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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

ferratilis

Magister
Joined
Oct 23, 2019
Messages
2,224
Every big game engine has an interesting origin story behind it: Ron Gilbert wrote SCUMM because he thought it would be a waste of time to make an engine for only one game so he made a modular one that could be expanded based on needs which was revolutionary at the time (and we know how many classics LucasArts released thanks to this, not to mention how revolutionary iMuse was at the time), 90% of Unreal was written by Tim Sweeney in an attempt to rival Doom and resulted in a game and engine that were way ahead of its time, so impressive in fact that even before it released a bunch of other projects were already using (Deus Ex being one of them). Doom and Quake engines have an entire book written about them, they spawned a genre and a subculture around it (with a bunch of interesting anecdotes along with it) while being installed on more computers than Windows. Some guys who worked on Windows 3.1 and left Microsoft licensed Quake engine to build their own, again revolutionizing gaming industry (for good or bad, depending on what you think about Half-Life). Infinity Engine shaped cRPGs in such a way that even 20 years later it's still being imitated, and two of the games made on IE are still the greatest RPGs ever made. The list goes on.

The lore behind Unity:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/17/how-unity-built-the-worlds-most-popular-game-engine/
Unity was founded in Copenhagen by Nicholas Francis, Joachim Ante, and David Helgason. Its story began on an OpenGL forum in May 2002, where Francis posted a call for collaborators on an open source shader-compiler (graphics tool) for the niche population of Mac-based game developers like himself. It was Ante, then a high school student in Berlin, who responded.

Ante complemented Francis’ focus on graphics and gameplay with an intuitive sense for back-end architecture. Because the game he was working on with another team wasn’t going anywhere, they collaborated on the shader part-time while each pursued their own game engine projects, but decided to combine forces upon meeting in-person. In a sprint to merge the codebases of their engines, they camped out in Helgason’s apartment for several days while he was out of town. The plan was to start a game studio grounded in robust tech infrastructure that could be licensed as well.

Helgason and Francis had worked together since high school, working on various web development ventures and even short-lived attempts at film production. Helgason dropped in and out of the University of Copenhagen while working as a freelance web developer. He provided help where he could and joined full-time after several months, selling his small stake in a web development firm to his partners.

According to Ante, Helgason was “good with people” and more business-oriented, so he took the CEO title after the trio failed to find a more experienced person for the role. (It would be two years before Ante and Francis extended the co-founder title and a corresponding amount of equity to Helgason.)

They recruited a rotating cast to help them for free while prototyping a wide range of ideas. The diversity of ideas they pursued resulted in an engine that could handle a broad range of use cases. Commercializing the engine became a focus, as was coming up with a hit game that would show the engine off to its best advantage; for indie developers, having to reconstruct an engine with every new game idea was a pain point that, if solved, would enable more creative output.

Supported by their savings, a €25,000 investment from Ante’s father, and Helgason’s part-time job at a café, they pressed on for three years, incorporating in the second year (2004) with the name Over The Edge Entertainment.
I couldn't copy the rest because it's a paid article, but you get the picture. It's a shitty origin story. I feel the only reason behind Unity's success is that it's free. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
5,861
You can make good games with Unity with a bit of work, but it's a lot easier to make a bad game with Unity.

it's always easier to make a shit game, the tool isn't that important tbh

In Unity you can produce more shit games faster.

More user-friendly software leads to more users of a lower skill range.

Good games on any engine take a shit ton of work and talent. Bad games usually don't.

Thankfully, we have this remarkable filter that weeds out most bad games. It's called "being ignored by everybody."
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I couldn't copy the rest because it's a paid article, but you get the picture. It's a shitty origin story. I feel the only reason behind Unity's success is that it's free. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

There were tons of capable free engines when Unity was released on Windows, what made Unity stand out by far was how easy it was to use as a tool and get immediate feedback. In comparison pretty much every single other engine, from small to big, had clunky tools (and often required endless arcane configuration) to the point where the tools for other engines started copying Unity's interface.

Also they did make a game, GooBall:



Unity was actually originally made for this game, but they released their toolset for Mac (originally Unity was only available for Mac OS X, they later ported the engine to Windows when they rewrote the editor UI because the Mac versions used Cocoa).
 

