m3mnoch

ha! blu ray support? who cares about blu ray support?

it's a snore-fest vs. dvds: http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/wp-content/uploads...

whereas streaming passed purchased dvds... last year: http://www.screendigest.com/reports/2012222a/2012_03_online_...

and win8 runs your htpc? nice. other than you, i know no one who even has an htpc anymore (occasionally hooking their laptop to the tv doesn't count) and most of them (my non-geek friends) don't even know what that is.

everyone and their dog has a roku/apple tv/xbox/smart tv tho.

m3mnoch.

> the future is user-generated content

as a veteran of the "user-generated" game content industry, i can honestly say 5 years ago, i had that same vision. 5 years of blood, sweat, money and tears later, i can (also honestly) say -- that's not the case. and won't be.

for those of you who've never made (finished and shipped!) a game before, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. you have what would be called an mvp in ycombinator terms inside of a month. "i will crush the rest of this thing out 3 months and ship!" uh... no.

i'm here to tell you that is not the case. the whole "first 90%" vs. the "second 90%" thing is magnified 10-fold in games. it's a really long post for me to explain the myriad of gotchas involved from safely syncing game state between sleep-and-non-sleep-packets-suddenly-flood-in-but-omg-my-clock to btw-you-need-3-times-the-states-in-your-state-machine-oops to why-am-i-getting-3-fps-on-a-faster-device to all-of-the-above-times-multiplayer-exponentially. i plan on writing that post someday, but not now.

anyway.

the prototype flies off your finger tips and then the next 2 and a half years (please see the common thread of 3 years to make a game, from the movie indie gamer [highly recommended!] to that recent atomic brawl post) working through obscure bugs and corner cases because games have more complex interactions than non-games and gamers don't have a clue how to follow the damn happy path when they play.

so, yes. i said 1 month of fun, fast iterative prototype and 2 years of awful, in-the-weeds debugging where your strength of will to finish is tested daily. (insert rovio making 51 games before angry birds here) finishing a good game is goddamnhard. finishing a shitty game is a snap -- just ship your prototype!

what we found was that anyone who has the strength and perseverance to actually build and (more importantly) finish a game was already working in the game industry -- mostly because they possess a proven will to finish.

i guess what's i'm saying is lots of people can snap together sweet, use-with-care prototypes ugc-style. almost nobody -- and i really, really mean almost nobody, like 0.0001% of "i want to make a game" developers -- can actually finish and launch a game regardless of scope.

mind you -- i don't view indie games as ugc. if you ship (SHIP, not start) an indie game, you have what it takes to work in the non-indie game world. you just choose not to.

if you don't believe me, i challenge you to prove me wrong and just make a simple game this weekend and let your friends play it where you can watch, but not talk or help them at all. it will take approximately 12 seconds of them touching your game before you're completely "wtf -- how did that happen?!?!?" screwed.

m3mnoch.

i believe the sticking point between the two views is the very definition of what you are selling to customers. someone says product and half of us thing "app store download" and the other half think "custom software services".

if you're in the business of selling services -- prepare for the op's difficulties in a revenue-per-hour world.

if you're in the business of selling digital widgets -- you can work it to a point of relaxed maintenance where you only need to grow if you want to grow.

m3mnoch.

as both a professional and independent game developer, i take issue with this statement for a couple reasons.

1) this is a life-cycle thing. the game has only been released for 3 weeks and has no marketing budget (i assume since it's only sold a couple hundred copies). that means, it's still too early to tell if the piracy correctly acts as "free advertising" or not. grassroots advocacy is NOT overnight.

2) piracy has been proven over and over again NOT to lead to lost sales by objective measurements. anecdote? sure! everyone is getting completely screwed when you take in anecdote. for examples, just google "game piracy lost sales" and read things from industry news sites (techdirt, for example) to developers (notch as another example) on why that statement is a load of crap. or, alternatively, you can just check this research paper outlaying the data and methods (pdf warning!): http://www.mit.edu/~ke23793/papers/Drahchenetal_paperID16.pd...

basically, we, as a community should simply wait another 5 weeks (october 1st, maybe?), then ask the developer for a post mortem to see if they've only made another 350 sales or so. and when they say "whoa! we've exploded!", we can say "but i thought piracy stole all your sales."

m3mnoch.

amen and ditto on the occupation.

i suspect this probably has to do with a truism every programmer knows. there are really only 3 cases to solve for (not 11,868) -- one device, two devices or n devices.

m3mnoch.

