popularity signals like the number of downloads and ordering by popularity increases the unpredictability of a music market, which is an opposite effect to what you expect. I suspect similar effects happen for game and other cultural markets:

Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5762), 854–856. https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....

I think it's more than lottery. Skills, contents and marketing are all important aspects of game production. I wonder what is the chance of getting 1,000 sales for the Nth released non-free game. It won't feed the mouth but is a good start (to convince wife). Steam probably has the data.

> The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity.

Sounds to me like an opportunity. There may be a demand for a service that reviews indie games and "discovers" (promotes) little-known-but-great ones. It even has an obvious revenue source: allowing advertising by games (so long as advertisements and promoted works are VERY CLEARLY separated).

You just shifted the problem to a different place. Now it is the reviewer who has to get big, and has to be able to meet the expectations of their audience - over a long period. There are tons of reviewer channels on Youtube and Twitch. I don't think becoming a big enough fish as a reviewer is any easier?

I personally don't think youtube or twitch is the right medium for a curated reviewer store system. It doesn't scale the right way.

You need to basically be an app store but do it better than original.

Every time I see a new-ish game released for free on the epic games store or indiegala, I think "bummer, I guess it's still mac and cheese in mom's basement for these guys.

After four years working on my retro game nearly full time, and several launches, I still don't understand marketing enough to understand what to do differently.

A lot of the advice out there is something like: "create a community" or "go join several communities" or "get to know other indie devs on Twitter". To me, this simply feels fake. I don't really participate in any online communities. I spend enough time in front of a computer for work and I prefer to socialize with my real life friends.

Besides, I simply have no idea how to get any kind of attention on social media. I created an eight-page booklet that recreates the first issue of Nintendo Power, except with my characters in place of Mario and Wart. It's an homage, because I developed a retro game. Somebody suggested that I post it on a retrogaming subreddit, where many others were posting fan art, and those people should recognize the magazine cover that I recreated. Well, I posted my PDF and it got about 4 upvotes. A simple photo, posted around the same time, of the very common TMNT NES cartridge got -- 800? 900? I stopped looking.

I understand that what I made is not going to be for everybody. I'm not expecting to be a millionaire. But damn if I can't figure out how to even get it in front of people. Everywhere I try just gets ignored.

The game is pretty substantial too. Mac, iOS, and Windows versions all done by me -- custom game engine -- 40+ hours of gameplay -- about a 5-6 hour minimum play time if you start from scratch and you know what you're doing (I was shooting for 3.5ish hours to equal Mario 3 or Mario World in "size" or "depth"). Lots of fun secrets. Nothing repeated. Challenging, but not as hard as Dwarf Fortress. Real life playtesters (not friends or family) asked me to reset the game so they could start all over again.

I just wish somebody else could do the social stuff. It all just makes me want to stop programming altogether. My brain just does not work along the lines of "how can I phrase this email to get this person's attention?" So I realize cold calling is a numbers game but I seem to be ignored no matter what I do.

I want to make great stuff, and I really don't care about attention/fame/money -- but what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?

Sounds interesting.

What's the game?

Hazmat Hijinks.

If you happen to visit the website and see the Nintendo Power-esque PDF, tell me, shouldn't that grab the attention of the right person? I know I don't have the best social understanding but I thought I nailed that one.

Marketing is just so opaque. I would rather write an OS from scratch. At least I know that can be solved given enough time.

> If you happen to visit the website and see the Nintendo Power-esque PDF, tell me, shouldn't that grab the attention of the right person?

Maybe 30 years ago, but we're all (mostly) grown up now. Even for those old school gamers, I don't think it's enough to just give them something retro -- there's still got to be something new brought to the table, and I'm just not seeing it here. I'm sure it's clever and all, but when it comes down to it, most people need (not want -- need) novelty.

I watched the video on the site. I didn't care for the music, very jarring. Most of the graphics were bland such as all the gray blocks.

When I think of the fun NES games I played, they were not puzzle games. They were TMNT 2, Mario (obviously), TLOZ, Contra, Metroid, Megaman. Those are more action games, not puzzle games.

While watching the video, I couldn't really understand what was happening. You showed gameplay, but what was going on was indecipherable.

Anyway, maybe the game doesn't appeal to me, and it does to others, IDK, I don't spend much money on games. From time to time, I'll spend a couple dollars on a mobile game if I enjoy it. Maybe you should change your marketing to make it F2P and users can purchase the full game after 4 or 5 levels via in-app purchase.

I think the best insight I've ever come across about marketing was in The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. He had a strategy of building marketing campaigns before he built products.

He would go as far as to develop the website and marketing assets, all the way up to and including an order form, spending money on advertising, etc. and see how it performed. And when people hit the order button they'd just get a message which said "currently out of stock - check back soon."

If the numbers coming back from a marketing campaign were good he'd then go on to develop the product.

Now you could debate the ethics of this but the key point is that the best way to figure out the sales and marketing side of a business is trial, error, and measurement of the outcomes. You get a marketing message of some kind out there, and you see if where and how you did it is a winner. You get your message/funnel/whatever as close as possible to an actual sales process. You get as close as you can to measuring specifically buying intent. You defer as much investment in actual product development as you can. Your time and money instead goes into looking for a technique and message that work.

Eventually you get enough info about your market this way that marketing looks much much less opaque. You will come to understand who would buy your shit and why. If you are a creator/maker/artist/developer/etc. and you achieve that understanding you've basically written yourself a golden ticket for many many years at that point, because for you, making the thing which fulfills that demand is really the easy part.

It's understanding what the demand is and who has it that needs your time and attention at the start. Understanding the shape of the hole in the universe which you are going to fill. Once you achieve that everything else falls into place.

I don't have the answer, but have been seeking it for a long time myself. Heard the same advise you got, make a community, join communities, post on twitter/reddit. As you said it just feels like fake advise.

As best I can tell, success in those efdorts is equal parts luck, wit, and having something unique yet relatable.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If you post, nobody will see it because nobody knows who you are. So you have to spend a long time "engaging" or "networking" with a community you didn't really want to join in the first place just to make enough of a name for yourself so that someday when you have something to say, a few people will listen.

I'm too busy making stuff and hanging out with my real friends to go be fake with people just to market to them in the future.

I guess you could try to make as many games as possible, quickly, and hope that one hits just right, and then focus on it and make it better fast.

I think this is why most people work in companies; there are tasks that need to be done to sell a product that we don’t want to do.

I mean, Dwarf Fortress was like the ultimate “good game, tiny community” example and even they had two dudes working on it, IIRC one of whom seemed to spend quite a bit of time dealing with the community. And despite making every game designer’s favorite game, they still had to hire a publisher in the end…

> Heard the same advise you got, make a community, join communities, post on twitter/reddit. As you said it just feels like fake advise.

It feels fake to let people know what you're working on by writing about it? That's what you and the parent are de facto saying.

How else do you expect them to find you?

There is no possible way around it. You have to tell people what you're doing. Repeatedly. You have to cultivate an interest in your thing. If one can't be bothered with that bare minimum building block, well, there obviously will be no successful outcome. It's definitely not build it and they will come (they don't know it exists until you show them). Give them a reason to care, cultivate interest, and they'll show up.

It is 'fake' in a way - you don't truly want to make/join these communities or post about this on twitter/reddit. If these communities really interested you, you'd already be a part of them. There are communities where the people have known each other for years and you're going to step into their forum, make your one post, annoy them, and move on. I personally wouldn't want to be that guy, but this is just what marketing is.

>but what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?

I have been struggling with this myself. Not just about programming but other creative pursuits as well. Recently it has been photography. I take pictures while knowing whatever I'm looking at has a far better picture on its wikipedia page.

I suppose we're supposed to take some sort of fulfillment in the process of creation itself? But that just goes back to the old koan of the tree falling in the woods. If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.

> I have been struggling with this myself. Not just about programming but other creative pursuits as well. Recently it has been photography. I take pictures while knowing whatever I'm looking at has a far better picture on its wikipedia page.

> I suppose we're supposed to take some sort of fulfillment in the process of creation itself? But that just goes back to the old koan of the tree falling in the woods. If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.

I think these questions come back to "what is the meaning of life?", no?

Among many things, I enjoy hiking. I also know for a fact that thousands of people have been to every place I go and none of my trips will ever be publicly notable. That's OK. When I hike, I enjoy the journey... exercise, clean air, calm views, quiet space, one with nature, and the ego-scratch of reaching a summit... my experience feels good, deep in the bones and belly. What more could one want? If no one knows about the trip, does that invalidate or lessen my experience?

I carry the same perspective to creative pursuits. The mental exercise, honing skill, going from nothing to something - some moments are frustrating, but in aggregate it feels good. At work, I do find capitalist realities corrupt the creative joy, but I accept that as part of where we are as a society.

I've thought about the same with regard to drawing (and previously with programming). While I agree that it's a tad bit disheartening to know that things better than what you are currently capable of are one search away, I like to consider the fact that prior to the internet those still existed and it was still somewhat easy to come across better photography by simply going to a library. Yet there wasn't such an easy way to get anyone outside of your own circle to acknowledge your work until you were already very good.

Thus you kind of do have to find at least enough fulfillment in the process of creation and of self-improvement to keep at the grind. Some amount of existential dread of that sort is also just part of the grind of any creative pursuit.

At the same time though, it also helps to keep some perspective and step back for some time if it becomes too consuming. I let this sort of dread get too far for programming, which had me shirking all other important things in life (family, food, sleep, work) just to keep coding. Once I stepped back from it I got a lot less stressed, managed to find other aspects of my skills I needed to work on and also managed to find a place to apply myself to which is sufficiently fulfilling.

> If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.

You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.

If you create a thing, then you have drawn on your skills, probably improving them. Whether the thing is seen by others is irrelvant. What is relevant is your experience in creating it, and the use of it (whether it has a use, or just has aesthetic value).

Maybe practice by creating something, then destroying it, as if it had never existed. What remains? Memory and skill, both of great value.

> You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.

And simply the fact that, nowadays, you have access to the production of thousands of other people, with which you can compare yours. And in most cases it will compare unfavourably; to make it worse, almost all those people are unknown to the general public, they are often not even professionals, they are just very ordinary persons with a hobby, and yet you can see in a couple of clicks that they get (much) better results than you do.

On may call this a self-validation based on external elements.

Perhaps, as it devalues your creations in your own eyes, it reinforces the need for external validation.

Assuming the game is "Hazmat Hijinks: Total Meltdown" on Steam. Here's some tough love:

The video takes way too long to get to gameplay. Screenshots do a poor job explaining what the mechanic is. I've read the capsule image, watched some of the trailer, looked at several of the screenshots and still can't tell you what the gameplay loop is. Sort of a top down puzzle thing? With a "match the color" mechanic? The art is not good enough by a mile. OK I just read some of the "About This Game" -- no one cares how many hours of gameplay, if it's so novel why can't you explain that better than "always something new", which is redundant. Surprises also feels like it's just more novelty. The first point about various suits is not exciting, why should I care? Having a handful of people really love it isn't sufficient. I had a game on Dictionary.com that people played hours daily, still couldn't make money from it.

Stepping back, I think there are ways you could vastly improve your marketing, but is it worth it? Take the "L" and move on to your next project. Use what you've learned to improve and "make great stuff." It's better to move quickly, learn, and make better and better stuff until you've hit on something that works. At least I wish someone had given me similar advice back in the day.

PS All this is coming from respect and recognition of the incredible amount of hard work and sweat you've committed to the game. You're a bad ass for working so hard and completing a game!

Thanks for your feedback. I agree it needs visual improvements. I chose not to spend money on an artist -- just had too much in the project already. The trailer should have been done by a 3rd party. I don't grasp what is going to appeal to someone anyway.

You know what? I won't make any more. I think I'm done.

I'm not interested in learning what people like or adjusting to what's popular. Why on earth would I go through this again? Nothing I am interested in working on is ever going to be profitable. Simple as that.

This has nothing to do with your comment. I've had it with programming, I've had it with tech, I've had it with people. I will just scrape by doing the bare minimum to survive as a freelancer.

I wish I could throw my computer into a river.

Isn't being an artist great? Hang in there.

Just going out on a limb here, but that's burnout. Take a break. Do things off the computer. Programming will call you back when you're ready. Or you'll find something new. Either way, take that break.

Looks like a Chip Challenge clone/upgrade, the surface mechanics aren't very obvious in the video on steam for someone who doesn't know it.

Perhaps some contrasting animations or visual guides would help with that.

