This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.
Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.
This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.
No, see you’ve fallen into the exact trap I just described. The “exact same binaries” is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won’t. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you’ve still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).
For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.
Edit: btw I’m not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I’ve been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.
This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
The reality is those other platforms won’t make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they’ve made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.
It’s the same reason a lot of indies don’t target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn’t make sense for small teams. Anyone who says “But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It’s literally two clicks!” has no idea what they’re talking about and hasn’t actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.
It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the “new” Metro-style Settings, then just kind of… gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can’t believe they’ve left it this long to address, it’s an awful user experience.
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.
But in many ways, it would probably be easier for them to remake in first person, considering they’ve got the engine and a wealth of Fallout 3D assets ready to go.
I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?