$750,000 from Parkour and Call of Duty goes "free"

Also Unity GDC, mix Physical and Digital or Smell your games!

Author

Code Monkey
June 01, 2024

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

Another week of interesting news, there’s constantly things happening in this industry! I’ve been hard at work on my upcoming DOTS RTS Course and it’s starting to take shape!

Also added an extra section at the end of the newsletter all about interesting videos that I saw recently: AI in F.E.A.R., Farming eSports and Dijkstra!

  • Game Dev: Unity GDC; Call of Duty “free”; PS on PC; Physical Game

  • Tech: Smell-o-vision

  • Gaming: Parkour

  • Fun: Multiply 1000

Game Dev

Missed GDC? Watch it now!

If you, like me, were unable to go to GDC this year then don’t worry! Unity has just published videos of all of their talks.

These always have some very useful information so it's great that everyone can watch it, not just those with access to the expensive GDC Vault.

In total it's 7 talks. First the usual Roadmap talk, I covered my highlights on this one myself. Then one on DOTS Baking, and Rendering Tools in Unity 6.

There's one on how to use Muse AI for faster prototyping, boost graphics performance, how to use the Apple Vision Pro, and best practices for Web Games.

I haven't seen the one on DOTS baking yet, and considering how I'm currently working on my upcoming DOTS RTS Course I've added this one to my to-watch list.

Like I said these usually have some great nuggets of information, so if you have the time give them a watch.

Game Dev

Call of Duty for "free"

Microsoft has finally spoken on whether Call of Duty will appear on Game Pass, and the answer is yes.

This is big news because Call of Duty routinely sells millions upon millions of copies, it has been the best selling game every year for the past decade. Giving up all of those billions of dollars worth of $60 game sales means Microsoft is making a huge bet on Game Pass.

If you're already on Game Pass and you buy CoD every year then this is a huge win. And if you don't have Game Pass then picking up Call of Duty by buying just one month is also a great deal, great for players.

I'm very curious to see what will be the result of this. Game Pass and these new subscription models have lots of positives but also lots of negatives, especially for developers.

It's usually great value for players, but for developers (especially developers of small scale singleplayer games) these deals can have a negative impact on how much players value games. It's harder to sell your interesting small scale indie game for $15 when Call of Duty is "free" on Game Pass.

And if your indie business model is based on getting your games on these subscriptions for an upfront fee, this deal will also make that harder since there's few dollars to go around. We'll see how this ends up.

Game Dev

Playstation on PC, but only Live Service games

Sony recently had a shareholder meeting, and there were some interesting questions and answers. One interesting bit of news came from the upcoming CEO of PlayStation talking about how they view their strategy for putting their games on PC.

For Live Services games, like Helldivers 2, put them on PC on Day 1. But for singleplayer games, like The Last of Us, leave them exclusive to PlayStation for some time and only put them on PC later on with the hopes that those PC players will play those older games and then buy a PlayStation to play the recent sequels. He also mentions TV and Film (The Last of Us TV Show) as an example of this same strategy of broadening their user base while keeping exclusives.

This is an interesting contrast to what Microsoft is doing, CoD and Singleplayer games on Game Pass Day 1. It remains to be seen which strategy will win out, but so far this generation PlayStation is far outselling Xbox (52 million vs 27 million).

Once again I'm curious to see how this will impact developers. I don't think PC vs Console impacts developers like myself much, but it is good how some TV shows, like Fallout and TLoU, have found tons of success.

That success in turn gets non-gamers to try out the games, and hopefully they become regular gamers, and over time start playing some indie games which increases the size of the market and the odds for small developers to find success.

Game Dev

Game you play in REAL LIFE!

Here's a really interesting idea, it's a game that is physical AND digital.

There’s a physical flipbook with various pop-up paper objects and a projector, and then the digital games are projected depending on the selected page which contains walls and pipes and various platformer objects.

It's a really nice idea, a unique mix of physical and digital. They were also finalists on Alt.Ctrl.GDC

I'm always interested in electronics stuff, it's something I wish I had more time to do myself.

If you are like me then this would be a great project to build to combine your skills of game development and electronics in a fun, interesting way.

Tech

You smell in-game, you smell in real-life

The promise of smell-o-vision has been around for decades, and now someone is trying that idea again with games.

Meet GameScent, it's a box that comes with some vials for smells. There's Forest, Gunfire, Storm, Racing and Explosions.

Naturally this product includes the buzzword of the day, AI. It supposedly listens to audio from your game and decides which scent to unleash on your nostrils.

It's a fun gimmick idea, it costs $150 and strangely enough you can't buy refills right now. The scent of Blood is coming soon, I'm not sure I want to smell that.

I remember as a kid reading about an ad for a console that had electric shocks. So if you were playing Mortal Kombat you would get some painful zaps. At that age I had no idea if that was real or a joke, but nowadays we live in an age where jokes can be real!

Gaming

Parkour parkour!

One of the best things about indie games is how there is a game out there for literally anything you can imagine. There are games about Farming, Fishing, Cleaning. You can be a Mechanic for Cars, Planes, Space.

And now there is even a game all about Parkour. So take Assassin's Creed, remove all combat and story and push the Parkour mechanics up to 11, that's Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game

You would think such an idea would be quite niche but actually the game is finding massive success. In 1 week it has over a thousand reviews, meaning about 50,000 copies sold or ~$750,000, and they are Overwhelmingly Positive reviews with 98% positive!

That's a huge success which is always great to see, especially from a solo indie dev, and with a pretty fast development timeline of just 7 months.

I love the uniqueness of indie games! This is also a great example for developers on how you don't need to work 3-5 years to make a game. You can make something really focused on just one idea and polish that to the max.

The developer also made various short videos that went semi-viral on YouTube and TikTok which confirmed he was on the right track. This is one of the best ways of testing the potential for your game ideas.

Fun

Multiply something by 1000!

There's been a fun challenge on Twitter, take a break from working on your game, pick a number in the code or data files and multiply it by 1000.

The results range from funny to insane! Characters flying to the moon with a punch, thousands of missile explosions, giant players and much more!

I think this is a great simple reminder to just have some fun. Even if you're working on a serious game, take some time to just make something silly for fun.

As a bonus this also means the potential for a funny clip/gif that might go viral and get you thousands of wishlists.

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Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

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