I am writing this reply not to dissuade you, but rather to hopefully be helpful in your understanding of what is happening here. As they say, life is a game, learn the rules, and I will attempt to explain one of the rules here. It may sound harsh - that's not my intent. I did't make up the rules, I just play the game...

Firstly;

>> Nothing I am interested in working on is ever going to be profitable. Simple as that.

This is a critical understanding. Because it helps you to determine what _value_ you get from an activity.

For most of us, let's say 99%+, we have creative hobbies. Some play music, some write, some cook, some make pottery or art, some program. The value of a hobby is that the process itself brings us personal joy. The value gained is in the process, not the result.

I've started making pottery. Some of it comes out the way I like, some doesn't. Some doesn't survive the firing process. But there is joy in working the clay, joy in decorating the result, joy in the finished piece. But it's safe to assume I will never sell the results (as in, no-one will buy them) and in some ways selling them would rob me of the "hobby". Frankly, I'd rather give them away. Given how much I pay for the studio time etc it'll never be profitable.

So if i's not profitable, why do it? Because doing it brings me joy.

So it is with programming. Either you are doing it for profit (work) or for fun (hobby). If you are doing side-projects primarily for money then for starters, don't write a game. there are a zillion games in the world, and just like music, the number of them that make actual money are vanishingly small. Going from "I need money" to "I'll write a game" is not a good strategy.

Lots of Indies write games though because writing games can be as much fun as playing them. The joy is not in the selling, but in the process. As long as you end up with a game you like to play, well, you have your reward.

In many ways, most open-source projects can be thought of as "hobbies", not in a pejorative sense but because, for most of us, they are not income. The value has to lie elsewhere, in the creation process, in the community or whatever.

>> I wish I could throw my computer into a river.

Clearly the act of programming is not bringing you joy. For you the computer is work, and you should use it doing things that people are paying you to do. That's completely ok. I use my car to go to a place I want to be, I don't "go for a drive". For me a car is just a tool, for others it's a major part of their lives. That's ok, we're all different.

So, in conclusion, if you want to make money with your computer, then there are lots of ways to do that. (hint: it's not in writing games.) If you need suggestions in this space, then by all means ask.

But most of all I encourage you to find an outlet for your creative instincts. One where you get joy from the process, not profit from the result. Programming is not providing that. Tech is not providing that. People are not providing that. You need to find that for yourself.

Good luck!

Go for it! If you have an opportunity to make a living outside tech, just do it.

The responding comment to your original post was a bit harsh. You are also being a little too hard on yourself. I can only imagine how hard you've worked on your game. You deserve a break, but don't throw your computer into the river. Go get recharged and rid yourself of the negative energy. Then ask yourself the hard question of why you originally wanted to create a game in the first place.

>"Hazmat Hijinks: Total Meltdown" on Steam

Looks like 1990 Chip's Challenge on Windows 3, thats not a good look.

If that game is like Chip's challenge I know someone that would love it, it's her favourite game all times. Thanks :-)

> I've read the capsule image, watched some of the trailer, looked at several of the screenshots and still can't tell you what the gameplay loop is.

Interesting. I think I sussed out the gameplay loop almost immediately because it resembles Chip's Challenge[0]. Maybe that's misleading, but to anyone who grew up in that era I'd think that's what would immediately come to mind.

> The art is not good enough by a mile.

Disagree. It could be a little better, but it is appropriate for what it is aping and plenty readable. Many many games have done well on art of about this quality or worse.

> no one cares how many hours of gameplay

I do, and so do a lot of people if How Long to Beat is anything to go by. In my case though 40hrs is too many and would be a negative.

[0] I later saw that it called this out in the video, during a part I skipped because, as you said, it takes too long to get to the gameplay.

I don’t have any advice, but I will say the art in the screenshots didn’t grab my attention.

For what it’s worth, I had a similar experience. I launched a game on itch.io for fun, and got a ton of positive feedback (including “I love this game!” And “I can’t believe this is free!”), but when I launched on Steam (also for free, but now with music people said they liked and new features), it bombed.

The cherry on top was when I posted a Show HN here (it’s a zachlike programming game, using an esolang—-right up HN’s alley), and didn’t get a single upvote. I’ll admit: that hurt.

To be fair, hn submissions are a total crapshoot; don't take it too hard. The first upvote comes down to whether the right person looks at the new submissions queue at the right moment... And I often get the impression that very few people are looking at the queue and trying to separate good stuff from the giant piles of crap...

I wasn't even aware of the New button after years of casual browsing :) When I discovered it one day, I felt bad that I hadn't contributed to sorting through the crap.

Ah, thanks to the person who looked at my submission history and gave me my sole upvote. I guess all I needed for marketing was a good sob story ;)

what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?

Life starts posing those existential questions at the extremes of sacrifice, especially when you're working for something your brain subconsciously knows could potentially turn out to be vaporware.

If you're going to play the game of wanting users, then 1) immediate and regular program-shaping user feedback is king and 2) many overnight successes take longer than expected [1]. At 4 years in you're really just getting started with learning. Obviously you're in the phase now where you recognize you need help and can't do it all yourself, so how badly do you want your Everest? It always takes teams to reach any great summit.

[1] https://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/05/guit...

Why don't you recruit those playtesters as beta users to promote your game?

First I’ve heard of your game is via this comment, and as a fan of old Windows 95 / DOS games, this looks great! I’m eager to buy it once I’m able to load up some Steam credits.

I’ve been down your road before, and it sucks, but ultimately it’s why you need to make sure you enjoy doing what you’re doing above all else, with the hopes that others will enjoy it.

Sometimes you just gotta make something because you want it to exist in the world, and because YOU want to be the one to bring it into existence.

Personally, I love that you’re keeping a concept like this alive.

That said, because it’s the internet, I can’t help but add my $0.02 on your marketing efforts.

So, from your brief description of your attempt at Reddit marketing, I can’t help but notice that your game is very much going for the Chip’s Challenge / MS DOS / Windows 95 vibe.

Yet your marketing efforts and description of game length is trying to make a Nintendo Power / Super Mario connection. On a subreddit in which people were upvoting NES cartridges.

I’d say that’s the wrong audience. While there’s plenty of overlap between early PC gamers and early Nintendo gamers, most people tend to focus their nostalgia on one over the other.

You’ve found a cool niche, but I would expect far more resonance with the vintage PC / DOS gaming crowd, and maybe even the Amiga / Atari PC crowd.

But like I said, I’m not any better at this than you, and I also acknowledge that your Reddit story may be just one of many attempts you’ve made at marketing.

I hope you keep at it, and find enjoyment in the process, but don’t be afraid to take breaks, or try something wildly different. Best of luck!

Marketing is a zero sum game to get people's attention. Attention is finite resource and you are competing with others for it.

It isn't a trivial task that anyone can do, at least efficiently (paying the minimum amount for the maximum number of conversions). It is just like programming where some people never seem to get it, except you are also competing against others.

If marketing is not something you are talented at or something you want to spend time and effort on, try paying for it. Even the biggest studios are buying ads and paying influencers.

I don't think you can make yourself want to be good at game marketing - you need to partner with someone who lives and breathes that life and recognize, by ownership/compensation, that they are just as important as you to the business, and work on it together from the start (that person will have a better pulse on the audience and what they want to see and how to get it to them).

Get Splattercatgaming or somebody in that space to play it somehow.

You have a Catch 22.

Your game looks super basic and through that unappealing. You would've gotten a feedback IF you would've not mentioned the 4 years sunk into the game. Virtually all that feedback would've been negative or critical, but people are just not assholes enough to tear into a massive amount of effort when it seemingly yielded so little. Hence the silence when you try and engage.

Isn't the usual advice to never make a game and a game engine at the same time, because you'll only finish one of them?

Here's the harsh truth: unless you're well connected, the only way to get visibility on social media is to pay someone.

This can mean:

- Paying the platform (the easiest and most scalable, but also the most expensive and arguably least effective)

- Paying an influencer for an explicitly labeled sponsored content (effective, but depends a lot on your target demographic)

- Paying a popular account to share your content "organically", without any explicit sponsored labeling (the most effective, but also the hardest to scale)

You'll find that once you get a decent amount of following, it's easy to snowball into a much larger following - provided you have content worth sharing.

Is the third one legal ? I thought influencers had to make it clear whether they are sponsored or not

Nope, that's why you won't see anyone online talk about it (at least not on public blogs and magazine articles). But it's also the most effective since it feels less like marketing and more like organic sharing.

Have you thought about making a demo? That would give you something you might feel good about sharing on social media, and would be passed around on if the game is good. And it’s something you could make with your existing skill set (no crafting of emails necessary).

Not entirely true as 15 years ago two people made World of Goo which was a big success.

Love your comment, but I want to add something to this:

> 15 years ago this just wasnt possible

Actually around 2003 to 2006 I was doing that. Back then we were releasing games on PocketPC, which sold around $20. It was basically 1 programmer and 1 artist, or some could do that all by themselves.

But then came a period where mobile became really popular, and a lot of money started flowing into that game platform.

But I do agree that now you have both the platforms and tools for small game developers to pull off some very nice games.

> The biggest thing I saw was that 2 guys, Unity, unity asset store and some upwork artists made a really pretty decent game. I love how this has come full circle. I'm 47 and back in the 8 bit days games were made by 1 or 2 people. 15 years ago this just wasnt possible, but now with unity, unity assets, remote for hire work, steam and twitch for marketing you can legit make it as a 2 person studio. I love it.

While it's certainly possible it's very much the exception rather than the rule here. Let's take the parts of a game and individually look at why:

* Gameplay - This is where small indies really shine it possible to create a game with some cool gameplay. The problem here is that to create something that people actually find fun is rather hard. Most Indie games are boring as shit, they often have a single gimicky gameplay feature. You can try this yourself to come up with something that's truly fun. Sit down for 30 minutes and build a game that's unique and fun, you'll fine it's really hard. That's why the AAA game studios don't really do that. They use other techniques to sell the game like using and big well known IP. Most AAA gameplay is not unique and often is really not that fun for this exact reason. Note also here most indie devs who have never actually made a hit with tell you to just work on making the gameplay in your game really great. It's a cop out.

* Art - This is one of the hardest parts. You can kitbash a bunch of asset store stuff but then your game looks like a hodgepodge mess. You can hire an artist but if you want something really good looking you won't find them on upwork selling their labour at sweatshop rates. Really good artists are specialists in specific areas like character design, concept art, environment art ...etc. Trying to just find someone on upwork who will do all of that really well for you is basically impossible. Also note if you use stuff off the asset store you will need your artist to match that style which is actually really hard. To get really good art for a game you have to hire a team and build from the ground up. That's very difficult for indie teams most of which have no money to spend on art.

* Sound - Great games have great soundtracks. Often composed by someone with a lot of experience. These people are hard to find and even harder to convince to work on a game. Again like the art it's not something people are selling for cheap on upwork. Note also that you will want stuff in the game like jumping sounds, landing, clicking all that stuff. You can again find packs with this on the asset store but they often just won't have that sound you are looking for and mixing sound packs make the game seem cheap. The sound design has to be all one piece of work really. Think mixing 8-bit era sounds with more modern stuff it doesn't work.

* Testing - Often not looked upon but testing your own work doesn't work. You need someone independent to look at what you've done and break it. If you've ever played Bethesda Games you'll see what poor testing looks like. Note that the larger the scope of your game the amount of testing becomes exponential. The big AAA game studio have more testers than devs by far. If you look at many of the small indie game this really can kill the game. The devs chuck something together which looks ok and is fairly unique but is so poorly tested that no one is willing to buy.

All in all it's possible to do but really hard and I would say they got really lucky.

> The distribution of Steam and viral marketing of Twitch have revolutionised indie development

Yes but not in the way you think. Before anyone was able to put stuff on these shops getting on Steam was a one way ticket to $$$$. There where curated stores and even being in them meant you got a seal of approval from the likes of valve. Now-a-days the steam store is filled with so much asset flip junk "indie games" it's become a meme. To be seen on any of these platforms is now a real miracle. Again on twitch getting picked up by a big streamer is like winning the lottery. The vast majority of streamers on twitch make no money and have such a tiny audience getting on their streams would only net you double digit sales if you are lucky.

As of right now, and barring any future misfortune, this is a great feel-good story for any engineer. These guys brought their passion to life and created something unique and special that has been meaningful to thousands upon thousands of people over the last 20 years. It feels great to see them succeed in this way, and I hope they can continue to work on this for as long as they enjoy it. Congrats to Zach and Tarn, wishing them all the continued success.