"rapidly heading towards the limits of material strength"

indeed. tho, we should also note that we are looking at a weakest link thing. can that one bolt sustain that much pressure? or maybe that one weld? or any of the concrete parts that attach to the earth itself?

shrug

m3mnoch.

heh. slow down turbo. nobody's arguing that the execution on the iphone wasn't completely awesome.

that being said, i find it funny that you flippantly discard the number of phones with better specs in one breath, and then acknowledge them in the next. (despite them having shitty implementations)

i am totally entertained picturing you as a slavering apple fanboy raging at a hacker news thread. makes me giggle.

m3mnoch.

p.s. btw, using your number and a gsma.com estimated 500 new phone models per year, 5% of them that "have those specs" amounts to 25 phone models that had better specs than the iphone. just sayin'.

uh, no.

so, what you're telling me is your [i mean the royal 'you', not necessarily you you, anigbrowl] performance isn't as good as cd playback? people would rather listen to your cd than listen to you?

makes me think you should either 1) change careers or 2) get better.

see? the technology gets dumped on as a scapegoat. we all hear this. this case is no different.

the real issue? competition has moved back to the streets instead of in the promoter's office. you're still fighting to get heard. and you still have to be good. and you still have to be lucky. because these days, every tom, dick and harry can become "a musician" by putting out a cd. it's the same fight every creative industry is fighting right now. it's just that professional photographers don't really have a pandora to shake their fist at.

just be glad it's not the 16th century and the only way to earn money as a musician was to get commissions from nobility. the phrase "starving artist" exists for a reason.

m3mnoch.

ha! can a guy get a "hello fucking echo chamber!" up in here?

m3mnoch.

indeed. i am also equally sick of hearing this complaint. tho, it's for a different reason.

music is not a freakin' product, people. it's a service. musicians are PERFORMERS. outside of the last 60 years or so, there was no such thing as "selling music" where you're not talking about sheet music. musicians get paid for performing.

the last 60 years has been a music bubble. welcome to the correction.

m3mnoch.

nah. you can totally disable it with hardware: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jpMACMgKo2A/UaaIiPp3IvI/AAAAAAAAAP...

m3mnoch.

no. it's not flat. it's not beveled and skeuomorphic. it's splits the middle. that's always bad -- as our friend yoda says, "do, or do not."

ios 7 basically says "i can't decide what i want. i don't want to be all textured and stuff because flat is cool! but, i also don't want to go straight-up flat because then i lose all the affordance like metro did. hrm... i know! let's do a little of each!"

no, indeed. this will end poorly for apple.

m3mnoch.

"good programmers" and "good indie games" are not by any stretch of the imagination mutually inclusive. [insert made up stat where 9 out of 10 badass programmers don't have the creative umph to put out a fun game]

m3mnoch.

i started with "The Tyger" and got this:

  The Tyger
  William Blake
  Romanticism
  Industrial Revolution
  United Kingdom
  Britain (placename)
  Great Britain

shrug apparently, william blake is indisputable.

m3mnoch.

additionally, a large part of the problem stems from economic scarcity. digital goods are infinite while the cup of coffee at [insert your local non-starbucks coffee shop here] is a finite good.

when the average marginal cost drops to zero (due to all the usual bootstrapping-style content here on hn), so does the average price -- artificial scarcity won't alter that fact in the consumer's mind. so, it's really the value you perceive as coming from your infinite good that actually drives things like app pricing.

if the average price of an app is free and people are willing to pay $0.99 for your app, well, that's what it's worth. if you're not happy with that, push up the price and test out what the market will actually bear.

m3mnoch.

except for pricepoint. can you imagine buying songs for $0.25 apiece? or even $0.10! take the digital sales learnings from initiatives like the humble bundle and steam sales and $0.99 ebooks and just apply them.

i mean, with marginal costs being approximately zero, drop the prices by 4x and sell 10x.

better yet, let me subscribe to a service i love and give me EVERYTHING! imagine the chaos if the riaa got into the delivery business and rolled out a spotify clone -- but, globally. with their entire catalog. cats and dogs would indeed start living together.

m3mnoch.

