It is sadly far more common than I think many might realize.

I went to school with a bunch of folks who worked all over the industry, and now only a little under half of them remain in the game industry.

They’ve worked at Bungie, BioWare, on Ken Levine projects, DOOM 2016, games for Netflix, etc. and so many like myself dropped out mostly because of the depressingly high rate of studio closure and mass layoffs that so much of the industry engages in.

I know of at least one that has gone off on their own à la indie dev whom originally worked on the Saints Row games while at Volition, but he’s yet to reach the success I imagine he deserves - given that he was probably one of the most talented folks in our cohort at our game dev school.

The “safe” way probably is one involving mass unionization, but I don’t see that happening - same with software. It just popped up post-Reagan - which seems to have been the point where new career fields didn’t adopt a pro-union stance…

As far as “for fun” goes, I sometimes do little visual projects, but no - the last time I worked on game stuff directly outside of just some casual consultation was at my last game job in 2012.

Also, that’s super crazy you saw that and crossed paths here, too. 😅

Glad at least a couple folks liked it.

I’m hopeful for a more federated circle of platforms to revive something more akin to the internet pre-Facebook, but I don’t know if it will ever get there.

Lemmy and Mastodon are great, but they still are nowhere at critical mass… and the platforms have largely remained somewhat stagnant feature-improvement-wise.

Who knows what will happen, but I am hopeful things overall in the Fediverse will continue to improve - even if it is mostly as a side-effect occuring from nefarious leadership among big business continuing to consolidate the major wings of the internet…

I wish I could have stayed in it. I loved it, and I loved my coworkers, and I loved making something that people I knew and cared about enjoyed… but I also can’t work in an industry where after 2 years of working on weekends until 3am making a project that then makes SOMEONE literally millions a day, all the while getting paid barely enough to pay back minimums on student loans, I and all my coworkers STILL lose our jobs out of the blue.

It’s not so much that Nintendo is massive… it’s that they don’t FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.

They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.

The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.

Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game’s profit chart shows even a slight slowdown… all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned… and then bailing on the industry completely.

Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.

The reason it’s shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work… so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.

It’s just finally catching up as the owners’ boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.

It’s not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.

This presumes that the closing of studios / layoffs will result in the same sort of funds used to pay for those sorts of investments are going to be recycled and available to new startup studios…

Also assumes that it doesn’t result in people leaving the game industry as a consequence of career game devs deciding the video game industry is largely an untenable career path if any sort of job security and stability is a goal in your life…

…because that’s why I left…

Started working in more general software industry work around 2012. The last game studio I worked for generated something like $8 million / day at its peak revenue point, but they still closed us down and let us all go within 2 years of hitting that milestone in the middle of a new project we were working on.

Haven’t worked more than a handful of days crunch since, and doubled my pay as well.

Not saying I wouldn’t have rather stayed because I didn’t love the work, but I wanted to own a home someday and start a family, so I had to pivot in order to be a relatively more reliable bread-winner for my family.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks!

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Our brains process simple symbols objectively faster than words - it’s why when you see a stop sign they all are 🛑s.

Your 🧠 maps the shape 🛑 more rapidly than the word “STOP” which is made up of several letters that you have to first understand, combine, and then remap in your mind internally.

If they made some stop signs purple triangles, there would be more accidents and traffic violations in relation to stop signs. “STOP” is secondary and takes relatively more time to process than “🛑.”

Symbols that represent objects or entire words are a more direct mapping than words composed of multiple letters.

If you’ll permit me to dust off my old game design hat… similar to the principle as to why it was easier to move Mario in any of his 3D games than it was to move your character in the original PS1 versions of Resident Evil…

…Less layers of “mapping.”

In Super Mario 64, you just angle the stick relative to YOUR view to make Mario go “that” way.

Meanwhile in the original Resident Evil games (and other earlier “3D” perspective games pre-Super Mario 64), tilting “up” on the Dual-Shock L-stick made your character go “forward” from THEIR perspective, not yours.

Part of the challenge was being able to quickly “translate” that layer of mapping in your mind.

TL;DR - 🛑 > ”STOP”

This is yet another one of the many reasons Steam is amazing. Not only do they have an abstracted layer that allows devs to insert control mappings that adapt to show your controller preference… but even BETTER, they have an option for “Universal” controller button iconography where they just show the relative position of the face buttons in a diamond layout ❖ where the button indicated is a filled circle ● and the others are outlined ○ - rather than letters like ABXY.

So like this :

…instead of “× or A or B” from PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo (respectively).

It’s pretty great. Basically feels like Vampire Survivors 64.

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The democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.

For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.

Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.

Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…

Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.

Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.

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I wish “The Studio” was ballsy enough to do an episode about this exactly.

Let’s be honest : the love is from one single thing - Nintendo’s game design.

Shigeru Miyamoto, and all the other major design leads at Nintendo like Masahiro Sakurai have been at this singular company for most of if not their ENTIRE careers and have done nothing but make video games for 40+ years now.

The game industry at large is riddled these days with 20-somethings and interns who’ve never shipped a game, or who are in survival mode and trying to just keep their heads above water employment-wise.

Many older game devs get burned out and change industry, or quit after a decade or so, and even the ones that stay never stick with the same company because so many cut staff after any game ships… except Nintendo and maybe a couple of other companies out there.

And it SHOWS. Nintendo’s game designers - like a 60 year old master carpenter or woodworker or a dwarven master blacksmith - have honed the artisanal craft of game design to a level of mastery otherwise unseen.

Yes Nintendo sucks at pretty much everything else not related directly to game design, but there’s a reason everyone tried to make their open worlds more like Breath of the Wild, or why Astro Bot seems to share so many platforming similarities with masterful 3D Nintendo platformers like Mario Odyssey, and why so many companies tried to copy Wii Sports at the height of its popularity.

Even games like Smash Bros have no comparable equal. Yes Sony did their own melee game featuring their IP, but to even try to compare the 2 games is a joke.

Outside of their masterful gameplay design… Nintendo IP is on the same level as Disney. Everyone else isn’t even Warner Bros. Animation Studios. They’re Hanna-Barbera.

It sucks that Nintendo is being greedy, but that Donkey Kong game DOES look fun and charming as hell and that Mario Kart game is something everyone will still go bonkers for.

Everyone knows what Steam does better, but there are a few things I wish they’d improve :

• more granular touch display
• higher resolution screen + larger higher res touch pad surfaces
• TMR sticks
• a REAL dock with simpler connection of some kind that doesn’t require a weird USB-C connected cable dangling off the top (but still would support 3rd party docks with that USB-C port)
• better vibration motors
• pressure sensitive face buttons (this hasn’t been done standard since the PS2 era, but would open up the possibility of PROPER PS2 emulation for games like MGS2 and MGS3, which STILL hasn’t been done right thanks to the disappearance of pressure sensitive face buttons)
• hot-swappable batteries that can be charged in the Deck or externally if needed
• haptic triggers
• NFC
• built-in microphone array to allow voice chat + isolation
• built-in simple web cam / IR sensor array for face tracking / video chat / streamer setup
• advanced optional stylus with pressure sensitivity / pointer function similar to a wii-mote that can be stored / recharged on top magnetically / wirelessly