They are definitely in 'set for life if we make wise choices' territory. In another month I'm betting they will be in 'set for life even if we make foolish choices' territory. I'm really happy for them. They really stayed true to their passion and I'm happy to see them rewarded for this.

> In another month I'm betting they will be in 'set for life even if we make foolish choices' territory.

I hope so, but it is amazing how quickly one can burn through money by making foolish choices. Or just being unlucky. I can’t be the only one who remembers esr being worth tens of millions on paper, then losing basically all of it.

Are you talking about Eric Raymond? The Cathedral and The Bazaar? I never knew he struck it rich

https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html

IIRC the stock price fell quite a bit before he could sell.

It wasn't bad luck, it was bad karma. ESR earned so much bad karma by being such a terrible racist jackass that he deserved to lose it all.

Are they? 300,000 units * $30 = $9M - 30% Steam tax = $6.3M in a single year take out federal taxes (just gonna call it 36% and ignore SFJ/MFJ), leaves them about $2M each. I'm sure they're some sort of a legal entity in WA state and will owe the b&o tax too.

They deserve it absolutely but $2M each does not put them in a position of "fuck you" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI

I also read, though who knows whether the source was at all accurate, that after the Steam cut, Kitfox takes a goodly chunk (north of 50% IIRC) out until their own expenses for development are paid, and then their cut ratchets down to 20% or so.

Oh, I didn't realize they had a publisher involved too. Yeah, this is a nice payday but it's just a start before it's life-changing for these two hackers. Let's see another 300k in sales!

People who want to support Tarn and Zach but don't want to buy the game can "donate" directly: http://www.bay12games.com/support.html

Or who thought they deserve more than their game cost! I just sent them $100 on top of the $30 I spent on the game.

I was lucky enough to contribute back when you still got ascii art rewards (memoralized here: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/ASCII_art_reward/A-F... ) - and somewhere I have a crayon drawing.

Same! Was well past due to give them another infusion.

I was 5$ a month patron for a few years.

That's 300 000 units in 7 days since launch if I understand it correctly. Even if we consider (I don't know if that's true or not), that theses 7 days are going to be the best ever for them that's still only 7 days.

Week1 sales is a decent predictor [1] of Year1 revenue. They'll probably do about 1M unit sales by Christmas 2023.

[1] https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-the-state-of-long...

DF is quite special though. It has existed for two decades before being for sale on Steam. It's also a very niche-y game. I don't think normal rules apply to it. I'm afraid sales are going to drop much quicker than predictions say.

They'll get a sale from me here before too long. I just know I don't have time for another addiction right now, at least not until the new year. Probably quite a few people being more frugal now because of the holidays that will buy it shortly after. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 500k+ sales by the end of January.

It’s on a million wishlists, and this game is evergreen, it’s going to get there.

Once macos and linux support drip, I imagine there will be a new wave of sales too.

It already works flawlessly in linux with proton, literally two clicks to enable compatability mode

If they’re smart they hopefully have incorporated and will only need to take money out of the corporation to pay themselves to cover their expenses. So they won’t pay tax on the full amount up front and will have most of the money pretax for future business expenses

I would guess Steam will only distribute games from companies for legal reasons...so most likely, yes.

you can sign up as an individual though and use ssn, as well as a passthru llc so as long as they have a tax entity they dont seem to care

Individuals are legal businesses in the US (a "sole proprietor").

That's not how corporate income tax works though; the company pays taxes on all that sales income less expenses, and then they would likely take dividends at a preferential tax rate and pay yet some more tax. I doubt they've been carrying much of a loss over the past 20+ years to offset this.

It would take 20 years to pull it off, and tax legislation may change, but a married couple can earn next year ~$115k/yr federally tax-free ($89k long-term cap gains + $27k earned income). So that source of income would only be subject to the initial 20% corporate tax.

Can you elaborate on how this works?

Asking for a married friend…

This blogpost [1] explains in detail but the gist is:

* Standard-deduction next year is $27,700 married ($13,850 single)

* Long-term-capital-gains is 0% on first $89,250 ($44,625 single)

Thus if you have the tooling to perfectly control your income, e.g. you take $27,700 in treasury bill payments and then sell off enough stock (or take qualified dividends from your corporation's bank account) in the total of $89,250, you'd end up with:

* Ordinary Income: $27,700 - standard deduction of $27,700 = $0 taxable income

* Long-Term-Capital-Gains of $89,250 = 0% ltcg tax bracket

= $116,950 ($58,427 single) of federally tax-free income

Then if you're in a no-income-tax state (such as WA, like the Adams brothers), you don't owe any taxes at all.

[1] https://www.kitces.com/blog/long-term-capital-gains-bump-zon...

If it’s a C-corp, then the corporation will have to pay income tax on its profit. If it’s an S-corp, then the owners will have to pay income tax of the corporate profits even if they do stay in the corporate coffers.

Unless there’s another way you hand in mind?

I recommend "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich".

As far as I know you can do clever accounting with IP licensing but I don’t know the specifics well enough to know if it’s feasible at the scale the Adams are operating at

They should incorporate an LLC and do some legal loopholes to keep more of that $$$

$2m in the bank is enough to easily draw $100k/yr from interest, which fits the GP’s “set for life if we make wise choices” IMO. That is way above median income in wealthy countries. Assuming you don’t try to live in SF!

Even in the US, $100K/yr puts you comfortably above median income. If I had $100K/yr of GUARANTEED income, I would stop working for money and do whatever I felt like for the rest of my life.

Yeah, something absurdly fun, like making video games.

Reminds me of the parable of the Mexican fisherman: https://www.kevincsnyder.com/the-mexican-fisherman-amazing-s...

Thank you for sharing. A real gem of a story.

Up until recently (healthcare reasons) the Adams were basically doing just that. I guess they won’t need to sign/sell little dwarf artworks for DF donators anymore though

the dream of being able to safely fail at any path you choose!

That's using a 5 percent withdrawal rate.

A 4 or even 3 percent withdrawal rate is more likely to be sustainable. Those are also rates I see suggested more commonly on retirement planning sites.

You are assuming no compounding. You have to model it as an annuity.

If you're assuming withdrawing at a safe withdrawal rate you're assuming you're not compounding. You're assuming a safe withdrawal rate from principal/dividends/interest that will, on average, leave the principal constant. Of course, if you're older and are not looking to pass down money you may be fine with drawing down principal to some degree.

So, yes, $2m should probably be modeled at about $80K income per year before taxes without touching principal but without building savings.

(May be somewhat higher with higher interest rates/inflation.)

I said an annuity. An annuity would draw the principal down as well, and you generally make a drawdown assumption that leaves you with some safe margin for extended life and maybe some inheritance.

If you model it as a lifetime annuity with inflation adjustment you are looking at more like 50k/year income at the outset were you to buy today.

My understanding is that annuities provide in general a worse return than the so called 4% rule on average.

You have compounding but also inflation. You need to slowly raise your draw to keep the same lifestyle.

That is not accurate. The 4% withdrawal rate is based on the Trinity Study[1], which showed that it was unlikely to exhaust retirement funds over a 30 year retirement. It already includes compounding and draw down calculations.

There's a whole active debate around exactly what numbers are sufficiently safe over what time horizons and what portfolio mixes. For a fun long read, see ERN's series on safe withdrawal rates https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study

LOL. Who is getting 5% risk free interest rate on USD? No one. I guess 1% after taxes is a more reasonable expected return. Remember that interest rates on retail deposits were pretty much zero for last 10 years. So, 20K USD per year. But if they can keep it up for next 5 years, then yeah, pretty much can retire on 1% interest rate forever.

Getting 4% right now at a normal bank (no high rate shenanigans)

I bet I'll see 5% within next 2 months. Obviously interest rate changes drastically over time.

https://www.rabobank.co.nz/term-deposits/ 5.50%P.A. here in NZ

Long term (~50 year) average stock market returns on reasonable indexes (like S&P500) is 10% per year.

The only real challenge is a portfolio mix and withdrawal strategy that minimizes the damage from withdrawing during downturns. That's where the 4% rule becomes relevant.

> 2m in the bank is enough to easily draw $100k/yr from interest

5% interest hasn’t been avail from a bank in a couple of decades, and the fact that we’re close to it again doesn’t mean it will stay that way…

You just can’t get a guaranteed risk-free return of that range indefinitely, which is why a lot of people shoot for 3-4% when they don’t have more capital to invest in riskier but higher return investments.

They seem to live on 30k to 50k a year so even if they double their expenses they are ok.

2m each is not "Fuck you" money perhaps but it is enough to comfortably retire to the original post point. It depends on lifestyle you desire but if I could retire tomorrow, I would make that lifestyle work.

> 2m each is not "Fuck you" money perhaps but it is enough to comfortably retire

That is exactly what "fuck you" money means. It's not about having so much money you couldn't possibly want for anything. People will always want. It's about having enough that you're not beholden to anyone for your basic needs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJjKP8vYjpQ&ab_channel=Youtu...

Well, yes. It depends on what your requirements are. For some people ~$80K/year without benefits isn't what they're looking for to coast through life.

I recommend watching the clip if you haven't. It doesn't that you actually go an retire, it means that you can.

I'm not sure how that contradicts what I wrote. It's above US median income, albeit without benefits. So, it's of course reasonable for someone to decide they don't need to work any longer with that income stream while others may feel differently.

At least for what I'm saying, it's not that someone would "decide they don't need to work any longer". This is what contradicts what you're saying.

It is about significantly improving your economic baseline, your p90 negative outcome. You can be making a million dollars a year and still be needy as hell. You need to keep your job, need to your investments stay up, need interest rates to stay down. If you're leveraged, there's a decent chance you'll go broke on a long enough timeline. And you'll always be partly aware of it. Your baseline is getting a job you hate so you don't go homeless.

If you have 2 million in the bank and don't leverage too hard, your baseline is being the average American while working 0 hours a week. You can do that until you figure out whatever is next, instead of sending out resumes.

Right!?

I always thought it meant something like "enough money to tell literally anybody to go fuck themselves without fear of the economic consequences". But I did a little googling and apparently "fuck you money" is one of those things that doesn't really have a clear-cut definition. Which is weird.

In theory there is some specific dollar that you earn which puts you over the line into "fuck you" money. If you're a dollar away from financial independence, are you worried about saying "fuck you" to your boss? Hell no! Which must mean that you're already safely in "fuck you" territory.

So that the magical greenback--the one with the serial number ending in "FU"--must come way earlier. Maybe it's the buck that puts your bank account into five figures for the first time. Or the one that tops off your 6-month emergency fund. Hell, if the dollar that puts you in the dos commas club doesn't send a surge of "fuck you" power running through your veins... you might just not be the "fuck you" type.

It really doesn't work that way, for several reasons.

First, you can't predict what will happen with the economy vis-a-vis your investments and cost-of-living. Sure there are rules of thumb, but depending your age and the current situation, assumptions like "I can perpetually do a 4% drawdown" may or may not be reliable.

Second, the ability to say FU to everyone is not a black and white decision. Perhaps you value earning more to live a higher lifestyle in the short-term, with some optionality to say FU if things go sideways. Other people might have been burnt and would rather live a life of poverty than be forced to capitulate to The Man one more time. In the immortal words of Lawrence from Office Space: "you don't need a million dollars to do nothing". Most people probably fall somewhere in between.

And last but not least, declaring financial independence raises new existential questions which people may not be ready to answer. Having a job gives a baseline social connection and sense of communal utility. To actually declare financial independence poses a risk of alienation, which may have no upside once the immediate threat of short-term dependence on one's employer is removed.

You don't sound like the "fuck you" type.

The article also mentioned money going to other people working on the game. Unclear how's much that is though.

Edit: this also touches on a grievance I have with progressive taxation and annualized retirement savings. These guys might have been in a Lowe tax bracket for many years and be back in a low tax bracket depending on how sales go over the years. The one time they hit it home they are in the top tax bracket and can only max out tax advantages from retirement contributions for that one year. They'd be in a much better position in this regard of their income was spread out. The entire system is build assuming people earn pretty much the same year to year. Same for other self-funded founders with exits.

Would be nice if you earned a 401(k) credit/allowance each year so when you do hit it big you can rapidly play catch-up on the past 20 years or whatever.

> Would be nice if you earned a 401(k) credit/allowance each year so when you do hit it big you can rapidly play catch-up on the past 20 years or whatever.