Tacgnol

Shitlord
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
XNA was always the popular choice before Unity for rapid game production. Whilst XNA itself is obsolete, the legacy is still carried by FNA and Monogame.

Others have probably made the same observations in this thread, but Unity is popular I feel because:

1. It has uncomplicated licensing. Unless you're raking in more than $100k you can just use the free license.
2. It's relatively simple/easy to use. This is also a downside in that bad devs can easily do dumb things, hence common unity problems like awful load times, save game bloat etc.
3. It has a massive asset store making it easy to acquire assets for almost any possible game.
4. There are millions of tutorials and guides for almost every possible feature you would need to implement.

I have less experience of UE4, but from the murmurings I've seen on dev forums it seems to have a reputation as being much more complex to use. I'd also heard that the licensing was much more complex, though these days it seems to be fairly similar to Unity.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
XNA was always the popular choice before Unity for rapid game production. Whilst XNA itself is obsolete, the legacy is still carried by FNA and Monogame.

TBH i think that XNA is a bit overrated and wouldn't be as popular if it wasn't the hype (at the time) by Microsoft and being an easy entry (actually only entry for many indies) to targeting XBox 360. I played around a bit with XNA some time ago (which i originally picked up for a job):



From my (admittedly little) experience using it, i do not think it provides anything that you wouldn't find in other free frameworks at the time - e.g. jMonkeyEngine for Java (if you wanted to stick with a managed language) provides at least the same features (actually nowadays it provides more features than XNA) as did engines like Irrlicht for C++. XNA provides very little functionality by itself, it is only a notch above something like SDL or LWJGL and some of the functionality it provides isn't that great (e.g. the content pipeline, which many games simply ignore and do their own).
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Irrlicht for C++

I'm getting PTSD flashbacks.
Thank god game development has improved from years ago.

I still remember sobbing in a corner trying to extend and work with Irrlicht / OGRE3D..

Hm, anything specific? I remember looking at Irrlicht and playing around with it years ago (somewhere around midlate 2000s) and i do not remember anything negative about it.
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
So how does long playtime necessarily indicates "depth" of a game or that it is played by "deep players"? I can think of many a time-waster game that folks spend dozens of hours on. The stuff that you can play on autopilot. Not exactly something requiring Deep Intellectual Engagement or Deep Aesthetic Contemplation.

(and "depth" is an empty signifier in this abstract all-encompassing usage anyway - like the "depth" of an arena shooter and that of a grand strategy capture the same thing)
 

Berekän

A life wasted
Patron
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TLDR: Don't expect a storefront to do your marketing for you, which is a lesson every other industry has known for ages
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
Maybe deep in like: Deep time investments.

Btw. here's the full blog post.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/08/09/steam-hates-small-games/

Some thoughts (being at the blog post.)

Barrier #1 - Popular Upcoming. Completely true but getting to that 5000 wishlists barrier isn't easy for long time indies even.
Barrier #2 - Ten reviews. You can get ten reviews with a cheap game, you just need to market it properly. If you have a big community, it can be totally viable.
Barrier #3 - Trading cards/Achievements. I think that these are revenue and not units sold based (or maybe playtime?).
Barrier #4 and #5 - Playtime. Just make grindy games, clicker games for example, lol. There are a lot of genres which can totally bypass that.
Barrier #6 - Daily Deals. Completely true but it's brutal to get there.

It seems like he's building the narrative of poorly marketed small games on the one hand and greatly marketed big games on the other. Some of his points are less true if you have a cheap game that's marketed properly (or a 10-15$ game that's marketed poorly for that matter). But overall I think it's a great post since the underlying thought is correct.
Is it 10 times easier to sell a game which usually cost 1 buck instead of 10 bucks? I honestly don't think so (except mobile). Even at 1$ many people wait for a sale. And a 10$ game with 90% discount seems to be cheaper than a 1$ game with a 50% discount. It's also more interesting for all these bundle sites later. And some people skip 1-3$ games altogether since they think that they aren't worth it.
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
Moaning_Clock
But what would count at "deep time investment" in this case? Take some clicker played for 10, 15 minutes in one sitting to waste time. If that, over time, accumulates to dozens of hours of registered playtime, is that equatable with "deep time investment"?
I'd say that, whenever folks talk of depth in this context, whatever it is that they mean and however dimly they mean it, it is something qualitative rather than purely quantitative.
 

