daniyeg

not a game dev and we don't have a console/pc game industry here, but i'm friends with a mobile game developer in a third world game studio (targeting a local audience rather than an overseas audience which means ad revenue is going to be higher rather than micro transactions), and the best way i can summarize it is to compare it to a monkey experimenting to see where its own excrement could stick to.

their productivity is measured in games they can make per month, they have to monitor and see what shit could grab attention anywhere and replicate it as fast as they can. no creativity whatsoever and the gameplay must be preferably loopable so that it shows better in ads/you can automatically generate a crap ton of levels for more ad spots. on the slim chance that your game might have a whiff of story, working on anything besides a very basic premise (which serves its utility by being converted into direction for producing art assets) is time wasted on not working on the next game.

the result is what you expect, word games tile matching games and those basic infinite games where there's a ball jumping on platforms and its jumps are synced to a basic loop that can be made (and has been made) in FL studio in 5 minutes but is somehow broken into levels (for the aforementioned ad spots). if someone is bold enough they try their hand on making another supercell clone (which almost instantly fails because somehow clash of clans is still king after 12 years).

every two weeks they meet and see which 2 or 3 games are ok enough that they can polish, insert ads and micro transactions into and push onto the market. they change their name on marketplaces every couple of months so each studio name doesn't have more than 5 or 6 game on it. if a game gets successful enough (some idiot kids actually come back to it everyday) they assign one of the devs to it to milk it dry, basically pump out "content" and micro transaction and ads, until the audience leaves and they get back to making more games.

and this business model is barely profitable. the mobile gaming market has been already calcified by gambling companies that have made better and more addictive products which have hooked audiences onto themselves and won't let go. there was a golden window to grab a captive audience when smartphones were still relatively new, and that window has passed since at least the pandemic, and making money in a market where your audience is not willing to spend money on transactions is hard.

the anglophone mind cannot comprehend subtitles.

too many and i've just been awake for two hours.

yep that's how it was back then, good times. although i don't know anything about any technical university in tehran now the woke mullahs must have closed its doors because it was too racist against the turks. damn you wokenesssssss

a good rule of thumb i try to follow is don't make judgements based on numbers that you pulled out of your ass whole cloth.

eh just wanted to be funny. takes the edge off of the stress of the incoming war.

bruh are you a time traveller what you mean first there's gonna be a second one after this?

thanks, the previous generations went through a decade of war it's time to use their experience. one can only be hopeful things work out although i guess it's too late for that.

with the info we have it looks real enough. hopefully they don't start carpet bombing cause im gonna be dead otherwise, but it's israel we're talking about they have zero fucks to give. more imminently right now supplies are probably gonna run out since people are panicking. i can only hope for the best.

dude they can hang their own pictures of course it's gonna cost an arm and a leg.

wait until they ban that too with these ghouls you never know.

this will be an interesting example of the cobra effect though.

I'm interested in things. I'm not a real doctor, But I am a real worm, I am an actual worm. I live like a worm.