No kidding. I spent most of my 20s and part of my 30s working for companies without a 401k (several small startups or video game studios). I'd love to put in more than the max now to make up for it, but have to make do with just buying stocks without the tax advantage.

I think that if you're considered 'behind' for your current salary and age, especially significantly so (I bet a bunch of people here, even those 10 years younger than me, probably have 5-10x more in their 401k than I do), there really shouldn't be much of a cap on what you can put into your 401k.

Like the cap should just be a max total you can have in there based on your age, not a cap per year.

They could easily set up a corporation and pay themselves over 10-20 years to avoid a windfall (and max out tax advantages over multiple years) if that’s the goal…

The corporation would actualize the income as profit at some <=1Yr period, where it would be subject to corporate tax. Not saying your idea wouldn't work out best tax-wise, but that you'd still need to run the numbers. I'm pretty amateur at accounting, so I don't know.

I do get a kick out of the idea that these guys basically revolve a lot of their life around developing DF. I wonder how much of their lifestyle could be legitimately expensed from a corporate account without any IRS hassle.

And publisher also needs a cut.

> They are definitely in 'set for life if we make wise choices' territory

Sure it seems that way now, but what happens when a volcano appears under their house and it floods with lava? Or they go to war with the elves?

I'm sure they'll be able to afford volcano insurance. I bet they could even find someone who's willing to insure their homes against Elf invasions.

That's a thing, in Washington.

Where does Washington get elves from?

Canada

They came from across the veil to join him in his fight against the English. Obviously.

Mostly Skamania county.

They'll just have to remember that losing is fun

It was inevitable

technically, they are still "set for life" assuming that they are in the house when it floods with lava.

Remember: Build a man a fire and you keep him warm for one night; light a man on fire and you keep him warm for the rest of his life.

it will be cheaper to power the forge

Stories have shown them living above ground, hopefully now they can afford a properly dwarfy fort down in a stone layer.

This. Or one of them gets caught in the rain while fishing and decides to murder teh other one.

Or if their cats start getting sick from alcohol in the blood on the floor?

Not with american healthcare, could burn thru that pretty quickly.

...which was entire reason for Steam release in the first place

Heartbreaking. Even with millions, cancer could destroy you financially.

One paramedic prices having a heart attack at about $400k pre-insurance† (or no insurance). Check those limits on your plan...

† Healthline has an article with another example from 2012 priced at $500k

Why would someone with millions not at least have an ACA plan? Even the worst ACA plan has an out-of-pocket max of around $10K individual and $20K family.

Personally, I don't trust "words from an insurance company." My health insurance company has more money and lawyers than I do. If I get cancer or something and they want to drain my life savings, they probably have some words on page 561 of my insurance policy allowing them to do it. What am I going to do about it, hire an attorney with my $0 balance and sue them?

Can you pay some "insurance of insurance", where someone guarantees they will win your fight, otherwise they lose a big chunk of their money as collateral?

Out of pocket maximums and limits (or aggregate limits) are two different concepts. Once the insurance plan's limit has been reached, it doesn't matter how much you've paid out of pocket.

The ACA does prohibit these limits for certain "essential health benefits", but there's a lot of wiggle room that insurance providers will take advantage of.

ACA plans don’t have lifetime or yearly maximum payouts. As long as the services are covered services, they’re obligated to pay beyond your out of pocket maximum.

With millions you buy health insurance.

Along with several other supporting insurance plans that backstop your health insurance and potential healthcare costs in extreme scenarios, and so on.

I mean, are you referring to long term disability? You can, it depends on what standard of living you want in the case both your legs fall off.

In actual health insurance, there is no longer a coverage cap. So you don't need a backup insurance plan past 5M or somethign anymore.

I hope they read this thread:

"So, what the hell DO you do if you are unlucky enough to win the lottery?" https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...

It's got some dark news, but real advice that seems legit.

~~I feel like HackerNews has enough reasonably financially-literate people that we can do better for advice to someone than that

If you're going the Reddit route, at least link to /r/fatfire or /r/personalfinance

A competent business owner coming into a windfall this size is in a pretty good spot compared to your average rando off /r/askreddit~~

EDIT: Please disregard this comment, just left it here as a monument to my own jerkness

What advice would you give that’s different to that post?

Ah, sorry, that was actually good advice, haha.

I saw "AskReddit", quickly skimmed and saw something along the lines of "Every lottery winner gets murdered by family", and jumped to the conclusion that this was your typical /r/AntiWork-esque "Mediocrity is good" viral post.

I think all the advice he posted about setting up trusts, buying index funds and treasuries, etc would fit in great here, on /r/fatfire, MMM or anywhere else.

I'm happy for their success. However, I'm dismayed that it was their inability to pay for healthcare that landed them in this (albeit good) situation. It's not a situation that should be forced on citizens in a modern country, for which this particular example is a feel-good ending, but there are many more (orders of magnitude more) feel-bad endings, so to speak.

Our fortunes rise and fall together

Healthcare and basic income are crucial for moving towards the next stage of civilizaiton. Like you said, I'm really glad it worked out for them but so, so many people don't get so lucky or are willing to take such a big risk.

How many more dwarf fortresses could we have if we gave people the safety net to follow their dreams? Instead of worrying about basic necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare.

I agree there is a problem with high healthcare costs, and food costs especially now.

However what we saw with covid stimulus and unemployment wasn’t the “everyone’s now an artist” outcome that is suggested with UBI.

We definitely saw creatives able to express and build their visions into the world, thanks to the money and additional time.

But we also saw, and still have ongoing, many people who choose not to work [0]. Some percent of these people are suffering from substance abuse. Not to say this is purely the outcome of UBI, but I can’t imagine it helps those individuals with such proclivities for abuse.

Personally I think we should have a good UBI at the least, qualified for individuals who make under a certain amount and who are able and working, or legitimately looking for a job.

There’s a reason many trust fund kids go broke or dive into substance abuse. Sure there are examples of families who would not do this under similar circumstances, but giving out money for no work (assuming one is able to work), leads to hedonic pleasures unless the individual is purposely aware and trying to avoid such sand traps.

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea38.htm

You seem to be connecting UBI to the "Do not want a job now" category, but I don't think there's any reason to think covid stimulus/unemployment led to much growth in those particular numbers. See https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2004/cpsaat35.pdf for the same numbers from 2003/2004; they're certainly higher now (~100k vs ~70k, but population increased, so more like 100k vs 80k if we equalize) but not that much higher. And at a glance the biggest increase is in 55+ - so possibly it's largely older people retiring rather than substance abuse or whatever.

I do think UBI has risks, hopefully we can encourage useful pursuits, public works, etc.

> but giving out money for no work (assuming one is able to work), leads to hedonic pleasures

It sounds like you think this is bad. Why?

Covid was not a great experiment. The stimulus checks were 6+ months apart each and would barely pay rent for the month in which they arrived for anyone not living in a shoebox. And UE has a lot of stipulations about you spending all your time trying to get a new job.

> UE has a lot of stipulations

Absolutely no auditing was being done. Some states require you reach out to or inquire about at least 2 jobs per week, nothing close to "all of your time" YMMV I suppose.

>U.S. watchdog estimates $45.6 billion in pandemic unemployment fraud

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/22/unemploym...

A wage slave is going to have a hard time adjusting to freedom.

That might seem a bit of an extreme statement but the reality is that as soon as children enter school they are steadily stripped of their creativity in favor of discipline and obedience. They are raised in a capitalist society where they are told that their worth is tied to their job. And they spend a huge chunk of their lives doing what their boss tells them.

As far as the stimulus check, these were people trying to survive a global crisis and managed to get a break from the drudgery of their degrading, exploitative jobs.

You can't make claims about human nature without considering the context in which these events are occurring.

> Personally I think we should have a good UBI at the least, qualified for individuals who make under a certain amount and who are able and working, or legitimately looking for a job.

The "U" in UBI means "Universal". Once you add any kind of means testing you ruin the whole idea.

More people building dwarf fortresses means less people doing whatever they are right now.

While some jobs may be completely pointless, I think we would quickly find that we actually need people doing boring jobs because society would fall apart without them and then no one gets to build video games.

Maybe. I suspect the amount of actual work to be done has dropped a lot. Surely it's worth trying a few steps in that direction.

That doesn't follow. The maximum possible human attention span will still be 24 hours a day in the future.

The current entertainment market already saturates this several hundred times over.

Creating several dozen more dwarf fortresses won't do anything since they will just take attention away from each other.

Since information can be replicated for almost nothing.

Whereas physical labor can't be replicated nearly as easily.

I’d imagine the people offering those boring jobs would have to make them pretty appealing. Perhaps better pay, better work hours, etc.

I don’t think jobs would go away like you seem to imply. When I say taking care of peoples needs I don’t mean giving everyone a mansion.

> How many more dwarf fortresses could we have if we gave people the safety net to follow their dreams?

So, so many. Linux is a good example. Linus has talked about how he was able to spend a lot of time on getting Linux off the ground because back in the 80s and 90s, study allowances in Finland were very, very generous. Took him like 8 years to graduate, and during that time he didn't have to worry at all about finding a job to pay rent and buy food. These days, the system is similar, but they do monitor your progress more closely and will cut off the allowance if you don't progress in your studies. (ask me how I know :P)

Imagine if he had a boss breathing down his neck and daily standups lol. I don't think people realize how much our society saps our humanity and kills our creative energies and our desires to build things.

I believe they now have enough cash to emigrate to Canada if they wished to do so.

Canada, like the US, has its own health care crisis. Wait times for medical care seem surreal.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/canada/british-columbia/...

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-paramedics-...

Is this a global issue now? Same in Germany.

In the name of profit and efficiency, all slack as been wrung out of our healthcare systems. Systems with no slack are brittle and prone to failure under stressors.

As for stressors...gestures broadly.

Profit? Aren’t all of your provincial healthcare systems publicly run and publicly funded? I feel that there are two issues.

One is taxes. Canada already has high taxes, which does not pair well with low salaries and a high cost of living that isn’t too far from either the SF Bay Area or even NYC.

The second is your confederation’s central government is weak. Your provinces have too much power, and they’re the ones controlling the healthcare systems which seem to be managed completely differently from one province to another rifht?

Guessing based on how things go in the UK:

> Profit? Aren’t all of your provincial healthcare systems publicly run and publicly funded? I feel that there are two issues.

The directly publicly run parts are only subject to the "efficiency" part. But more and more gets contracted out where it's also subject to profit pressure.

> The second is your confederation’s central government is weak. Your provinces have too much power, and they’re the ones controlling the healthcare systems which seem to be managed completely differently from one province to another rifht?

That's pretty backwards. Locally managed healthcare tends to beat centrally managed. It also helps inject a bit of competition in, gaining many of the benefits of for-profit healthcare without so many of the downsides.

> Locally managed healthcare tends to beat centrally managed

I tend to agree, but the downside to having each province having their own special healthcare system is that it’s hard for them to collaborate like with something as simple as sharing medical records. Also, the central government can’t do things like mandate minimum spending for healthcare and a more consistent floor on salaries for healthcare workers. Overall though I agree with you.

> It also helps inject a bit of competition in, gaining many of the benefits of for-profit healthcare without so many of the downsides.

People would have to be able to easily move between provinces for that to be true. Unfortunately, it’s hard due to the housing crisis and low salaries. Having a private option would increase competition. It might even offload some strain from the public system assuming that everyone still gets taxed for the public option.

Btw since we’re on the subject, how do Canadians mitigate the long wait for everything healthcare related? Is it common to cross the border for healthcare?

> People would have to be able to easily move between provinces for that to be true.

Not really. If a few people can move at the margin, that's enough to keep things in equilibrium. Even if no-one's moving, it still creates political pressure if one province is clearly offering better healthcare than another.

> Btw since we’re on the subject, how do Canadians mitigate the long wait for everything healthcare related? Is it common to cross the border for healthcare?

Again just assuming it works like the UK: a few people pay to go private and get treated quicker, some travel to a cheap place for the same, most people deal with it. While you hear about a handful of dramatic failures (partly since, unlike in a private system, there are many people with an incentive to publicise them), by and large the system is actually very good at prioritising the things that are actually urgent.

Well, I'm American. The "we" I was referring to is the developed world.

But, there is a massive effort underway in the UK, Ontario, and others, to cripple those systems in order to privatize them and profit.

Even a non-profit has people who profit; the doctors get paid, everyone gets paid, and they don't want to not get paid.

I had the wrong impression that the EU’s healthcare system was working well compared to North America. It’s terrible to learn otherwise.