Immortal

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Irrlicht for C++

I'm getting PTSD flashbacks.
Thank god game development has improved from years ago.

I still remember sobbing in a corner trying to extend and work with Irrlicht / OGRE3D..

Hm, anything specific? I remember looking at Irrlicht and playing around with it years ago (somewhere around midlate 2000s) and i do not remember anything negative about it.


Honestly, I'm just exhausted with writing Game engine wrappers around graphical api's / dx & opengl implementations.
My experience with "Old School" engines is that your not actually making a game until you've gone and extended the engines capabilities and found 20 different plugins and integrated them.

AKA you become so front loaded with engine programming that 6 months in your still not making the actual fucking game.
From my shitty drunken memory Irrilicht was purely a graphics engine, you had to integrate everything else, animations, audio, physics, etc etc.

I mean the results speak for themselves.. how many games were ever made on Irrlicht - I bet I could count them on one hand.
That said, Irrlicht wasn't horrible necessarily - it did exactly what it said it did and from my fairly shitty memory was fairly easy to extend, I'm taking a little creative license for laughs and brofists.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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5,104
Those were kinda my thoughts as well. Marketing and knowing your audience pays off? Who'd a thunk it.
 

Immortal

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Is it 10 times easier to sell a game which usually cost 1 buck instead of 10 bucks? I honestly don't think so (except mobile). Even at 1$ many people wait for a sale. And a 10$ game with 90% discount seems to be cheaper than a 1$ game with a 50% discount. It's also more interesting for all these bundle sites later. And some people skip 1-3$ games altogether since they think that they aren't worth it.

Anything billed under 5 dollars screams to me Scam or Meme game.
I would likely refuse to buy anything that cheap unless it arrived at that price from a sale..

If your target retail price is 5 dollars or less, you are probably better off making it free with some type of gacha style monetization and hope you net a few whales.

Maybe I don't represent the feelings of most gamers - but in my mind the 1 - 5 dollar range is about where most Russian sweatshop games fall - quick asset flip trash that gets pumped out en masse. (I guess maybe cause it works?)

(I actually filter / sort the store page so that I never see games that fall into this category.. it's usually 1000's of pages of shitty puzzle and shooter games cobbled together in Unity or Game Maker)
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
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Messages
655
There are many great games which cost less than 5$. Superflight is awesome, Interactivity the Game, the Tonguc Bodur games, also the Rusty Lake games, Suits and The Corridor and many more. But all of these games are underpriced imho due to various reasons so it makes sense that they are great value. But I couldn't find a game that costs under 5 bucks, is great and not underpriced.
 

Lutte

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
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So how does long playtime necessarily indicates "depth" of a game or that it is played by "deep players"?

It doesn't, but people tend to pay more attention to a game with an average playtime of 20+ hours than a game with ~3 hours.
It's really not that hard if you make a game that's actually a game to get past the mark of 3 hours of avg playtime on users despite the game itself not being longer than 1 hour from start to finish for a single session. That's the story of beatemup, shmups, actual rogue likes but also those newfangled roguelites, card games/deck builders, racing games, anything multiplayer, repeatable (pattern generation) puzzle games etc.

Heck, just look at simple computer implementations of real life non video games.
Look at that sweet average playtime :
https://store.steampowered.com/app/733070/Sudoku_Universe/
With real games, player engagement is real.

There's a level of degeneracy everyone of us have accepted when we add the word 'video' next to 'game'. Think one minute about what it would imply to, before video games existed, buy a board game, or a manual about a set of rules for a game, that you use once in a very short session and then throw away?

Video games are computerized games. They're not meant to be shittier version of the most basic jigsaw puzzles (I'm looking at you here, the "puzzle" part of most adventure games, that barely amount to putting the round peg into the round hole), of the shittiest books, or the shittiest movies. If you make an actual game then it can be played and enjoyed for hours. If you don't make a real game you will need to pad it with, ahem, narrative, cutscene and other bullshit.

The computer implementation of the solitaire card game included in every windows installation is more successful as an actual game than most of what is sold on steam. It's a fact. It's certainly more of a game than many of the so called best sellers too.
 

