I often give the advice of "make small games" for many reasons. One is how small games are excellent for learning quickly, you will learn a lot more by making 10 games than just one massive game. They are also great for finding success since the game idea itself is one of the biggest factors in a game's success, if you try 10 ideas you have better odds of hitting a home run as opposed to just one shot.

But most of all, I really don't want you to spend 5 years working on a game with hopes of finding success, only to then launch it and have that game sell a dozen copies, just like what happened with this developer.

The post is a very detailed breakdown of the game Sacred Earth - Reverie which launched in late November after 5 years in development, and currently sits at just 11 reviews, and about $1000 in revenue.

There is some very accurate self-reflection in the post about what caused this game to fail. The genre mix (JRPG + Visual Novel) which makes it insanely niche, the lack of unique compelling hook.

The dev mentions how they did everything in their power to do marketing but nothing worked, how it was a "slow crawl to build mild interest", that should have been a big warning sign to not spend such a long time on a game idea that was clearly not appealing to players.

The good news is that the developer only seems mildly disappointed the game did not sell, it does not seem like they're going to go bankrupt and homeless. So like I always say, you should make small games and pick a good marketable idea IF your goal is financial success, but if you're making things just for fun then there are no rules, make whatever you want to make! But don’t lie to yourself saying you’re making something just for fun while secretly hoping for a million copies sold.

However, in the "what's next" section of the post the developer does not mention the most important lesson: Don't spend 5 years working on your next game.

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The Publisher of the Week this time is D.F.Y. STUDIO, publisher with a lot of awesome UI packs for all sorts of games and themes.

Get the FREE Cyberpunk RPG GUI Pack which like the name implies is perfect for any dystopian sci-fi cyberpunk game.

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Unity has just written a blog post talking about the future of Unity Render Pipelines in 2026, and in it they detail the next steps on their plan to merge the render pipelines (which they announced back at Unite) and those steps involve continuing to improve URP while only maintaining HDRP.

This does NOT mean HDRP is deprecated, if you're using it in your projects you can keep using it. You can even start new projects with it, it is still officially supported, it is just not getting any more new features in the future (other than Switch 2 support)

Whereas URP is continuing to improve, and now hopefully at a faster rate. Recently at Unite they showcased a really awesome looking Real Time Global Illumination tool coming in the future to URP, it looks really awesome! You can see it in action in this video at 55:27. It will also be getting Physical Light Units support, Physical Sky, Auto Exposure, Screen Space Reflections and more.

Another piece of news is how the Built-in Render Pipeline is finally being deprecated in 6.5 with a removal date sometime after that. However if you really like the BiRP and you use it, technically you can keep using it until 2028 with 6.7 LTS.

Many people have considered the splitting of the render pipelines to have been a mistake since it doubles the amount of work for so many people, so hopefully this direction is something people are excited about.

Phil Spencer has been in charge of Xbox since 2014, and now that time has come to an end as both he and Sarah Bond (ex-president of Xbox) have left the company.

The Xbox brand has certainly recovered after the failure of the Xbox One (TV, TV, TV!), they bought a ton of awesome studios and published some great games, however in more recent years it has gotten back to a downtrend with many game cancelations and massive price hikes to both Game Pass as well as the consoles themselves.

Replacing Spencer is Asha Sharma who was the president of Microsoft's CoreAI division having previously worked at Meta. Right away this concerned many people who fear/dislike AI, so she made a point to mention how "First, great games. Everything begins here. We must have great games beloved by players before we do anything" and speaking against soulless AI slop, but also continuing the plan to make Xbox "expand across PC, mobile, and cloud."

Summer Game Fest (previously E3) is happening in a few months, I guess that's the first place where we will see what this new direction for Xbox looks like.

Tipping culture in the US sounds insane to basically every other country. You buy something that costs $10 but at the end you're expected to pay $12. It seems crazy how it's legal for a business to pay below minimum wage to their employees, and have the customer pay the remaining 20%.

And if you don't want to tip, usually you have to get by a bunch of dark patterns to be able to skip it.

So here is a fun mini-game all about those dark patterns! You have moving buttons, pre-selected options, some require you to accept giant terms and conditions, others you have to do math, or just straight up psychological manipulation.

Try to see how many of those dark patterns you recognize (which are also widely used in many other places like canceling subscriptions or mobile games), I survived 26 rounds!