The capitalist European governments that are being elected are privatizing healthcare. The first step for doing that is defunding public healthcare to make people say that 'it doesnt work - its better in private hospitals'. Then you say you have to privatize the entire system. It also funnels people to private hospitals early - when you defund public healthcare and force people into long wait times, they have no option but to go to private hospitals.

Most affluent European nations have seen net negative economic growth for the past 15-20 years, and in some cases for a generation (France and Britain).

Now they're commonly seeing population contraction or flattening.

They already have high taxes.

They're in deep shit and it has little to do with Capitalists taking over their healthcare systems. The math was always going to take them here. Only per capita economic growth to offset the aging and population shrinkage can save them, short of epic scale high income immigration.

30 years ago Germany's GDP per capita was ~$26,500. That's $57,000 inflation adjusted. The projected GDP per capita for Germany in 2022 is $48,000.

30 years ago France's GDP per capita was ~$23,800. That's $51,300 inflation adjusted. The projected GDP per capita for France in 2022 is $42,330.

30 years ago the UK's GDP per capita was ~$20,500. That's $44,200 inflation adjusted. The projected GDP per capita for the UK in 2022 is $47,300.

30 years to end up with a net contraction or otherwise close to flat. And these are supposedly the economic giants of Europe. In some cases it's even worse than it seems per capita, as eg France has added nine million people in that time; the UK has added ten million people.

The same scenario is playing out for nearly all the affluent European nations.

This is the best summary of what’s happening with the demographic bomb that is occurring in every developed country. It’s even starting to hit developing countries.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...

As the World Bank dataset shows, Germany has in fact had GDP per capita growth - the 26500 figure you cite is in 2015 dollars, so it is already adjusted for inflation. GDP growth is never reported in nominal terms, but always in real terms, which is adjusted for inflation.

Two things are at play, the capitalists, and the nationalists that make everything for what would be new European citzens to be shoved away, people that could be paying for those taxes instead of caged in some camps waiting years for their future.

> Most affluent European nations have seen net negative economic growth for the past 15-20 years, and in some cases for a generation (France and Britain).

Economic growth is a meaningless term in itself. There was so much growth in the US, and what did it do for the majority? A tiny ~1% or less got extremely rich. But the majority are not able to feed themselves.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...

> They're in deep shit and it has little to do with Capitalists taking over their healthcare systems.

The capitalists took over the economy of entire Europe starting with Thatcher/Reagan.

> The math was always going to take them here

This sounds like religious sermon. There is a magical 'math', which makes everyone happy when there is 'growth'. Like how it obviously did in the US.

...

That has nothing to do with it. Growth, or contraction, has nothing to do with people having public healthcare since public healthcare is run over the fraction of the GDP that people generate. If there are less people, there is less GDP, but less need for healthcare. If there are more people, you need more healthcare spending but there are more people that generate GDP.

Its capitalism. Unequal distribution of wealth can never be sustained even with gigantic growth. Like the US demonstrated since Reagan.

Finite resources don’t disappear when you change economic systems, and neither does corruption. To me, what changes with different economic systems is the currency. With capitalist systems, currency is obvious. However in socialist systems, the currency tends to be political power and connections. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait in lines just like everyone else.

Neither system is perfect and they both have pros and cons

> However in socialist systems, the currency tends to be political power and connections.

That's objectively false and its a perception that is based on the Angloamerican cold war propaganda.

With all the 'power and influence', the 'elites' of Eastern Bloc did not live so much more in luxury compared to their own people.

If an ordinary person got his house at the age of ~35, a party official got it a few years earlier. If an ordinary person drived an X years old car, the official drove a 4-5 year newer car.

The catch is, all the citizens in the Eastern Bloc systems got their houses, cars, guaranteed jobs, education, healthcare, childcare, paid vacations, paid maternity leave, retirement and all that stuff.

They were very surprised when they changed to capitalism and learned that none of those were guaranteed under capitalism. Now they have so much freedom.

> With all the 'power and influence', the 'elites' of Eastern Bloc did not live so much more in luxury compared to their own people. If an ordinary person got his house at the age of ~35, a party official got it a few years earlier. If an ordinary person drived an X years old car, the official drove a 4-5 year newer car.

You’ve contradicted yourself in the same comment.

Besides what you wrote doesn’t fully reflect reality

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0390670050003867...

Power is much more centralized in socialist systems. Consequently, corruption spreads much faster compared to more decentralized systems like capitalism. The end results is everyone is equally poor except for high level government officials.

> You’ve contradicted yourself in the same comment.

I didnt. There is absolutely no practical difference in between driving a car that came out last year and driving a 5 year old car.

> Besides what you wrote doesn’t fully reflect reality

Im sorry but a paper from a private American think thank does not make reality. Actual statistics do.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-...

> Power is much more centralized in socialist systems. Consequently, corruption spreads much faster compared to more decentralized systems like capitalism

Those are religious statements without any sound basis. In a capitalist system corruption is normalized in the form of the 'freedom of the property owner to do whatever he wants with his property' and 'election funding'.

> The end results is everyone is equally poor except for high level government officials.

Another religious statement.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...

Which contradicts the reality. The US is not at war. Nobody is sanctioning the US. Nobody is conducting economic warfare against the US. The US sat at the top of the world's economic system uncontested for the last 30 years. And that is the result.

> There is absolutely no practical difference in between driving a car that came out last year and driving a 5 year old car.

Newer cars weren’t the only thing socialist kleptocrats were found to be hoarding. They had all sorts of luxury goods from the West ranging from fashion, jewelry, and even food.

I don’t deny that late stage capitalism will happen or is happening as we speak, but socialism isn’t immune to corruption either. Late stage socialism also happens much sooner than late stage capitalism because power is so much more concentrated in socialist systems. We know this because we’ve had plenty of failed socialism experiments in the 20th century

> Those are religious statements without any sound basis

It’s ironic that you’d write this when you never offer solid facts yourself despite other commenters requesting that you provide data. My data is more valid than your little anecdotes

> the EU’s healthcare system was working well compared to North America

I think it's "working well" in the sense that "sudden illness won't bankrupt you" but not "working well" in the sense that "you might have to wait two years to get a new hip" (which I believe is the current waiting time in the UK.)

Same in France. People are having trouble finding doctors, dentists, etc. that can squeeze them in in their schedule.

Same for Germany, same for the UK, same for Canada, same in any Western European country - im reposting what i posted to the GP:

> Wait times for medical care seem surreal.

Its due to the governments defunding public healthcare in order to 'strangle it then save it'. You defund it, make people say 'it doesnt work', then say that "We need to privatize it."

Its de facto privatization method used since Reagan/Thatcher. Same method is being used in any country that ends up with a 'privatizing' government.

Yes, its a global issue since last 40 years - im reposting what i posted to the GP:

> Wait times for medical care seem surreal.

Its due to the governments defunding public healthcare in order to 'strangle it then save it'. You defund it, make people say 'it doesnt work', then say that "We need to privatize it."

Its de facto privatization method used since Reagan/Thatcher. Same method is being used in any country that ends up with a 'privatizing' government.

Using monopsonic position to keep costs as low as possible is a primary advantage of single payer healthcare. And raising healthcare payroll taxes is politically unpopular like raising any other taxes. No need to spread conspiracy theories about preparation for privatizations.

I feel that the bigger problem is that the demographic bomb has finally hit more developed countries beyond Canada. Unlike either the US or Canada, Europe just isn’t very used to immigration yet. The EU is nearly as good at assimilation compare to the US because they’re still relatively new to the game, which exacerbates the problems associated with immigration. Of course countries in Asia, like Japan and South Korea, are even worse than the EU when it comes to assimilation

Any proof for this? Because in the Netherlands wait times are increasing because, get this, more (old) people are using health care. This increases pressure on the people who work in health care so they burn out, leaving fewer people to pick up the work, who then burn out, lather, rinse, repeat. Salaries in health care are not fantastic, true, but the people burning out do so because they have to work too hard, not because the government is defunding them. Another problem is that there simply is more treatment options available because of scientific progress. Afflictions that used to kill people can now be treated or at least managed, but this takes up a lot of time and money. Great for you if you end up living longer and in better health, not so great for the system as a whole.

> Any proof for this?

Its amazing how people are still unaware of this after so many documentaries, reports, advocacy on the matter.

Just google. "Neoliberal privatization tactics", "Economic hitmen" (that was a pretty popular take), neoliberalism etc.

> more (old) people are using health care.

Irrelevant. The number of older people in any country is not enough to bankrupt healthcare systems Healthcare is a function of the percentage of national GDP spent on it. If there are more people, you have more GDP, you can spend more. If you have less people, you cant spend more but you also have less people.

Blaming the problems on irrelevant 'reasons' is one of the ways in which privatization is hidden from sight - just check how many cuts have been made to the healthcare spending in your own country in the past 40 years, and how much. There you will have your answer.

I appreciate that you’re angry and I agree that for the most part there’s entirely too much privatization going on (railways? really?). As far as healthcare is concerned, however, in the Netherlands (it might very well be different elsewhere), it is mostly not being privatized and the government is spending ever increasing amounts of money on it which take up an ever increasing cut of the budget and the reason for this is more people are growing older and sicker and are therefore requiring more complex care.

We’re currently at €7000 per person per year spent on health care, with average salaries being €36.000 annually. This is unsustainable.

Only in countries where there are people in power who stand to benefit from privatizating healthcare so as to turn it into the dystopian hellscape like the American healthcare system.

We don't have this issue in Taiwan for example. I'm sure other countries can pipe up.

Actually now that I think about it the devs could relatively easily get a gold card visa and emigrate here... From what I remember of their documentary they basically love to just code all day and go on walks, a lifestyle easily supported here. We also got FAT internet pipes.

Taiwan has other problems that are similar to what Ukraine has faced from Russia. People would be crazy to immigrate there now and in the near future.

People keep telling us this but we feel it's overblown. When you listen to western media they make it seem like an invasion is just around the corner, whereas over here the relationship with the PRC is little changed.

Nobody can know for sure but you can never know if a huge earthquake will hit San Francisco, better not live there. Or if the subway will flood in new York city, better not live there. Or if Berlin will be hit with a terrorist bomb, better not live there...

And so on. At least here we are very unlikely to be shot, and, our public transit means we don't have to risk death from drunk driving. I believe a rational analysis of actual likelihood to random death in Taiwan vs the usa, the outcomes are much better in Taiwan, and that's before considering better access to healthcare and other reasons our quality of life is higher here.

I’ve been watching news in Asia, including from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines.

It’s not overblown. If I were to guess, people are prone to normalcy bias even when the probability for an invasion is getting higher and higher.

The further China’s social order degrades, the higher the chances of an invasion.

I think I'm going to take the Taiwanese person's opinion on the matter over yours, no offense haha. Frankly being a Japanese native in Japan, I can only confirm his opinion. Endless political posturing does not make a war, except in the case of the classic gung-ho American cowboyism.

I’m Taiwanese as well, but that irrelevant in light of things like news and facts. Japanese media tends to side with my narrative as well.

> I’ve been watching news in Asia, including from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines.

It should be obvious, but so have I. What are you seeing in your news that makes you think you know more than I that there's not only a higher risk of PLA invasion, but that said risk is at all measurable in any meaningful way?

> The further China’s social order degrades, the higher the chances of an invasion.

By what basis? Try my logic: the further the PRC's social order degrades, the less support Xi will have for a foreign war. What happened back in Russia when they invaded Ukraine? Protests. Does the CPC want more protests right now?

It's moot. Think about it: if you are so certain that there will be an invasion, then you likely would acknowledge that our intelligence services are even more certain. If your certainty is so high, their certainty would be, well, probably at 100% in the next year, right? If they knew that, would they not completely mobilize our army, activate our standing militia? The PLA would know that we know, and wouldn't the invasion simply happen tomorrow?

I say this because I ask you to recognize the inherent uncertainty at all, and that the statistical probability of a PLA invasion is dependent upon human whim and global politics. If you can't tell me which way a stock is going to go confidently enough to bet your entire savings on it, there's no way you can reasonably guess whether Taiwan is livable based on risk of invasion.

I mean, if you're telling me you wouldn't live in Taiwan because you'd be afraid of an invasion, I definitely don't want to hear that you've been in a car any time in the last year, because if you're that concerned about the PLA invading Taiwan, there's no WAY you would risk the objectively, measurably higher likelihood of getting in a car accident from a drunk driver.

