• Game Dev Report
  • Posts
  • Xbox host joins Unity and how big is your Pile of Shame?

Xbox host joins Unity and how big is your Pile of Shame?

Also learn Steam Marketing, ICQ dead and Blender on your Nokia!

Author

Code Monkey
June 29, 2024

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

I love learning and one of the things I love about what I do is how I have to learn things before I can teach them. After a ton of work researching and building the prototype, I just started recording lectures for my DOTS RTS course! The first part should be out in a few weeks.

DOTS looks really complex at first but once you learn the basics of DoD it’s actually pretty easy to use. And considering the benefits (100x SPEED-UPS!) it’s definitely worth learning, stay tuned!

  • Game Dev: Major Nelson Unity, Steam Marketing

  • Tech: ICQ Shuts Down

  • Gaming: Pile of Shame, Steam Summer Sale

  • Fun: Blender on Nokia

Game Dev

Major Nelson joins Unity

If you've been around since the Xbox 360 era then you've probably heard the name Major Nelson aka Larry Hryb. He was the main public face for the Xbox brand for many years, hosting the Official Xbox Podcast.

Now he has joined Unity as Director of Community where he is working as a Developer Advocate, meaning talking to developers to figure out what they want from the engine.

His posts for the first week seem quite optimistic. Having someone who is so used to talking to developers at such a high position is probably a very positive result for Unity (and all developers).

I'm not too familiar with his work but as far as I know everyone seems to have a positive view of the work he did at Xbox.

Considering how Unity has had plenty of missteps this past year it seems like having someone who really understands Developers in change of Community is a great thing.

Game Dev

Steam Marketing GOLD!

This past week I did three, awesome, videos with a very different format, it was a collaboration with Chris Zukowski.

Chris is a Steam Marketing Expert, he does a lot of analysis on how Steam works and what strategies are finding success nowadays.

How many Wishlists should you have? Should you do Early Access? How important is the Steam capsule? How long should your trailer be? What are the best genres on Steam? The three, separate, videos, that I made with Chris answer tons of these questions. All of them have Timestamps.

Marketing is extremely important nowadays due to how crowded Steam is, this is an extremely valuable skill that you absolutely must learn if your goal is to find success.

And funnily enough one piece of advice mentioned in those videos literally just happened.

Go watch those videos to learn the basics, then make sure you read his blog posts, lots of knowledge for FREE.

And if you want a ton of learning in a very convenient condensed format then check out his courses. He's currently running a sale which is ending this weekend, so definitely get it quickly.

I've been reading Chris' newsletter since 2018, it has taught me a lot about marketing. Another one I highly recommend is the GameDiscoverCo newsletter.

Learning about marketing has definitely been a big factor in my ability to keep making profitable indie games even as Steam has gotten more competitive.

I also absolutely love his benchmarks page, super quick way to look at a bunch of numbers and compare to see how your game stacks up. Get the courses before the sale ends.

Tech

Gone after 28 years

ICQ is shutting down, the very popular instant messaging service has finally reached its end. Apparently the name meant I Seek You, I didn't know that!

They were bought out by VK, the very popular Facebook of Russia, and they are pointing the remaining ICQ users there.

The space for messaging and communication apps has changed a lot in the past 20 years, nowadays it seems everything is happening on Discord.

And related to the previous story, I asked Chris about how should game devs build a community, he does say Discord is good but Newsletters are better.

I don't think I ever used ICQ, here in Portugal the popular chat app was MSN Messenger and I definitely have fond memories of that one.

Same thing for voice apps, first TeamSpeak was super popular, then came Ventrilo, and now everyone is on Discord.

Gaming

$19 billion Pile of Shame

How many games have you bought and never played? If you're anything like the average Steam user then the answer is a lot. The folks at PCGamesN did the math and counted $19 billion worth of games sitting unplayed in Steam user's libraries, that's a lot of games!

Technically that number is very exaggerated, most of those games were probably bought in various bundles at super deep 90%+ discounts, or during the many Steam sales, but still that's a huge amount of unplayed games.

Over the past few years I definitely stopped buying games just because they're on sale/bundle since I already know I have little time to play nowadays. Now I tend to only buy a game if I'm going to play it right away.

You can input your own SteamID to check out how big is your pile of shame.

I just checked my own account (which I've had since 2003) and I have 2236 games owned and 1845 never played!

Most of it from tons of bundles but still lots of awesome stuff I can't wait to play someday: Banished, Company of Heroes 3, Gladiabots, GTAV, ...

Gaming

Steam Summer Sale!

Summer is here and you know what that means, Steam Summer Sale!

Lots of discounts on all kinds of games, from interesting indie games to AAA games.

Although keep in mind the previous story, don't buy something just because it's on sale, only buy if you're intending to actually play it.

I have my own games on the sale, my latest game Dinky Guardians is 20% off and everything else is 75% off. The complete bundle with all my games has a really nice discount.

If you want to see the power of experience then check out my first game, Survivor Squad, and compare it to my last. There's quite a big difference which represents 10 years of making indie games!

Fun

Old-school Modelling

Do you have an 18 year old Nokia phone? How about some 3D modelling on the go?

Someone has ported Blender onto their Nokia phone. According to the developer the goal was simply to demonstrate the power that even old phones have, also sometimes it's fun to do something just because you can!

There is a video talking about the process, quite fascinating.

I love these kinds of projects where you make something just because you can, even if it makes no sense.

It’s one of the reasons why I love programming, it’s the main skill that lets you take any crazy ideas you have and make them real!

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

Reply

or to participate.