Game Dev

Dev Emails 400 content creators, wishlists?

What are the results of emailing a ton of content creators? Here is a post with some stats.

This dev emailed 408 content creators, out of those, 44 (12.6%) redeemed keys and 7 (2%) made a video or streamed the game, in turn that lead to about a 5000 wishlist gain (mainly from 260k YouTube views).

Those are excellent results, especially considering how the goal was closed demo access.

The dev created a Presskit, did market research on which Streamers would potentially like the game, launched the Steam page and started sending emails.

I highly recommend you read the whole post, it looks like he did everything absolutely correctly, from finding the right people to writing the emails. He mentions how he followed the advice of Chris Zukowski, definitely check out the videos I did with Chris if you haven't already, lots of excellent marketing knowledge to help you hopefully find this same level of success.

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Game Dev

NVIDIA ACE generating Digital Humans

NVIDIA has just showcased a really interesting toolset called ACE, this is a suite of tools to work with digital humans. It has use cases for customer service, telepresence, virtual facilities and importantly videogames.

There is a post that talks about some specifics for how it works. It's basically a normal AI bot except instead of being hardcoded using something like a State Machine, it is using LLMs and lots of inputs to speak, move and take actions.

The AI takes in input from the player as voice or text, then combined with vision to look at the game world, and also just the game state being transcribed into text. The AI takes in all of that and comes up with actions which it can then either take in the game or speak or animate.

It's definitely an interesting use case for AI that combines multiple inputs into multiple outputs to make something potentially quite useful.

One example is in PUBG, the player uses voice to say "look for some 5.56 Ammo", the AI can understand that command and using vision can look and identify what the player is looking for.

Another example is Naraka: Bladepoint, the player stays on a defensive position and asks the AI to go trigger the bell to start the enemy spawns which the AI understands and does.

Quite interesting tech. One funny comment on YouTube says: "POV: you don't have friends but you can afford a good GPU"

Tech

Highlights from CES 2025

CES has just happened! This is the event where lots of companies announce all sorts of new tech, from useful interesting things to completely weird gimmicks.

There's a TON of stuff shown, so here are just a few highlights:

NVIDIA RTX 50-series, 5070 $549, 5080 $999, 5090 $1999, performance is supposedly up to double the previous gen, but that includes lots of DLSS generated frames.

ROG NUC, super compact 2.5-liter gaming PC, Intel Core Ultra 9/7, RTX 40-series

Lenovo Legion GO S, very powerful handheld, the first third-party handheld using SteamOS.

MCON Mobile Controller, magnetic controller that attaches to your phone and connects with Bluetooth, had a Kickstarter asking for $25k and got $1MIL!

Displace Wireless TV, battery TV with suction cups in the back, could be fun to place it in an outside wall for a barbecue and then bring it back inside.

Electric Salt Spoon, cut down your salt consumption without eating bland food by replacing salt with a tiny electric current that apparently simulates salty-ness.

TV Shows: The Last of Us season 2 coming in April, Ghost of Tsushima Legends, anime out in 2027, and Helldivers 2, Until Dawn and Horizon Zero Dawn becoming movies.

Fun

AR Glasses Screenshot the World!

Here's a fun use case for AR glasses! The user creates a box with their hands, the glasses store the coordinates of that area in the world, captures the image that is behind it and identifies what it is.

Imagine using this when traveling abroad or when visiting a museum, super cool!

Or since it's all about identifying/analyzing things in a square, just use this to look at your math homework to explain how it works, use it while working on your car to identify each piece and how to fix it, use it on some picture of yourself to remember where you took it.