Game Dev

Sales from 10 MILLION YouTube views?

Do you wonder how many sales you might get if your game is covered by a popular YouTuber?

Here are two separate posts sharing some stats. The answer is that it actually varies quite a lot, different YouTubers have different audiences. Some might target very young people, some might be more about entertainment than about the game, so the results are tricky to estimate.

One video from a YouTuber targeted more towards kids led to 1 million views and just 300 sales of Knock'Em Out (~$1.5k)

One Northenlion video with 72k views generated $4.2k in sales of The Ouroboros King and several Aliensrock videos with 1.2 million views generated $6.1k.

So yes YouTubers/Streamers do help quite a bit, it's not necessarily "winning the lottery" but is a huge help. Perhaps the bigger effect is afterwards, if all of those people that bought the game actually enjoy the game, it will in turn hopefully lead to positive reviews and positive signals for the Steam algorithm which will enable the game to have a higher baseline of daily copies sold for the future.

And one of those devs also made a post on the topic of how to contact streamers. I've also made a video on this topic myself, going through a checklist made by Wanderbots, and in terms of marketing in general check out the videos I did with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski.

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Game Dev

Human artist wrongfully accused of AI, new normal?

There are people who are extremely anti-AI, but what happens when those people mistakenly assume something is AI when it was human made?

Here is an interesting but very sad post. It's a human developer that drew their own human art, but upon announcing the game it was instantly met with accusations of AI art. Or rather, not accusations but people being convinced the art is made by AI and not by a human, despite having no evidence of it other than "looks like AI"

In this case the game was first unveiled 7 years ago with much of the same art, so it can't possibly be AI art.

This is a very very tricky subject and one that gets even trickier as AI gets better, with the current tools there's already really no way to know if something was made with AI or not, the issues with fingers and weird text have largely been solved. So all the people and content creators that are vehemently anti-AI will end up harming human artists with their anger.

Sadly this seems to be the new reality, especially if your 2D game has a “concept art” sort of look. If you are a 2D artist yourself then I'm afraid you will have to deal with this issue at some point. You might work super hard on a beautiful illustration to then have someone accuse you or just using AI, sadly I'm not sure there's a solution to this, other than maybe recording an entire time-lapse video?

Tech

Meta Robot Fingers

Meta continues doing so much interesting research. They've been pushing hard on open source AI development, they're pushing hard on VR/AR development with their impressive Orion prototype, and now also apparently doing a ton of research on Robot Fingers that can "feel"

The AI brain was trained on the 460,000 tactile images, these apparently use light to identify how soft/hard a material is. Then they built the Meta Digit 360 which is meant to be an artificial fingertip with human-level tactile sensing. It can apparently detect spatial details as small as 7 microns and forces as small as 1 millinewton. The digit itself contains a processor allowing it to process touch information on-device extremely quickly. You can read the full paper and check out the GitHub, the goal is for this to become a platform that other developers can build upon. Really exciting stuff!

Another cool robotics thing this week was another video by Boston Dynamics showing the latest Atlas version picking up items and putting them in the correct place. The whole thing is fully autonomous, it is capable of picking up strange looking parts, looking at them, rotating, and fitting them in the correct place in the correct orientation. I love how at 1:20 one piece gets caught of by fabric and the robot freaks out, then pulls back and correctly inserts in another slot. Also fun to see the hockey stick in the background in case things go wrong.

Gaming

Black Ops 6 goes big on Game Pass

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is out, and this is an important release because it's out Day 1 on Game Pass.

This will be a very important moment for the industry as a whole, is it viable for AAA games to go on Game Pass Day 1? Will it make more or less money compared to the $60 price tag? How will players react to this? Will they start to expect more AAA games on Game Pass and perhaps devalue indie games even more?

All of those questions will be answered in the coming months, so far it seems like the game is good, people are enjoying this new entry.

And in terms of results it also seems to be doing great, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella mentioned how the game already broke records for day one players and Game Pass subscribers.

Oh and apparently the entire Call of Duty series has already sold over 500 million copies! That's insane!