This article is sensationalizing a non-issue. It reads like the author went to the convention with the story already written and then tried (and failed) to find people that supported the premise.

As someone who attended GDC for the full week this year, I can tell you that not a single conversation I had or panel I attended discussed the RAM shortage. I’m sure this topic arose in some circles, especially anything related to the timing or cost of next gen hardware. As a professional AAA game designer of 25 years and an occasional game director, this does not affect the way that the games themselves are made. Games on consoles already have their limitations, games on PC should always be (but not always are) optimized to work across a broad spectrum of hardware configurations, with the minimum spec being the lowest system possible without sacrificing playability.

Even people interviewed in the article are saying the same thing:

“Does this affect us? No,” Subotnick said. “We’re making games on as many platforms as we can to delight consumers. Could it impact us? Sure. If there’s less devices for people to get their hands on, then we potentially have less consumers to sell to. But right now, I’d argue that there are plenty of consumers with plenty of devices for us to sell these games to. Where it could impact us is, sure, we will have to make decisions around next-gen platforms when they tell us that it’s time to bring content to them. And if they are threatened to have a total addressable market that is viable from a business standpoint, sure that’s a business challenge. But right now all I’d be doing is speculating on a bunch of hypotheticals.”

My partner got a pair for work when they first came out (her job involves creating social media content). I was impressed by the speakers and it’s the same style of sunglasses that I normally wear daily, so I got a pair for myself. It was so nice to be able to listen to stuff and take calls without carry around headphones or putting them in when the phone rang. I was already uncomfortable with the association with meta, but was able to isolate that aspect at first. As they continued to add features, I’ve started being less comfortable with them. I accidentally left them somewhere a couple months ago and decided not to replace them. It’s such a bummer that all the cool tech is now not just spying on you, but on everyone around you. Fuckin capitalism ruins everything.

I’m guessing this is the non-specific way of saying Limbo-like.

Investors are not required to form an indie studio, in the case where every team member of that studio has some means to pay their own rent/mortgage, bills, and feed themselves for the entire duration of the project. If you’re in the US, you’ll also need to figure out how you’re paying for health insurance. This could be a passion project in addition to a day job, but coordinating work/life balance in that scenario with multiple team members is exponentially difficult.

Money adds up quick. Let’s use some round numbers and say you want to hire a team with some experience (those folks that just got laid off and are looking for work). Let’s say everybody on the team costs the project $100k/year in salary & benefits. Let’s just imagine that includes costs a normal employer would pay: insurance premiums, IT hosting costs, all the little stuff. Note, this is underpaying people with more than 5 years experience who live in California (where many game dev studios are based). Let’s say you can get the game made in one year with everybody starting on day one and ending on ship day, exactly 365 days later. People will be wearing multiple hats, but let’s be general.

• 1x Gameplay Programmer
• 1x 3D Artist (general modeler)
• 1x 2D Artist (general texture artist)
• 1x Game Designer (Camera/Controls/Combat)
• 1x Audio Designer

$500k

Expanding that team:

• 1x Animator
• 1x Character Artist
• 1x Environment Artist
• 1x Prop Artist
• 1x VFX Artist
• 1x Lighting Specialist
• 1x Tools Programmer
• 1x Render/Optimization Programmer
• 1x Level Designer
• 1x Narrative Designer

$1.5M

That’s a 15 person studio, where people are still wearing multiple hats like UI, Music, IT, Testing, other things I’m forgetting about. This isn’t anywhere close to a AAA sized team of 100+ people.

This is also assuming you can stick to a STRICT time schedule. In reality you’re probably going to need a very small team at the start and not grow until you finish prototyping, then again once you’ve done a vertical slice.

Anyway. This post got real long. The gist of it is the people making the game need that money to live. There should be space in the industry to make a game with a team this size, paying your employees something close to what the big studios pay them. Getting that kind of money has been incredibly difficult these past few years.

Amy Hennig is great, but what? Are you saying Uncharted 1-3 is the whole PlayStation brand identity?

10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:

• friends/family/classmates
• developers on the actual game
• multiple Steam accounts with the same owner

10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.

I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn’t a problem for those developers.

I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don’t yet have a following, and can’t afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.

Indie has always been a way to define a category for creators without access to the same amount of money that publishers had historically provided. Now publishers are both no longer needed to release a game and are very rarely taking chances on original games from first time developers.

We’ve gotta figure out some rules for what “indie” means. E33 is a great game, but that budget is estimated to be least $20 million. How many small teams are not being honored because a spot is being taken up by a game that has the same budget as a small AAA project?

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It’s not just the obsoleteness of it, it’s the fact that any device that is on the other end of the TV’s HDMI cable would need to be actively routing internet traffic into the HDMI connection. What device would do that? Any device that’s using the TV as output for itself has no reason to also include network access.

It’s not the team that made Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s the same publisher that also published Thank Goodness You’re Here. That’s the equivalent of two different streaming shows that are both exclusive to the same service.

It’s not. There’s no gameplay here. It’s just streaming weird content.

They didn’t make “back” money, they’re just making money. His friends are the ones telling him to say insane shit that drives the market (or specific targeted stocks like Apple) down, then they buy while it’s low. After a few days/weeks, he changes his mind/can’t enforce his nonsense and the stock goes back up, his friends sell and have nothing but profit. The majority of the shit he does is market manipulation to benefit himself and anyone riding his coattails.

Such a good series. It continues to weird me out that this is the same studio that went on to make Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor/War.

The commercial itself didn’t feature the shirt or any nazi imagery. It was a 30 second clip of Kanye in a dentists chair telling you to visit his website. It only aired in LA.

I don’t understand this timeline.

https://youtu.be/4eR--0vYHGc

As someone who doesn’t use TikTok and was under the impression that it was a young person’s game, I did not expect the “trend” involving a notoriously phallic vegetable to be a recipe.

Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.

After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.

I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I’m no longer as confident that I know what’s going on.

This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.