But don't take my word for it: in the words of a huge portion of the staff of the US state department stationed here in Taiwan (we had a dinner party recently (I have no authority to quote them on this so you know, don't run to the press)): the US State Department is skittish to a fault. If they haven't pulled staff, they don't consider invasion a realistic probability.

TSMC wouldn’t be making foundries in multiple countries if the danger of a Chinese invasion wasn’t both real and imminent.

There’s also a lot of troop deployments in both Fujian and Hainan.

Focusing your country’s rage outward towards a foreign enemy is also a strategy so old that even the Romans mention it.

I get it. You don’t want to leave like the Cantonese in Hong Kong. You can keep your head in the ground all you want, but it’s not going to make the danger go away

The difference being that Taiwan is a goose that lays golden eggs (TMSC) so you'd be crazy so invade and thereby kill it.

Pretty sure Ukraine had / has nothing that Russia wants to keep alive.

Xi isn’t very bright. Taiwan is also an emotional issue for mainlander China, so the logic will not be fully rational.

If the danger wasn’t real, TSMC wouldn’t be building foundries in the US, Japan, India, and Germany to name a few places.

I think the global problem is that medicine has improved so much that, unlike a hundred years ago, it's impossible to provide the full extent of modern medicine (which is huge!) to everyone, so some form of rationing/filtering is inevitable and necessary.

You can do the rationing through market forces, where people who can't afford it get less care; you can do the rationing through some other allocation system (e.g. priority systems, or long queues, or lottery, or committee allocation) which in effect still mean that not all people get everything.

If you want to say "In our society, everyone gets healthcare" then you have do define "healthcare" narrowly, which includes some services but not everything technically possible - I mean, if we have services that take more than a man-month of labor for each month of prolonged life (and there are some) then that's not possible to provide for everyone always even from a purely mathematical standpoint.

This is the crux of the matter, and the solution at some point is to either have people deny themselves "extraordinary care" or have someone else do so.

There's a "motte and bailey" that goes on with healthcare - emergency services like handling broken legs and illness and such is actually relatively cheap; it's the prolonged costs of all the various things we die of that really puts a burden on things.

Sure we spend $5 million now and then to save premie infants, etc, but that's such a small portion of total healthcare spending as to be a rounding error.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2020-2021/HExpType.pdf breaks some of it down, but not in detail; I suspect that a huge amount of healthcare expenses can be directly tied to obesity and its consequences.

And here I thought waiting 2 weeks to see a specialist sucked.

> Wait times for medical care seem surreal.

Its due to the governments defunding public healthcare in order to 'strangle it then save it'. You defund it, make people say 'it doesnt work', then say that "We need to privatize it."

Its de facto privatization method used since Reagan/Thatcher. Same method is being used in any country that ends up with a 'privatizing' government.

No, it isn't.

Public health is just difficult to fund. Especially on a shrinking population.

This is the same conclusion I came to. Many Canadians are now against immigration due to their housing crisis. What they don’t realize is that Canada has been hit with a demographic bomb in the 1970s that other countries are now only starting to experience. Ie without immigration, the retired elderly will soon outnumber working age adults who contribute to the economy and tax revenue

They only have two choices now:

* increase or keep immigration at the same rate

* decrease or eliminate benefits like socialized healthcare and social security

Three.

Increase productivity (per capita output), increase taxes, specifically pursue high income society development paths (including on who you allow to immigrate, such that high income immigrants promptly become high tax contributors).

Canada is more or less already doing this. They'll likely just have to boost taxation further.

You’re not wrong, but increasing productivity is not easy especially in a place that is both highly regulated and highly taxed. Your most productive and talented workers tend to move south due to both the higher pay and lower cost of living.

You’re right about the other two either already happening or inevitable.

More and more, I continue to be shocked that countries in this position didn't end up letting covid run its course. Seems like after some initial difficulties, it could have helped balance their demographics a lot.

Guess governments aren't as cynical as some think

Are you actually surprised governments didn’t decided to kill a few million of their own citizens?

Didn’t Sweden take this risk? Looking at the data, it seems to have paid off unless I’m reading it wrong

No? Sweden had quite a strong COVID response including an entry ban for a while. The government got quiet draconian when cases spiked, but where more targeted than many countries.

Yes, or at least I was until I remembered those making decisions are mostly older and more at risk of death or issues from contracting covid.

They did. With not locking down early, claiming that it was 'nothing', not providing them support during the lockdown, then reopening early. All for the sake of the stockmarket and 'the economy'.

How's Canada ' a shrinking population'? Canada is a fastest growing developed country, in % of course.

You’re right, but only for now

I’m having trouble finding the original statscan article, but according to their projections even if you drastically increase immigration even higher than it is today Canada will still eventually face a population decline. Immigration only slows down the decline. I can’t help but think that the world is experiencing a more subtle and slow version of Children of Men

Yes it is. I live in Ontario. The provincial (conservative) government literally froze the wages of nurses and other public sector workers in 2019 (see Bill 124), creating a massive exodus of nurses and a severe staff shortage. The provincial government doesn't have money to pay nurses, but it has enough money to build a useless highway (see Highway 413) that just so happens to go through land owned by the Premier's friends and business associates; or to give out millions in license plate rebates just before an election. That's also the same provincial government that intentionally didn't spend about $2.7 billion of federal COVID-19 relief funds (which could have, you know, funded healthcare).

Lastly, Canada's population isn't shrinking. It's growing, thanks to a sensible immigration policy (well, mostly sensible; not recognizing the credentials of healthcare professionals is pretty dumb).

Public healthcare is only difficult to find when your government's priority is to personally engorge on a gravy train powered by corruption. All of the issues facing the Ontario healthcare system are intentionally self-inflicted.

> Yes it is. I live in Ontario. The provincial (conservative) government

Sure, just be a socialistic/communist government and be able to finance the pension system while depending on US money (because there isn't any good alternative), once you go too much into debt and deal with IMF, and be sure not to defund important services (like medicine) when they ask you causing bank runs and bankrupcy. Easy, no?

Oh, and make sure there is no corruption that would cause funds to be mismanaged.

> Sure, just be a socialistic/communist government and be able to finance the pension system while depending on US money (because there isn't any good alternative)

Why the hell would they depend on US money if they become a socialistic/communist government that channels its GDP to its people instead of channeling it to tax breaks for the rich.

> corruption

No problem - they can just legalize it under the name 'lobbying' like how US did it.

> Why the hell would they depend on US money

Indirectly, because they depend on petroleum/oil/gas. Sure your glorious government has to import energy or other fuel derived products. Not to mention imports don't magically teleport to your location, they also depend on oil to get shipped.

> No problem - they can just legalize it

That's just papering over the issue. Akin to saying we solved drunk driving by setting alcohol in blood to 50%.

Its not. Its a percentage of GDP. Shrinking populations produce less GDP. But they have less people to support.

There is no country in the world where public healtchare is failing without getting DEFUNDED intentionally.

It is hard if the population is shrinking because the two shrinking parts of the population, children & working adults, are essential for GDP and tax revenue; while the growing numbers of retired seniors just put even more strain on the system. There’s a threshold when taxes get too overwhelming.

You’re still down to some major choices:

* End immigration and end public benefits like healthcare

* Keep immigration and keep healthcare for now. Then pray that someone finds a solution someday to a shrinking population because immigration will only slow it down.

* Drastically increase taxes. This isn’t really a viable long term solution because in most places that have a lot of socialized benefits the taxes are already very high.

Yeah this is a global offensive by the plutocrats to discredit public health care. It's going on in the UK, in Sweden too.

When are people going to wake up and smell the class war?

France too.

Is there evidence of this or is it just a feeling?

Oh man, how many times have I considered saving all the evidence? I guess I need to start doing that.

Because the evidence just passes me by in the form of news articles, new laws being proposed, new budgets undercutting public health care and promoting the private sector.

I have stories for days. But as you say, I need to start saving the sources because I'm not really into politics. I'm a nerd, I live in a nerdy bubble. I just observe the world around me and see the corruption.

The evidence is how many cuts have been made to your country's healthcare spending in the past 40 years. And how much. And the accompanying increase of laws that encourage private hospitals and insurance, and the channeling of the healthcare to those.

They decided to live off 30k a year with no health insurance. What did they think would happen?

Would you rather live in a world where we don't have things like Dwarf Fortress? Their passion has been the game, as they understood it, they weren't able to make it and have health insurance (as I recall from the documentary, there were some issues getting remote jobs, and health insurance out of pocket is apparently prohibitively expensive in the USA).

Why are you blaming them and not the system?

They always had the option to start selling the game. He could have put it up for sale years ago.

He produced an enormous amount of value and chose to not collect the earnings until now.

> Would you rather live in a world where we don't have things like Dwarf Fortress?

1. we do have Dwarf Fortress.

2. It's not our collective responsibility to finance people who want to make art

I'm not blaming the system because it's not the limiting factor here. They did not prioritize their financial security so why should society do it instead? They have all the tools to finance their lives yet opted not to. They learned this themselves and corrected it when they realized it was unsustainable. The worst possible scenario is subsidizing their previous lifestyle.

Insurance not covering medically necessary procedures and hospitals charging exorbitant prices is a problem, not this.

fuck the poors, right?

Would it have been any different if they did have health insurance? Under the US system I read plenty of stories of people who did everything right - had top insurance and lots of savings - but were still rendered destitute.

Wow, this is such a #goodnews story!

> "I'll have to rework… my, uh, whole life, figure out what the heck's going on there. I don't really have any ideas or plans right now. I've just been thinking about dwarf stuff."

> "My wife has plans," Zach said. "We live in a tiny little house, so buying a new house, that's a major goal."

This is a goodnews day. This, fusion announcement, and the Apple forced to allow 3rd party stores. Haven't had anything like it in a while.

Just bought the game out of respect even if I don't get to play it.

Oh good point on the other good news announcements!

There's also progress in gene-editing cancer treatments, China throwing in the towel on their "COVID 1984" plan, a LOT of progress the last few years on space commercialization, serious conversations about how we're generating our energy..

It's pretty wild. My whole life from the 80s up until the late 2010s was under this dark cloud. The wild optimism of the mid-1900s was gone, and more and more it felt like we were settling into this grim expectation that Humanity was going to slowly die off. Then over the course of just a few years things completely changed

I wonder why not he but his wife thought about improving their material circumstances? So content with his life, or so focused on the code, or something else?

I suspect the part of the spectrum he is on provides the ability for very intense but very narrow focus.

Either he is that obsessive artist who pays little thought to anything else, or just wasn't ready for this sudden flux of money.

He gets to work on his dream project, and is beloved by thousands of fans. Sounds like a good life to live, even if in a tiny house!

Focused on the code and just being happy with what he has. If you don't need much, you are more happy in life, like buddhists say.

I love that they straight up said the game won't get any big discounts in the near (~2 years) future

>Q: When is the game going on sale?

>Not soon! And not for very much discount! Bay 12 and Kitfox are going to keep working on this for ~30 years, so it doesn’t make sense to follow normal Steam discounting. For example, we might discount 10% in a couple of months, but we also might not! We certainly won’t be discounting for more than 15% for at least two years!

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/975370/view/36316205...

Same as Factorio, which also never goes on sale.

When I know a game discounts 50+% it just makes me put off buying it.

Some games are great even if they are "done" and no longer under active development. Frostpunk is a good example. When you see it on a large discount, pick it up.

I have no problem at all with both methods (a "one and done" game/movie that will sell high for awhile and then go discounted, and a "work in progress" that continues to evolve over time and never discounts) - but it is very nice to know ahead of time.

Factorio did see a sale! I believe it was just on the Switch version though.

You can get a discount on humble bundle if you’re a subscriber

I’ve often marvelled at these guys and their approach: making one game into your life’s work. Rimworld is perhaps another example of continuously added depth/complexity (although perhaps too soon to call that Tynan’s “life’s work”). Perhaps it’s something peculiar to this genre - so-called management sims.

It seems to me a phenomenon that - while perhaps not unique in art - is both rare and very well suited to this medium.

I'd wager it's because of the step back the player takes from the actual world. Like, Dwarf Fortress adventure mode exists, but it gets tedious. Carefully deciding which molar of your opponent to grab while grappling isn't the most engaging gameplay. But when you take a step back, and are making general instructions to your dwarves like "Go fight these goblins", the added complexity makes for some very memorable moments.

Combine that with a gameplay loop that basically demands a sprawling amount of new things to do (since the dwarves basically handle themselves in the steady state), and you've got a recipe for some truly expansive games.

