1,157 karma · joined April 17, 2022
I'm creating Metropolis 1998, a 2D city builder/simulation video game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
I'd argue throwing a game wrapper around an LLM is a new LLM experience, not a new game experience.
Physicians were (one of the) first LLMs (in terms of functionality).
Their job is to handle common cases, and have broad enough knowledge to point you in the right direction as needed
I’m speaking from experience and it’s explained somewhere on howtomarketagame.com
That is debatable. For one thing, Steam is partly (mostly?) built off the backs of games marketing their games and providing a Steam link (marketing costs money for the devs). Steam kick started this chicken/egg problem by creating their own great games first.
Second, Steam does not provide your game any marketing (algorithmic visibility) unless it's already successfully marketed outside of Steam (marketing is not free), and again later once it hits a certain number of sales.
Third, per Tim Sweeney, games during the retail era had a bigger margin for the the studios than they do today [1]
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_NC1ZskeN47LHaYJziotbA0sqL...
edit: So I do feel a little upset that Steam gets free marketing for every game put on the site (important note you can (and should in most cases) place your game up on the site long before its ready to purchase, and steam will advertise other games on your page), doesnt provide any marketing in return (via the discovery queue) unless you bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of clicks, and then turns around and skims 30% of all my work which they are greatly benefiting from (e.g. what if the customer goes to my page, wish lists my game, then purchased a different game in the mean time? At least e.g. amazon has referral links)
Great place to stream cartoons and anime for free, no account. It feels like they have almost everything, as I found anime as far back as the 1970s on there.
When I discovered Food Wars was split between two streaming platforms, I hoisted the sails.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
[2] (I'm the dev)
I've been developing a city builder game "Metropolis 1998" [1] for over 3 years. My life has been constantly pulled in two or more different directions (e.g. creativity/artistic expression vs. logic/software). Most of the time the environments that allow these forces to thrive are incompatible with each other.
Since working on my game, I've been in a happy place where I get to go full throttle on both of those. I've created my own engine and I am designing the game, directing the art, handling sound design, marketing, UI, UX, environment design, etc, etc.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
My Steam page is perpetually far behind the current state of development: https://x.com/YesboxStudios
>Think about all that's happened since 2009 when I started: multiple presidential administrations, a global pandemic, zero interest rates, and now high inflation and higher interest rates. My investments have had to withstand all of these shifts, and many didn't make it through.
Really interesting stuff (for me, as an outsider).
Can anyone comment if VCs are looking for shorter fund cycles or are the macro economic shifts what's capping it at 10 years?
I once read one reason why startups take so long to IPO is so private investments can benefit longer from the growth
Source (Page 48): https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
Im really curious what Meta/Apple/Microsoft are predicting for the future
>Generally, the economics of these 30% platform fees are no longer justifiable. There was a good case for them in the early days, but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee.
>If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter UA or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990's.
>We know the economics of running this kind of service because we're doing it now with Fortnite and Paragon. The fully loaded cost of distributing a >$25 game in North America and Western Europe is under 7% of gross.
Full email: [1]
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_NC1ZskeN47LHaYJziotbA0sqL...
Can you recommend some other similar artists??
The music is minimalistic at first ear, but the tension and release caused by the slightly out of tune notes [2] is really pleasant IMO.
[1] https://kalimalone.bandcamp.com/track/all-life-long-for-orga...
[2] Out of tune to equal temperament, which is what nearly all modern music western music uses.
Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)
Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts
Your comment brought back my memory of watching this CBS mini-documentary comparing school lunches in France vs USA from years ago. Enjoy!
Nintendo isn't an American company, and Japanese have different cultural values (with tradeoffs)
> If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries
Im not so confident about that. For most games, you launch it once, and you get the vast majority of the revenue within one year of release. Then the next game has to be better (and cost more) than the last. I think it has less to do with short term profits (games take years to develop).
> AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
> The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero;
You lose 30% of that to the storefront, 30% on marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. (fun fact: the profit margin of games were higher in the 90s) [1]
> Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
No it isn't. Not when people's expectations continue to rise.
[0] https://www.gamedevmap.com
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_NC1ZskeN47LHaYJziotbA0sqL...
While there are some success, there are also some failures--all across the cost scale. WB games were making $XXX,XXX,XXX games, and just had to shut down 3 studios and cancel a game.
Lots of other examples (Anthem, Concord, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin to name a few)
That record revenue is used to fund the next game, which is almost always more expensive than the last.
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
All that said: A hit based industry is not one that provides stability. I cant think of how slapping a union on top of an unstable foundation is going to solve anything. I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
There isn't really a solution to this. Market pressure keep the prices of games down. Funding gets a better bang for buck by investing in up and coming countries (e.g. Poland). Most qualified[1] games don't even break a million. Hitting [just!] $150,000 in revenue is when Steam starts seriously promoting your game[2]. $150K is not even enough to live in a coastal city (after dev. costs), never mind hiring people.
[1] The dev had the intent to market _and_ sell a legitimate product, which is the minority of games on steam.
[2] howtomarketagame.com
1.) Grab many GBs of text (books, etc).
2.) For each word, for each next $N words, store distance from current word, and increment count for word pair/distance.
3.) For each word, store most frequent word for each $N distance. [a]
4.) Create a prediction algorithm that determines the next word (or set of words) to output from any user input. Basically this would compare word pairs/distance and find most probable next set of word(s)
How close would this be to GPT 2?
[a] You could go one step further and store multiple words for each distance, ordered by frequency
>Games can be a good business, I know my studio is
If you dont mind sharing, how many people do you employ/long term contract with? "Games can be a good business" is entirely subjective to the studio's goals. So I guess I'm wondering: is your goal to stay solo+/micro/indie, or are you planning to grow with each successive game? And how big?
Sustainability is something I've been thinking about a lot recently[0]. I'm relatively close to launching Metropolis 1998, which falls squarely in a long tail genre (if done right)[1]. I'd love to build up a studio, in office, and along the way figure out what's the right headcount for my goals.
Whiskerwood looks neat btw. Good luck on the game. I'd love to hear why you chose to go with a publisher this time around? Was it an affordable luxury :P ? Marketing, community management, localization can be a PITA, but it's entirely possible to do even at solo scale.
[0] It is not cheap to operate a game studio that employs local people in the USA. It's frustrating because the COL in the mid west is <= 70% cheaper than the coastal cities (where the vast majority of studios are). There's a lot of cheap land where the industry could be to make art/games a lot more comfortably (ignoring the fact that N% people dont want to live there, which is valid if that's not what they want)
[1] Many people play Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999), SimCity 4 (2003), and the original City Skylines (2015) today. steamdb.info, OpenRCT, subreddit activity, etc.
Shoot me an email if you dont want to respond here?
City Skylines 2 is a good accessible example (even though it's made with Unity). Via mods, editing a single property takes several hours to make it look amazing. Time is spent adding texture decals, doodads, importing new textures, and playing around with the texture geometry (e.g. adjusting the grassy area size).
It seems like this depth of detail requires exponential time investment on the devs part. Small wonder CS2 launched with very few building options?