> Why do opponents of IP rights keep saying it isn't stealing?

shrug

probably because it was ruled thus by the supreme court. so, i guess there's that...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3901205964610715...

m3mnoch.

no. there is absolutely a talent shortage.

as proven by 1) the fact that the percentage of of the general population who have an aptitude for "brainy things" in general is pretty much the exact same as it was 20 years ago and 2) the percentage of companies with a need for said people is growing exponentially as software eats the world.

basically, all of the new-need companies from point 2 are bottom-feeding all of the people from point 1 which applies upward pressure on the talent pool.

because a talented accountant-turned-programmer still leaves a hole that needs to be filled.

feelin' me?

m3mnoch.

or, you're thinking the support rep doesn't have the power to change the email address on the account.

m3mnoch.

really? so you guys think they are rigid enough with security and willing to do all that extra work in order to two-way encrypt the password (and credit card data, theoryetically) just so their $8 an hour customer support reps can decrypt it for you?

c'mon. really?

no. put my vote in the box marked 'plain text.'

m3mnoch.

this makes me wonder if music is about to be unlocked. all it really takes is for one of the majors to realize that music is a service and not a product and completely disrupt the music industry. similar to the monetization strategy of social games -- spend money chasing the people who will pay by giving them reasons to buy rather than throwing good money after bad by litigating against people who won't pay in trying to recoup some silly notion of a 'lost sale.'

then again... this is the self-destructive music industry we're talking about here.

"fast-paced environment" means getting shit done. it means rolling hard like facebook, google, zynga, groupon, etc. it means launching fast. it means getting feedback fast. it means failing fast. it means the exact opposite of the folks complaining about it who work at ibm or hp or microsoft or yahoo or aol. or worse yet, some hole-in-the-wall enterprise vendor inflating internal budgets and wallowing in mediocrity.

fast-paced to me means "if you can't keep up, don't step up."

regardless, if you have to ask, it's not a place for you to work.

m3mnoch.

no. there is no bubble.

that means there's nothing to pop. the first time around there was no plan for making money and there were hordes and hordes of companies throwing ridiculously expensive spaghetti at the wall to see if it stuck. everyone and their dog was filing for an ipo.

this time around?

there are relatively few companies with ridiculous valuations... and guess what? they're all making money. and tons of it. for god's sake, even twitter started turning a profit in '09. groupon? $800 million and more in annual revenue is a just fine pe ratio for their valuation. their financials make sense. people are paying for their services. and all those companies not making money yet are bootstrapping on next-to-nothing rather than taking on tons of investment.

it's different this time because it's not about the squishy-touchy-feely "we know better." you can't count on people knowing better. no, it's different because there's real revenue and real business models involved.

bubbles happen when there's no income to back wild speculation.

companies are offering percieved-as-valuable services and are getting paid for it.

they're primarily taking investment for expansion, not runway extension.

most of the money is from private investors instead of zillions of get-rich-hungry public speculators from an ipo.

i mean, it's only natural for information-based companies (instead of say... webvan) to go from 0-60 faster than we've ever seen in an environment where information is enabled to go from 0-60 faster than ever in recorded history.

things are fine, folks. back away from the stupid "bubble" panic button.

m3mnoch.

no. way.

seriously. i would have answered this question, with those same three things in that SAME ORDER! (LOVE my henckels!)

no really. have you been talking to my wife?

m3mnoch.

mmm... bacon.

really? do you alias any shell commands? by your rationale, that's totally useless and 'meh.'

it's simple: if you have any shell aliases, you are a hypocrite if you complain about this being just that.