ulasbilgen

There’re are some difference between a codec or OS with a game engine. One is the user base. I think there’re simply not enough game developers to extensively use the open source engines, every single computer needs an OS and in most cases needs a codec. But not everyone is a game developer. Another one is requirements I guess. For OS and codecs, I think the requirements are much more defined and manageable, but for a game engine the user uses it to create something else, hence the capabilities needed from the game engine may change wildly per project.

Well there's no need for an elaborate scheme like this, certainly no need for video. The buyer gives a paper ballot that's already marked for Dr. Evil, and asks the vote seller to bring back the empty paper ballot to get paid. It's that simple :( and being done in the places which still uses paper ballots.

Soul Searching is a narrative game, that you take a journey to find yourself. It's one of the best indie games I played for sometime now.

Very good point :) Btw here're some facts for the original game and pirating it. I think First Samurai was one of the most pirated Amiga game ever. Just after the game published Robert Maxwell passed away and the publisher Mirrorsoft changed hands. Because of this the game was not really available in the stores, despite the fact that it was the game of the year. So basically it got pirated quite a lot because that was the only way getting the game :)

I have very fond memories of First Samurai, hope this campaign will succeed :)

Hello, Thanks for sharing your project with HN. I have couple of questions. - Do you have any usage statistics, or at least Beta signups? - How is your service different from Zeplin (Which is a YC Startup) and Avocode?

You put it in a much better way :) As you said it's about investing in games, but expecting to create a financially successful game on the first try is kinda unrealistic. So I think the better plan is to invest in a team that has a methodolgy to build games that have chance to be financially successfull, and let them build and test at least 5-6 games. This is like a startup pivoting and trying to find the product market fit. In gaming business this confirmation is quite straightforward, you do limited play testing for a prototype, and decide if you'll continue develop the game according to test results. If you do continue to develop, you release the game for soft launch with limited features and limited marketing budget. If the game has enough retention, you have a game that can become financially successfull. The studio follows this procedure and iterare till finds a game market fit :)

I think Zynga might not be a good example, in my opinion it's a company that doesn't care about their customers enough. Any company takes that road will face the similar results. I'm not exactly sure if it's a market with low margins also, with mobile phones, cheaper PCs and more accessable consoles the gaming business is getting bigger. In every business there're big players, but look at SuperCell, in 3 years they were valued more than 4 Billion, actually SoftBank bouth 51% of Supercell for 2.1B. Wargaming, Riot Games are the other examples. I think we still couldn't figure out how to iterate quickly and find winning games, like we did in lean startup model. As an example you can manage to develop a game and do a soft launch to see the retention values for under 50K USD, talking about mobile games. So with a very basic calculation a small studio can iterate through 8-9 games with 500K USD investment, and I think optimizing these iterations are also possible.

Is there any specific reason that there're not much YC companies working on gaming? I can only assume that the gaming startups maybe seen as less predictable than the tech ones, but seeing all entreprenourship and indie gaming booming and they're not meeting, makes me wonder.

My opinion is that nobody yet able to crack the gaming funding as YC did for tech startups.

I really don't understand the content owners still insisting on this whole location based licensing shenanigan :( They should have to let people to pay money to them, so the users will not pirate their content.