dsirijus

Exactly. It's about non-delusional financial projections and transparency of business leadership. So, management.

None in 3 years running. I'm doing my financial projections well. There could be some drastic cuts during the rest of this year, but absolutely everyone in the company is aware of that. We have 3 games due release pretty soon, and if only one is even moderately successful, I'll keep everyone running by me.

I came close to firing one, but we've managed to find a consensus and we drastically reassesed him and reassigned his responsibilities within the projects/company. It was a good decision - he's probably the most productive person on the team now.

Of course. There's a bit of delusional idea that games are somehow sustainable business model (admiteddly, they _are_ for some genres).

But, yes, that's the nature of business. This, to me, is a bit like complaining how war-time journalists don't get to spend enough time with their families and are at life risk. It's the biz, and, I'm sorry to be slightly verbally violent, get tougher skin or gtfo. Plenty of sustainable software/design/management roles in various spheres for you if you can't take it.

This relates only to a particular type of games - the ones that are shipped and forgot, or the ones that need minimum upkeep costs. So, perfectly understandable, and this is (almost) analogous to complaining why some hotel staffs 30 during winter instead of 100 people during the summer season.

As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game.

I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees, the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a frequent occurence.

As a side note - you've single-handedly destroyed the layout of this article's comment page with this magnet link.

MailChimp redirects to Designer Chat instead of The Hacker News Chat.

Just unrelated addendum to Fortumo - they enable developers from countries where Google Merchant account is not available to charge for in-app purchases on Play Store.

We'll be using it in two of our upcoming games.

There's game companies doing very profitably whose basic business model is - localization. [1] Word games work easiest for this case.

Localizing international game is also a non-trivial task (especially from western to asian markets), but it can easily lead to ten-folding your profits. [2] [3]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo

[2] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/And...

[3] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Saf...

Looks like something that could be modeled with some cellular automata rule.

I resent your "working brain" allusion and, while I do have plenty of counter-arguments to your statements, I'll just walk away. <- That's how I cope.

That only changes strategy of how money goes into politics. In your scenario, the focus will most likely be on "building a politician" before the actual nominations and office runnings, boosting his popularity before his public announcement to go into politics even comes to table, ending up with a lot more Terminator governers.

You can't take money out of it.

There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future.

I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell?

If so, how do you cope?

So what?

Do one for the money, the second for the show, third to get ready, and then make proper games. That's exactly what I'm doing now. Quite literally.

I can't wait to start doing games I'd like to play! Just few more months.

I tried first plain views (shouted it out really, to anyone), then per install (went from table to table).

But no A/B testing, it wasn't a buzzword back then really.

You don't have to like to respect.

I approve!

Five Mother's Days ago, I paid for beverage of their choosing to all local bar patrons who phoned or even just sent SMS to their respective mothers that night.

Horrible conversion rate! <20%. People are just silly sometimes.

That is fully my perception of it too. I really don't know why Valve is frequently so lauded as game-changer. They're just another store. With particulary shitty terms.

Discovery on Steam is a bit better than on mobile stores, I give them that.

I held greenlighting thing in high regard, but these days a lot of crap gets greenlighted so, meh.

I think the main issue here is that people don't clearly delineate making games from making money.

You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen.

You wanna make money off that? You gotta wade through all kinds of shit, as is usual in most businesses. And before someone mentions Minecraft - it is such an outlier that it's not usable as argument in any discussion.

I don't subscribe to the self-entitled tone of the article that making games in itself is something virtuous and should be basically subsidized. I love Koster though, Theory of Fun for Game Design is what made me really interested in game development.

Well, you do have a new unread mail now. :)

Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work.

I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.

We do, and I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking.

At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win.

Thinking out of the box like a boss.

My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor.

I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

I've always wondered - when synthetic meat becomes economically viable, and animal rights come even closer to human, will we end up in much greater need systematically controlling most animal populations? What are we going to do with all those caracases? Feed the poor?

Mostly single-hand maneuverability of device, is what I find most useful.

I'm pretty dexterous person with medium-sized hands, and weight and form factor of 4S allows me to easily fetch it from any side, flip it, access any button, and manipulate any point on screen while still keeping weight center in palm of my hand, not fingers or, god-forbid, fingertips.

I sort of could work with Samsung's SII, but SIII I couldn't tolerate.

Well, as another data point, I used big-ass android and switched to 4S and found it to be much more appropriate size.

Ordered in 5S not 10 minutes ago, and I'm afraid it's not really gonna be better form factor.

I do find your "toylike" adjective appropriate. But I don't think that's neccesarily a critique.

Epilogue: Guess we're stuck with reading about ssh configs.

Or never-ending "Hey, ever heard about SSH config files!?". :D

Because the content really is hillarious, breaks the HN bubble a bit and is tightly related to this particular community.

To take that kind of joke badly shows immaturity and potentially some other psychological disorders, if one would try to ascribe them to community as opposed to individual.

If it were to remain unflagged this time around, I think it would show that HN is reaching some kind of social maturity.

Let's just wait and see.

previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4375342