Ben Sizer

@Natanox@chaos.social @rye@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe Yup, it’s become easier than ever to get something shipped but probably still ridiculously hard to be able to pay yourself minimum wage from it. But at least for now game developers still have some price-setting capability, unlike musicians who are mostly squeezed out by tech platforms.

@leeloo@techhub.social @antonyjohnston@mastodon.social I don’t have a good answer for that, but I know a lot of good indie developers never finish or ship their game due to lack of resources. I like independent games (and music, and film) but sometimes we glamourise a culture that is basically expecting hobbyists to provide us with work at their expense. It’s a tricky one.

Tonight, on…
BlueSky: “Trump is destroying 80 years of American moral leadership”
X: “Zelensky is on cocaine and should never have started the war”
Mastodon: “Mozilla have removed a paragraph from their terms of service!!”

Time we switched all this brain-rot off.

2 seconds into logging on to Mastodon and at the top of my feed I see people lobbying for the Internet Archive to continue stealing the work of authors. There’s so much hypocrisy on the Fediverse where people think they’re principled for stopping creators losing out to AI, but equally principled for demanding that we can just steal those creators’ work directly. Freeloader culture is not the same as collaborative culture.

Seen some academics recently admit that they’re not going to attempt to stop their students using LLMs to write their papers. So I guess industry is going to have to make junior interviews even more stressful to weed out the people who got a higher education qualification that does not reflect their actual knowledge.

@Natanox@chaos.social @rye@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe Agreed, the reliance on Steam is a really bad thing. Sadly, gamers have traditionally rejected other stores, and there’s a wider trend for online ‘consumers’ to expect every store or platform to carry every product, which is unreasonable and props up monopolies. It needs regulatory intervention IMHO, but I think that’s true of almost all tech.

@Natanox@chaos.social @rye@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe How many of those indies are hobbyists making games alongside a day job though? I’ve not seen a move from mainstream games to indie development. It’s still a tough market.

Once again I find myself furious that I can't get a photo from my Windows machine to my iPhone without emailing it. Why is iCloud on Windows so broken? Why is Dropbox so bad on iPhones? Why are these companies all so abusive to their customers?

@leeloo@techhub.social @antonyjohnston@mastodon.social Problem is that nobody’s funding indie games to fill that space and there’s no sign that the market is moving towards buying more of them either.