
Lessons from the PC video game industry - jordigg
https://medium.com/@cdixon/lessons-from-the-pc-video-game-industry-3350bb7713de
======
Zikes
> Legally, it would probably be easy for the games industry to crack down on
> broadcasting, but instead they have encouraged it, seeing it as a new way to
> engage users and generate revenue.

Nintendo is a notable outlier in this instance. They are notoriously strict
about broadcasting games, to the point where even many reviewers simply won't
touch their games. Even though a review is absolutely protected by copyright
law, it's just not worth the effort when all of the industry's video hosting
services are stacked in favor of games publishers and developers. [0]

SEGA also has a sordid history in this regard, having sent out huge swaths of
takedown requests on YouTube, effectively shutting down many content creators
and endangering the livelihoods of even more. [1]

[0]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/06/nintendo-u...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/06/nintendo-
updates-their-bad-youtube-policies-by-making-them-worse/)

[1]
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-
goes-nuclear-youtube-videos-old-shining-force-game.shtml)

~~~
Mithaldu
Nintendo is an outlier in another sense too. They straight-up do not
understand the internet and customers. This is evidenced by how very long the
3DS account system had games you bought online tied to the physical machine,
instead of the account you used. They're not strict. They're just helplessly
ignorant.

~~~
Zikes
I think it's a bit of a culture clash. Nintendo of America seems to do what
they can, given the short leash Nintendo of Japan has them on.

There seems to be something about Japanese culture that is fundamentally
incompatible with the "share everything" West.

~~~
Laforet
They just don't buy into the subscrption model at all and it is not limited to
just games. A lot of major Japanese music labels pulled their titles from
Apple Music lately because they worry that it competes with the sales of
physical albums, without realsing that the market has been in decline for at
least a decade.

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dijit
The author paints a rosy picture of PC gaming, but in my experience (I work
for a AAA game studio) PC sales are by in far the least profitable (10%~) and
the most likely to cause piracy (crackers even use the PC version to figure
out how to reverse engineer the console versions)

This would tell me that we simply don't know how to make games for the PC
platform; but the author also ascribes the freemium model to PC gaming- which
I personally see as a blight on gaming and firmly in the realm of the
smartphone market..

or at least they do it more tenaciously.

~~~
Mithaldu
On the other hand games on PC have a much longer tail with much less effort
and can often bring in money decades after release (see GOG). There's also a
difference in store design that makes it really easy to find things on steam
you didn't know before and are relevant to you, even if they're really old;
while the stores on consoles are utterly useless if you are not buying the
newest games or know which game you're looking for.

As for the freemium comment, you didn't understand him correctly. There's
different ways to do freemium. One way is to sell cheats, and design the game
so it becomes progressively more unfun to play without cheats. (mobile games)
The other is to make the game free to play and offer either cosmetics (tf2) or
pieces of the gameplay (warthunder) for cash. The latter is really nice, and
seems to happen exclusively on PC.

~~~
Zikes
I'm utterly baffled at how terrible the Playstation 4 store experience is. I
can't help but think it's somehow intentional, but for the life of me I can't
figure out why.

~~~
Mithaldu
It's not intentional. Just like Nintendo, Sony is just very helplessly
ignorant about many things. Even their webstore has childlishly naive
failings. They recently added a wishlist, which has a maximum of 100 entries,
and doesn't automatically remove games bought. As well, when they update the
webstore, on tuesday, it becomes a literal minefield because they update every
single item slowly, over the course of 3-4 hours, in production, and often the
storefront will display different prices for items than you see in the cart.

------
Zikes
> A close cousin to crowdfunding is the trend of pre-releasing games before
> they are finished.

This has contributed to a disturbing trend of actually releasing games before
they are finished. AAA titles have been released in the past couple of years
that should have been delayed several months to be fixed and polished first.
Batman: Arkham Knight was so terrible on PC that all stores offered no-
questions refunds, and even stopped selling the game altogether until it was
patched. Fallout 4 committed the cardinal sin of tying physics to framerate,
so people with high-end gaming machines are actually experiencing more bugs
and issues than most, unless they cap their framerates.

~~~
kevingadd
You're right on Batman and the general theme, so I upvoted you, but you're
totally wrong about FO4.

Physics are _always_ tied to framerate. There is not a game physics library in
wide use that is independent of update rate. In practice what usually happens
is that the physics library has an internal tick rate (say every 1ms or every
2ms) and every frame N physics ticks occur to catch up. Without this, the
physics sim would be dangerously unstable (and in practice, it still is).

There are many other places where game code is typically framerate dependent,
not just physics. Even games that are 'framerate independent' are often
framerate dependent in very subtle ways, such that players with high or low
framerates gain an advantage or experience unique bugs. Most parts of a game
are not continuous equations that you can perfectly evaluate at any point in
time; there are always 'frames'.

So ultimately, this is not some unique cardinal sin FO4 committed. It's just
another in a long series of Bethesda titles that ship incredibly buggy and
broken and don't get fixed, largely as a result of the way they build
software. The incredible scope of their games is a factor, though, as building
games that large is EXTREMELY HARD.

Ultimately you should consider people talking about FO4 framerates that way to
be in the same bucket as the types who get vigorously upset about a game being
locked to 30fps: Uninformed.

~~~
ufo
> Physics are always tied to framerate

Why does it have to be like this? I would think the more robust approach would
be to decouple the simulation from the rendering and display interpolated
frames if the renderer framerate is higher than the simulation framerate.

~~~
hacker_9
Whilst it's nice to think in separate concepts such as 'physics' and
'rendering', in reality all these things are tightly coupled together in code.
For example collisions inform physics which informs collisions which informs
animations etc. Also with memory being so scarce in AAA games you have to
evaluate the cost of using separate threads for different actions, which leads
to problems of resource sharing, deadlocks, syncing of update/render loops
etc.

Bungie did a talk on their multi threaded renderer for Destiny. Google it if
you want to see how complex the design can get, and how it affects the whole
game process.

~~~
ufo
Thanks. Apparently fallout4 has a bunch of bugs on higher-end PCs because and
I was wondering why they would couple things like that. I guess the harsh
restrictions of gamedev explain it a bit then...

btw, I think this is the video the parent mentioned, in case anyone is
interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nTDFLMLX9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nTDFLMLX9k)

------
Macsenour
I feel I should point out that the "Games" section of Kickstarter also
includes board games, which takes a big chunk of cash.

~~~
Zikes
A good point, and many games are being developed for consoles, or include
consoles as "stretch goals".