Tyrr

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 25, 2020
Messages
2,257
Is it 10 times easier to sell a game which usually cost 1 buck instead of 10 bucks? I honestly don't think so (except mobile). Even at 1$ many people wait for a sale. And a 10$ game with 90% discount seems to be cheaper than a 1$ game with a 50% discount. It's also more interesting for all these bundle sites later. And some people skip 1-3$ games altogether since they think that they aren't worth it.

Anything billed under 5 dollars screams to me Scam or Meme game.
I would likely refuse to buy anything that cheap unless it arrived at that price from a sale..

If your target retail price is 5 dollars or less, you are probably better off making it free with some type of gacha style monetization and hope you net a few whales.

Maybe I don't represent the feelings of most gamers - but in my mind the 1 - 5 dollar range is about where most Russian sweatshop games fall - quick asset flip trash that gets pumped out en masse. (I guess maybe cause it works?)

(I actually filter / sort the store page so that I never see games that fall into this category.. it's usually 1000's of pages of shitty puzzle and shooter games cobbled together in Unity or Game Maker)
It's the same with food. Too cheep and there must be something wrong about it.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Messages
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Honestly, I'm just exhausted with writing Game engine wrappers around graphical api's / dx & opengl implementations.
My experience with "Old School" engines is that your not actually making a game until you've gone and extended the engines capabilities and found 20 different plugins and integrated them.

AKA you become so front loaded with engine programming that 6 months in your still not making the actual fucking game.
From my shitty drunken memory Irrilicht was purely a graphics engine, you had to integrate everything else, animations, audio, physics, etc etc.

Irrlicht is a game engine, it is Ogre3D that is a graphics engine. Irrlicht however provided enough functionality to make a game.

But yeah, they're not like Unity, etc, they are frameworks. However i was comparing it with XNA which is also a framework.

I mean the results speak for themselves.. how many games were ever made on Irrlicht - I bet I could count them on one hand.

Sadly the vast majority of game developers - despite what they may claim - are really influenced by hype and other unrelated factors. The main reason there weren't many games using Irrlicht was that there weren't many games using Irrlicht and no successful games using Irrlicht. It had little to do with the engine's own quality - it was a known fact that the best way to promote an engine was to have a popular game on it (regardless of the engine's quality). This is why Torque was way more successful among indies at the time despite having a price attached to it and pretty much everyone who worked on it said it was awful (nowadays it might be ok but AFAIK it had a massive rearchitecturing at some point, but that was after it lost to Unity) - it was the engine powering Tribes, a popular game. Also back when XNA was released many gamedevs were still skeptical of open source stuff.

But Unity managed to break through all that crap with their tools' quality and ease of use.
 

Immortal

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Safe Space - Don't Bulli
Irrlicht is a game engine, it is Ogre3D that is a graphics engine. Irrlicht however provided enough functionality to make a game.

I went back and checked.. pretty sure Irrlicht is just 90% a Graphical Framework. Barebones collision detection but their own documentation says to not use it.
No Audio framework, no Animation framework / tools (That I can see). Not sure if it has any particle system or any predfined / boilerplate shader code (AKA you have to do this all yourself), irregardless - Really missing all the bells and whistles of what I'd expect from a "Game Engine".

It's a nice Graphics API wrapper with an editor IMO.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I went back and checked.. pretty sure Irrlicht is just 90% a Graphical Framework. Barebones collision detection but their own documentation says to not use it.
No Audio framework, no Animation framework / tools (That I can see). Not sure if it has any particle system or any predfined / boilerplate shader code (AKA you have to do this all yourself), irregardless - Really missing all the bells and whistles of what I'd expect from a "Game Engine".

Having collision detection, even if barebones, is still more than what XNA provided - remember that i was comparing it with XNA. Also it does have particle system, animation framework and other stuff, you can see the features here. BTW XNA also didn't have any of that either. When i made the RobGetOut demo i linked previously i made everything myself, the only thing XNA provided was the graphics framework (note that i also had to write the shaders as the default weren't that great), input handling and audio playback (in comparison Irrlicht doesn't have audio playback but there is irrKlang which was made by the same developer as Irrlicht - but TBH i only used the very low level API which would be trivial to do manually in C++ anyway).
 

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