Plus every modern game in the genre is directly inspired by Dwarf Fortress, who is made by someone who really seems like he just wanted a way to get people interested in his high fantasy world simulator.

I am so happy for them. I remember reading about how they struggled living with their parents in their 30s. I could imagine how much self doubt they must have had executing the long term plan of doing a user friendly steam release... will it actually work? And it has! Bravo.

I'm so happy for these guys. Selling 300,000 copies @ $30 each is life-changing money. Over the years they've accepted donations but from what I've seen it's tended to a few thousand dollars a month. Decent but not a lot for 2 people.

I still find DF really inaccessible but this Steam release will prompt me to give it another go. Whatever the case, I'm happy for their success.

Classic DF is inaccessible during the first hour only if you follow a good tutorial. Most anybody willing to slog through that hour will be able to get it.

Lots of AAA games these days won’t even have you playing that quick (though for different reasons)

Back in the day the 10hr+ youtube tutorial series was considered prime viewing before even playing dorf fort, for someone without any traditional rogue experience. Even watching a condensed video and starting, I don't imagine the game would feel accessible for many hours for the average AAA enjoyer. My 6yr old however, is able to pick up and finish most any appropriately age rated AAA game. 5 minutes of experimenting with the controls and they are as good to go.

As an observer since the initial release, Tarn repeatedly refused requests to compromise by expanding the team or involving a publisher. It was a genuine passion project the sort of which rarely succeed financially. I couldn't be happier for them!

Now that money worries are (hopefully) not an issue anymore, I really hope they consider releasing the source code.

Due to being written in C++, mods are quite restricted in what they can do (especially in comparison to more recent games like Rimworld that are trivial to decompile due to using C#). Especially frustrating because performance really isn't up to par - a lot of the old generational forts from a decade+ ago are really only possible now if you tailor your gameplay to account for performance issues.

Yeah I have some doubts about its optimization. Would be great to get fresh eyes on it.

Had they talked about releasing the source code? I would love to see the machine behind DF. I think about it all the time.

Either is a complete mess that no one else can understand, or they nailed the abstractions and it is infinitely extendable. I’m really curious to see how they implemented a system that provides such depth and subtlety.

Tarn has made an off hand comment about it before [1], but I'm not sure how serious it actually was.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/if-dwarf-fortress-sells-millions-on-...

Partner: "What the hell are you playing?"

Me: "Dwarf fortress! It's that game I used to play when I was in college working at the IT helpdesk. They finally added graphics!"

Partner: "I wouldn't exactly call those graphics..."

Me: pulls up copy of DF Classic

Partner: "...I see your point. And this game is fun?"

Me: "Imagine The Sims, if your sims could fight and you can only instruct them to build rather than building it yourself. And then set it in Lord of the Rings."

Partner: "Oooookay. How long have you been playing today?"

Me: looks at clock looks at clock again "Would you be mad if I told you six hours?"

Partner: "...I'm going to leave you to it."

11/10, amazing game. So happy for Tarn and Zach, they deserve every last penny of this.

>"We found a foolproof way of saving our money, which was to not sell anything for 20 years and then drop it all," Zach deadpanned.

Lol

I love the voiceover screencapture of how to play the game on the Steam demo videos. Would like it if more apps had tutorials like that from the creators.

source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

This is so amazing and inspiring. I was actually sitting down lately and thinking about what my next project is, as I've been working on a few other projects for a few years now, but nothing that will make any money. I think it could be fun to work on that kind of game for a long time, and not feel that pressure to deliver anything. Then hire some people at the end to make it more palatable, I guess. Question is, how much is luck when you work on something for that long? I think that in that time-frame you can do anything you set your mind to!

Congrats to the Adams brothers.

To my knowledge, Dwarf Fortress is the closest thing to Hari Seldon’s Prime Radiant

I’ve played for about two hours over the last decade. So playing the game hasn’t given me all that much pleasure. But I got considerably more pleasure reading Let’s Plays, so I dropped the 30bux on general principle. Congratulations to them.

Congrats to them! Very rare to see people who follow their dreams no matter what their field become millionaires.

On a side note, I feel like I should like Dwarf Fortress, but every time I look at it, it seems completely daunting.

It might sound condescending, but the daunting is part of the !fun!

I strongly recommend just digging in, and it's never been easier than right now. The DF Wiki is one of the most comprehensive video-game wikis that exist due to a very passionate, very tight-knit community; and has excellent guides on how to play your first game.

I'd recommend playing one fort while strictly following a guide so that you can learn the interface and concepts, then try another fort totally on your own to experience the chaos in full.

The new release adds graphics (instead of the ascii art styled graphics) so maybe that might be less daunting.

I say this only from observation, having never played the game. I saw a headline recently about the graphics update and you can see it in the videos on the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

Strike the earth!

Yeah. I like the idea of this game. But I'd love the idea if I could romp around in it with a friend or 15. But multiplayer is hard baked in from the start. This game will never happen.

So someone else will copy what they've done and add multiplayer and get that bag.

Dwarf Fortress is basically uncopyable. Lots of games have tried: RimWorld is a good example. But they end up feeling like shallow imitations, because Dwarf Fortress has been continuously upgraded for 16 years. It's the game that every first year game dev dreams of making, with incredibly deep simulation and a myriad of mechanics to play with, before they realize that it would take decades to build.

The Toady One is just the madman who actually did it.

While Dwarf Fortress is incredibly deep simulation, it is also filled with bugs and UI misdesigns, that makes playing it much more frustrating than playing e.g. Rimworld. Also, the simulation is very uneven, some parts are very deep, some very shallow and some completely broken.

I never successfully got into Dwarf Fortress before because the ASCII interface was just too hard to learn. I have had some fun with the new release.

I do agree though, whilst it’s made the game, for me, playable, there are lots of smaller annoyances that really add up once you’re a few hours into a fort. The UI is inconsistent in many areas. Sometimes you can view dwarf details, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes right click closes one level, sometimes it’s all of them, then for the squad menu you dismiss by the squad button/hot key again… Search is useful but not available everywhere.

I hope some of these annoyances will get resolved, but certainly it’s not a perfectly polished game either. It is still fun - yes - but I can’t help but be a little sad because it could absolutely be better.

The UI revamp in the current Steam version fixes most of the UI misdesigns.

The graphics package removed my big complaint: that trying to figure out what each particular character stood for in which context was not fun.

The complexity is daunting, but also a big part of the fun. Since I started playing the new version I find myself constantly sniped by trying to re-design the UI in my mind.

there are a lot of ('fun' in community parlance) rough edges, but just getting food and drink down isn't too difficult and unlocks about as much of the rest of the game as you want

that is, figuring out or looking up-

- how to get a small farm plot going ('plump helmet' is the staple food)

- how to brew drinks at a still (set it to repeat- brew-able plants will be used indiscriminately, generally plumphelmets, and seeds will be left behind for planting)

from there, you'll start to see messages about (cancelling the brew job due to) needing more barrels/rock pots, which aren't difficult, neither are beds and mugs, which you'll see dwarfs complaining about

oh and you'll obviously want to set up stockpiles, which will keep your workshops from getting all cluttered...

anyway, the new game-start options make it easy to turn off attackers, which should ease fortress-management enough to figure out any other features you want to work on:

-centralized job management with a 'manager' and an office, which will also let you schedule jobs to occur as needs arise

-getting charcoal and ores for forging is of course a big one

hopefully the new interface makes it even easier to see what is going wrong, things that you can get a head-start on the next time you start a fortress

Congrats! I bought it with no intention falling down the rabbit hole again; rather, I owe them for all the time I spent playing in high school. So happy for them both!

Respect to the developers for their effort. But I would never get into dwarf fortress because to me the idea is kind of insane. I get that it is fascinating to try and model complex real-world behaviour into a video game. But the truth is you can spend 100 lifetimes worth of time perfecting these systems that try to appear like a physical world (but really aren't) by trying to preprare for every possible situation the player can get into. And in the end you don't even come close to preparing for 0.1% of the possibilites.

So on one end you are mercilessly sacrificing gameplay for complexity to the point where the game devolves into manual reading. And on the other hand the complexity is never going to be enough.

Maybe in the future AI Networks will be able to come up with convicing game-systems like in dwarf fortress on the fly to offer an illusion of complex emergent behaviour.

They deserve all the money they will get from their game. I am really happy for them, they allowed us to play DF for free for so long that I would not be mad if the sell price on steam was higher. DF is an awesome game and I hope they continue to improve it and to add content.

Good job guys !

Worth noting that in the Steam store it says Windows only right now. (no Penguin/Linux yet)

Yah I just looked today..

Has anyone heard? If it were Linux I would buy it now..

I've been playing on Linux. Both on desktop and my Steam deck. Runs fine under Proton.

Sweet!

It's low GPU / high CPU, so it should be a ripe candidate for Wine and friends..

Works great on Proton!

Thanks, I have been on Linux for 10+ years but really haven't played much games yet, I did buy Portal on Steam for Linux ages ago. But, I hadn't heard of Proton until just now from you all! I guess I'll go see how to get that up and running.

Another long-time linux user here: During the pandemic I finally decided to get a little bit more into gaming and figured I'll try it on linux to see if it'll work and if nothing else, the technical challenge would be fun.

Fortunately I like games after all, because there wasn't any real challenge to getting things working the wine/proton folks have done A LOT to make this stuff just work. I play overwatch and other AAA titles on my linux box just fine.

I still haven't looked this up yet, so is Wine now Proton? Can you share the history here?

Proton is Valves fork of Wine with optimisations made specifically for playing games.

Proton is built into Steam for linux and should "just work" with any game purchased through Steam. It's also possible to use proton like standard Wine and run any Windows application outside of Steam.

A few years ago Valve integrated Wine directly into Steam under the name Proton, and started some serious development work on it. As a result you can now play thousands of Windows games on Linux by just clicking "play" in Steam and maybe a bit of tweaking now and then. Years later Valve recently launched the Steam Deck which makes use of all this.

It's not perfect, of course, many games still don't work at all, but if you only know Wine you will be surprised how much better the compatibility and experience is now.

I'm glad others have answered because I didn't know (and to my point above, it's good enough that i don't have to know!)

I'm a happy user of Proton. You can even make non-steam applications run with it, by just creating a launcher for them in Steam. Also neat that you can have, and switch easily between multiple Proton versions, if the application misbehaves.

Looks like it runs just fine under Proton, at least: https://www.protondb.com/app/975370

Woebetide same who takes protondb at face value, I use it as a source of debugging tips because I have no idea how Wine/Windows work, but you've gotta dig into the reports is my experience.

It should be coming to Linux and Mac once they figure out the packaging.

Ooh, is this a "matter of weeks" thing? Is there a post on this the curious can follow?

"Sometime in 2023" according to https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/975370/view/36316205...

Works great on Proton so: 6 hours in with ~20 dwarfs and decent automated production

Do you also experience mouse input lag? My input is constantly dropped. Test drawing ("free-hand" mode) a line of mining quickly. Are any squares missing?

I'm getting some input lag on Linux, via Proton, but I just pause the game and it gets snappy again. That's been working for me so far.

I get input lag in Windows around 100-150 dwarves. It feels like the GUI not registering clicks, but since the GUI is a separate thread on top of DF it's possible that events are simply lost if a step of the simulation takes a long time. E.g. the selection box will keep running underneath the autosave window or complex world events (migrants, beasts, caravans, season changes), and I think I'd rather have that then random buffered events all playing at once, but certainly GUI integration could be improved a bit.

I'm getting occasional (maybe every 3 squares?) dropped input in the free-hand mode and sometimes the box draw mode gets "stuck" in the same spot.

Using Proton I have mouse input lags when the time is running. So, I pause the game to draw complex things. I hope the Linux version will be reased soon. And I hope they hire somebody to implement multithreading.

Lots of talk about the financials here, so I thought people might be interested in this financial simulator I've been working on.

Here's a very simple scenario that I set up to forecast Tarn and Zach's windfall:

https://thetortoise.io/shared-scenario/72ff9de5d4f64a408f83c...

I just set it up with an initial $4m balance and a 100k annual drawdown. It uses some fairly standard market assumptions and is all in real terms.

Feel free to experiment with it, and always happy to get feedback!

I'm super happy for them. When they've got this version available off of Windows, I'll contribute some more to their, uh, new reality.

100% well deserved. I'm disappointed that there's no Mac release yet, but I'm sure it will come. As soon as it does, I'll be switching from the Patreon brigade to paid-for on Steam.

I love Dwarf Fortress, and I'm delighted that this labour of love has paid off for them.

