@Tocelot@EmilyG@TomFulp@ninja_muffin99 (I'll post this again tomorrow morning for people in the western hemisphere with actually reasonable sleep schedules)
@Tocelot@EmilyG@TomFulp@ninja_muffin99 If you're working on something relevant to what this article talks about, or if you're in the industry and want to talk about with me (on a podcast or just to chat or whatever) please do hit me up in my DM's.
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Here's my current thoughts on everyone trying to be the next "instant games" or "metaverse" platform...
You MUST give something away if you are starting today. You cannot have a closed stack top to bottom unless you already have a captive audience.
Roblox can have a closed stack top to bottom because they started 10 years ago. Giganticorp can maybe put something together because they're Giganticorp, but YOU can't. You need to give people an incentive to use your stuff and that means relinquishing some control
To be perfectly honest I don't like ANY of the closed stacks no matter how cool the stuff people make with them is. But I have to acknowledge the reality that they work and are attractive for a reason. But even with that hat on, startups cannot clone Roblox and succeed
RE: "instant games", Former Kongregate CEO Emily Greer presents a really fascinating perspective about Flash Game License. This was an auction site that a developer started. Says it was a huge driver in increasing developers' leverage with portals and raised earnings.
FGL was a familiar site for those of us who remember the flash scene days, but I never realized how instrumental it was in changing the ecosystem. According to Emily it broke information asymmetry in devs' favor
2/X
Information asymmetry is one of the CHIEF things that platforms use, either passively or actively, to increase their leverage. If you know what something's worth and the person selling it doesn't, you can capture lots more value than you otherwise could.
3/X
Okay can someone tell me why this old thread from last year is blowing up my mentions today? Did somebody big retweet it or embed it in an article or something?
I get it that Funkin is timely and big people are starting to take notice and we should have a full on Discourse probably starting next week about THE FUTURE OF GAMES IS A FLASH TO THE PAST (I probably need to get an article out on that speaking of...)
Ah what the hell here's a crappy tweet draft of my thoughts, for later articleification:
"Instant Games" as the nice fancy people are calling them, are an emerging niche that is as new as it is old as dirt, but this time might be different for interesting and boring reasons: 1/X
Can we ditch this ridiculous notion that "Technology is neutral, it's all about how you use it?"
Technology is POWER.
"Neutral" falsely implies inert, passive, safe.
Technology is *volatile*, *dynamic*, *dangerous*. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be useful!
Technology, fundamentally, has intentionality built into it.
Yes you can use a hammer to build a house or kill a man, but honestly we have much better weapons for killing men, we intentionally designed them for that purpose and they're very good at it.
I am not anti-technology, but I think it's fundamentally disrespectful and disingenuous to think of technology in this wishy-washy way.
You're holding an awesome ball of fire in your hands, be mindful what you do with it.
Debugging Defender's Quest 2 just now, perplexed by "fire" status having NO effect. Pulled my hair out until I discovered:
"Fire" cancels freeze.
However, I recently added logic that makes freeze degrade into "wet" when it terminates.
"Wet" then cancels "Fire"
D'oh
Obviously, what I need to do is make it so that "freeze" only transforms into "wet" if it was naturally terminated by running out of time, not by being cancelled by an elemental interaction.
One thing that might not be clear here --- fire cancelling when touching a wet target actually makes sense!
The behavior I'm describing is a normal, non-wet target gets hit with fire. Fire then "cancels" freeze (which was not present). Then target becomes wet, canceling fire.