Game Dev

Ghost stories to scare indie devs!

It's October which means it's Halloween month! Time to get scared!

Or maybe not! Steam Expert Chris Zukowski wrote a really interesting article talking about 7 myths that indie devs get scared by, but really shouldn't because they are myths.

• #1: Another game developer had my game idea! I am dead, It’s over!!!! This is never the case since a game is a lot more than just an idea. In order for something to go from idea to reality the developer needs to make hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions and it would be impossible for 2 separate people to make all those decisions exactly the same way. Just look at Game Jams, everyone starts from the same idea/theme but the results are all vastly different.

• #2: Wishlists get old. They don't. This is a great thing because it means there's no penalty for keeping your Steam page up before launch for a long time. I announced my game Total World Liberation about 3 years ago and it currently has 10,000 wishlists. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens at launch!

• #7: That AAA game everyone is talking about is launching when my game launches. I will be buried. The recent Silksong release is an excellent example of this myth. I even made 2 videos specifically talking about this myth, one before release and one analyzing the results after.

Check out the full blog post to read about all 7 myths. You definitely should know about these so you don't waste your energy being scared about something that isn't even real.

And if you want to learn more about Steam game marketing then check out the videos I did with Chris.

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Tech

AI companies are embracing the slop

The term "AI slop" is technically a negative, it supposedly means "low quality". But OpenAI is embracing that term in their recently released Sora 2 app which is a never-ending feed of vertical AI generated video. On the page they talk about how it's a "sloptimized feed".

I guess the good thing here is how there are no concerns about misleading anyone, every single thing on this feed is guaranteed to be generated by AI, there is no hand-made stuff here.

One new feature in this Sora 2 update is easily adding your own likeness in your AI generated videos. When you start the app you point a camera at your face and say three numbers, then you move your face a bit, and with just that data the model is able to mimic your voice and use your face in the videos. You can keep your likeness private or make it public so anyone can use you in their videos.

In terms of tech it is super impressive, the "bloopers" video is pretty funny, it's amazing how far the technology has come in just a few short months. I tried looking in the background of the various videos and I can't really see any super weird artifacts. Sora 2 is currently only available on US and Canada and only on iOS so I cannot access it myself.

Then very similarly is Meta which also unveiled their own AI-slop feed, they call it Vibes.

This one is also a 100% AI generated feed, there is no human-made stuff here.

In theory the idea behind this is for you to use it as inspiration for whatever it is you're trying to build. Technically inspiration can come from anywhere so this might be a valid use case for this tech.

But of course there are many serious issues as this tech improves with regards to copyright and more. CoffeeZilla has an interesting video on this topic.

Gaming

Game Pass gets a MASSIVE price increase

For years Xbox Game Pass has been described as an "unbelievable deal", especially since they had a $1 offer for a very long time. Slowly that deal has become more and move "believable" as they announce multiple price increases. Now Game Pass Ultimate is going from $19.99 to $29.99! (every month!)

There has also been a lot of discussion over whether Game Pass is devaluing games or not, specifically indie games. Many people questioned whether the fact that a game is "free" on Game Pass hurts sales on other platforms like Steam. Thankfully the data doesn't seem to show that, most games on Game Pass still found lots of success on Steam, but that concern is still valid.

So technically this massive price hike might be a positive for the industry? Many people will likely unsubscribe and go back to buying indie games normally, or will they just stop playing indie games at all? Regardless it seems people are unhappy with this price increase and Microsoft is trying everything they can to convince people it's worth the new much higher cost.

This comes after they also announced price increases for the consoles in the US.

Fun

Play Snake on the Address Bar!

One developer did something that I have no idea how it's possible, they built Snake that you play in the address bar!

It's a website here, you control with the keys as usual but the visuals are just basic ASCII in the URL.

The entire project is on GitHub if you want to see how it works, it's only 400 lines long.