Congrats to the guys but my selfish hope is this helps spur some life back in to the Real Time Strategy genre -- so good news even if you aren't in to DF per se.

People are making a lot of assumptions about the finances of the publishing deal with Kitfox

Really happy for these guys. I've loved this game for 15 years.

Hopefully they don't go the way of Notch and spiral out of control

people like complex games as opposed to tunnel runners. and no AAA studio can compete with what dwarf fortress got.

People like both. If you think about it, books, music and film are linear too. There's nothing wrong with being entertained by a story, but I too find it fascinating to see how indie developers push gaming as a medium.

Please don't pull a notch, please don't pull a notch...

Notch took orders of magnitude less time for orders of magnitude more money. I think they're safe.

Put on your https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moishe_Postone hat and the time portion is especially key here.

I do not get your Moishe Postone reference either. What does it mean?

His most famous book, Time, Labor and Social Domination, is not the clearest writing to say the least, but really dumb basic idea is that the downside of work during capitalism are less "boss mean" than the rat race / treadmill of more hours, more deadlines etc.

Whatever you say about the Dwarf Fortress creators, one thing that is clear is that they hopped way the fuck off that treadmill. Money gave Notch a "rush" (pun very much intended!) but the Adam's brothers were clearly in no rush.

I think that means this success will not get to their heads. He who was never running won't trip.

Thank you for this very clear explanation!

What do you mean? I don't get the reference.

Notch is the dude who built Minecraft and then sold it to Microsoft for a billion dollars.

Because no one explained. Notch made Minecraft and at one point was making £300k a minute in sales. After a few years of very intense life changing profits he eventually sold Minecraft for £4B and turned into a bit of a weirdo largely blamed on his sudden rise in wealth.

If you read his blog you'd understand there was a lot of subtlety and complex relationships and emotions, but the gist is that.

I was just thinking that myself, and wrote about it 5 days ago! But I have a lot more faith in the Adams brothers than my misplaced faith in Notch, who was inspired by Dwarf Fortress to make Minecraft.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33907092

DonHopkins 5 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft ...

Years ago when Minecraft was new, I used to really respect and admire and root for Markus Persson because of his work, but then he opened his mouth, showed the world who he really was, lost all my respect, and totally disgusted me. It would have been so easy for him to just keep his big mouth shut, count and spend all his money, and retain all the hard earned respect and admiration that so many people including myself had for him, but then we would have been delusionally admiring a truly terrible Q-Anon supporting, GamerGate promoting, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, racist bigot, who called video game developer and feminism supporter Zoë Quinn a "cunt".

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." – Maya Angelou

Oh course he tried to walk back some of his worst tweets, but what kind of person tweets that kind of shit in the first place? I believe what he showed about himself the first time, not his pathetic attempt at damage control.

So I guess it's better that we all now know what kind of a horrible person Notch really is thanks to his own words, so we're not wasting our money, energy, and respect on somebody who certainly doesn't deserve it. Let him serve as an anti-hero for exposing other bigots who choose to carry his water and show everyone who they really are by defending him.

I'd much rather spend my money and admiration on wholesome deservingly beloved game developers like Tarn and Zach Adams, who've worked so hard and creatively on Dwarf Fortress, and are decent human beings who totally deserve to reap the benefits of their fine dedicated work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarn_Adams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#Controversial_v...

Markus Persson: Controversial views

Persson has received criticism for political and social opinions he has expressed on social media since around 2017. Many of his comments have seen by others as misogynistic, racist, and homophobic.[52] He claimed feminism was a "social disease", and called video game developer and feminism supporter Zoë Quinn a "cunt".[53][54] He took offence to gay pride celebrations, asserting there should be heterosexual pride days and stating that opponents to his ideas "deserve to be shot".[54][55] After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now."[56] Persson said in social media that "It's okay to be white"[57] and that he believed privilege is a "made up metric".[58] He has promoted claims that people are fined for "using the wrong pronoun".[52] Persson has also faced criticism for tweeting in support of QAnon, stating that "Q is legit. Don't trust the media."[59]

In March 2019, a Minecraft update removed all mentions of Persson from the game's menu, though his name is still in the credits.[60] Microsoft did not explain this action, but its timing led multiple news outlets to conclude it was related to the controversies associated with him.[60][61] Persson was not invited to the game's tenth anniversary event later in 2019, with Microsoft saying that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang".[52][62]

[52] "Minecraft creator Notch unwelcome at 10th anniversary due to online conduct". Ars Technica. 29 April 2019. Retrieved 6 November 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/online-conduct-leaves...

[53] Bonazzo, John (13 June 2017). "Minecraft Creator Tells Women on Twitter 'Act Like a Cunt, Get Called a Cunt'". Observer. Archived from the original on 19 August 2019. Retrieved 18 June 2019.

https://observer.com/2017/06/minecraft-gamergate-markus-pers...

[54] Kane, Vivian (29 April 2019). "Minecraft's Creator Excluded From the Game's 10th Anniversary Due to Racist, Sexist, Transphobic Comments". The Mary Sue. Archived from the original on 16 May 2019. Retrieved 18 June 2019.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516071226/https://www.thema...

[55] "Minecraft creator Notch unwelcome at 10th anniversary due to online conduct". Ars Technica. 29 April 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/online-conduct-leaves...

[56] Morris, David Z. (2 July 2017). "Minecraft Creator Sparks Cries of Homophobia". Fortune. Time Inc. Archived from the original on 3 December 2017. Retrieved 3 December 2017.

http://fortune.com/2017/07/02/minecraft-markus-persson-homop...

[57] Crecente, Brian (29 April 2019). "'Minecraft' Creator Excluded From Anniversary Due to 'Comments and Opinions' (Exclusive)". Variety. Archived from the original on 17 June 2020. Retrieved 25 July 2019.

https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/minecraft-creator-exclu...

[58] "The Creator of 'Minecraft' Tweeted Some Dumb Stuff About Race". GQ. Archived from the original on 25 July 2019. Retrieved 25 July 2019.

https://www.gq.com/story/notch-whiteness-tweets

[59] "From Q-Anon to transphobia, the creator of 'Minecraft' has takes". Newsweek. 11 March 2019. Retrieved 17 June 2022.

https://www.newsweek.com/minecraft-notch-controversy-twitter...

[60] Thubron, Rob (28 March 2019). "Microsoft removes references to game creator Notch in latest Minecraft update". TechSpot. Archived from the original on 4 February 2020. Retrieved 31 March 2020.

https://www.techspot.com/news/79403-microsoft-removes-refere...

[61] Lanier, Liz (28 March 2019). "Some References to 'Minecraft' Creator Notch Removed From Game". Variety. Archived from the original on 7 June 2020. Retrieved 31 March 2020.

https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/notch-removed-minecraft...

[62] Arif, Shabana (29 April 2019). "Minecraft creator Notch won't be included in the game's 10 year anniversary event". VG247. Archived from the original on 29 April 2019. Retrieved 29 April 2019.

https://www.vg247.com/2019/04/29/minecraft-creator-notch-abs...

Ten years ago (exactly, remarkably) Notch wrote about his father on his old blog.

I think it's a beautiful, sad, human piece of writing. It's hard to find online, now that his blog ("The Word of Notch") went away. Someone made a 500+ page PDF backup of his blog, here:

https://habrador.itch.io/the-word-of-notch

The post, titled "I love you, dad", is the second to last post.

Making beautiful things doesn't make up for saying horrible things. Still, every time I used to hear about the awful stuff Notch posted, I remembered how I felt about him when I read about him and his dad.

I just wish things didn't have to be so awful, for everyone.

Unnecessary tangent.

Need to run macOS

Site unreadable due to ads.

You care about that enough to complain, but you don't have an adblocker? I don't see any ads.

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

I hope they can handle this unlike Notch (Minecraft) - reckoned becoming a billionaire overnight ruined his life.

It looks more like it showed that he's an asshole to entirety of the world. Ruining he did of his own

I heard he gave millions of dollars to his dev team. What did he do wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson

There is a Controversial Views section

He said some pretty awful stuff about race and gender on Twitter.

No he didn't.

He said he found gay pride parades offensive, suggested that there should be hetero parades in response, and then said that anyone that disagrees with him should be shot. He's certainly entitled to his opinions on being offended by pride parades, but suggesting those that don't agree should be shot certainly crosses the line.

That is just one example. He also has been very anti-trans.

Here's some stuff I found.

> In 2017, he voiced his support for Gamergate, an alt-right and sexist movement that largely targeted women, LGBTQ, and other minority groups in the industry. At the time, he referred to feminism as a “social disease,” claiming on Twitter that feminists were “overtly sexist against men.” At one point, Persson said that anyone who opposed “heterosexual pride day” should be “shot” and also tweeted “It’s okay to be white” after claiming groups pushing for more diversity and calling out white supremacy were being racist against white people.

> Persson followed that up just a few days later with a series of transphobic comments in which he suggested that trans men and women were “mentally ill.”

Aside from the thing about "should be shot", which is stupid, I agree with a lot of those takes from him. Heterosexual day is cringe though just like homosexual day is. His Q comments were cringe too, aside from his related comments telling people they shouldn't trust the media.

In other words he's just a normal person who holds views everyone in the world held until 5 minutes ago.

> In other words he's just a normal person who holds views everyone in the world held until 5 minutes ago.

You're either being disingenuous or live in a very small information bubble, because the majority of the world never held those opinions in the entire history of the planet.

The majority of the world held those opinions for the entire history of the planet. In fact, the majority of the world still does. On the topic of bubbles, maybe western liberalism isn't as ubiquitous as it feels from within.

I disagree with his opinion too, but he's not lying. The majority of the world has and still does hold those opinions. The world is still very anti-LGBT outside of the western culture bubble. And even in countries that are westernized, they are often still anti-LGBT even if their governments and media are pushing people not to be.

It's a very sad state of affairs. I mean, just 16 years ago I was marching for the right for gay people to get married in the US. We've come a long way but there is a long way to go.

Do you seriously believe that? Your comment is incredible euro/western centric. Wildly so, too. Especially w.r.t LGBTQ rights. (Not saying I agree with notch, just completely disagree with your point about the majority).

Yep, I don't agree with his views but I don't think they're such a big deal. If that's his opinion then, so what really. No need for anyone to get so riled up about it. I'm sure we're all mature enough to tolerate differences in belief.

"Should be shot" is not just stupid, it's hateful. The regime where you kill for holding opinion is authoritarianism.

The other comments of his don't look like they mean much, but only if you look at them at a surface level, which with human communications, you basically never should. Context matters a lot, and the context of his messages is not a world where people get fair treatment, but a world full of issues. "Homosexual day" might sound random, or unwarranted, if you're not familiar with the issues of queer folk, but they are still not safe in the world, despite decades of social advancements.

Finally, being "normal", or belonging to a majority, doesn't make something morally valid. Because the majority is also comprised of individuals, humans, they can also fail, and they can, and can be made, to fail on a major scale as well.

got caughtup in the gamergate/qanon drama and it's all downhill from there

imo once you lose your anchors to reality and social media becomes your world your mind is gone there's just so much contradiction and noise

Burned some bridges in personal relationships and then went deep into qanon stuff.

Had the wrong opinions.

Just curious - what was the evidence for this before the success? I don't think people are really built to handle that much power over other people, seems like anyone that gets that much money goes down basically the same path:

- Vastly different wealth makes you unable to relate to normal people

- You have to justify that somehow to yourself and maybe others

- The easiest answer is that you're successful because you deserve it and that means other people also deserve their relative failure

- Resentment builds and you treat people differently because you see them as both failing and deserving of their failure, instead of through the lens of luck that would take away all the ego credit you built up from your perceived success

This happens in pretty much every category - top athletes think they trained harder, executives think they have a better business mind, etc. Seems like artists are the most likely ones to realize that they just got lucky and can't really claim much credit. There was a great article from the creator on the end poem in Minecraft recently about this - they literally wrote the poem but attributed it to luck/god/muses/pick-your-magical-force so didn't feel justified in claiming the royalties even though they could sue Microsoft for a DMCA violation on every copy of the game sold

Just like Elon - he has always been a racist and homophobic douche but being a billionaire rather amplified it.

Unnecessary tangent.

And we are all thankful that Minecraft team is now in the safe hands of Microsoft and not Notch - it seems he was always an arsehole but it was overlooked and also forgiven because of his most wonderful creation.

Kind reminds me of Tesla and it's CEO - starry eyed you can be but he revealed himself to be a racist homophobe.

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