The whole "Games are still a young medium" thing is a bit played out now.
How long did it take film to mature?
1st silent film - 1888
Cabinet of Dr Caligari - 1920
Citizen Kane - 1941
~50 years spans earliest tech demos to silent-era classics to titles in the modern canon
Video games:
Tennis for Two - 1958
Pong - 1972
Super Mario Bros - 1985
Minecraft - 2011
53 years from the first twiddlings on an oscilloscope to the best selling video game of all time
It's been 62 years since Tennis for Two.
If we count up from 1888, Video Games are now where Film was in 1950.
1950 is when Sunset Boulevard came out [1]
Was film still a "young" medium still finding its feet? Or was it an established art & powerhouse of culture & industry?
Film has gone on to do a lot of things since then, but movies are still basically movies and despite innovations in technology and techniques since then (such as widespread color, digital instead of film, CG, etc) filmmakers still rely on fundamentals discovered ages ago.
Look, let's just admit it to ourselves:
Video games are no longer young, and neither are you 🙃
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(I did not predict this because I was not yet paying attention)
Here's Calico's movement up the North American Switch charts.
(Keep in mind this is a sliding two-week window and I haven't matched this to discounts, which matters a lot because games leap onto the charts when they're on discount then decay slowly)
Mobile game market question:
I always hear mobile market is "ruthlessly metric driven", ie, that it's all a user acquisition arbitrage game (spend big on ads/cross promotion, price out your competition, make a thin profit margin, then scale it all up)
1) Is this true?
...
2) To whatever extent it is true (b/c whether or not it's true for everything in mobile it seems to me to be true for certain segments of the market at least)... is there anything fundamental about mobile that means it HAS to be this way, or is just an artifact of store design?
So basically, is this meme actually true, if it is true, to what extent and what limitations, and for any segments for which it holds true, is there an easily imaginable alternate universe where it's not true, and what is different in that universe.
Kongregate and Newgrounds was the now-nearly-vanished "Minor League" of game development, a middle step between "indie nobody" and "massive success".
You could make a mediocre game and expect a mediocre return, which is where future careers can blossom from.
This is certainly where I got my start. If it wasn't for Kong (and Newgrounds) I know for a fact I wouldn't have sold many copies of DQ1, and then I wouldn't have gotten on Steam in 2012, and I'd have picked a different career.
I've read several reviews now and the consensus seems to be:
1) Reduces loading times, often by a lot! 2) Under optimal conditions, has more lag and lower image quality 3) Under merely good conditions is intermittently frustrating 4) Under average conditions is unplayable
And that's without considering the fundamental flaws in the business model (subscribe THEN buy full priced games) and the lack of guaranteed, no-extra-effort-for-the-devs, cross-save with your existing game platform that you also own the game on.