I dunno about "never". Look on the bright side--when climate change crashes civilization, the number of new games on Steam will probably drop down to something quite manageable!

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Quoting: NezchanInteresting that the "how do you specifically use AI" is entirely taken up by a disclaimer about how it's trained, and he doesn't actually say what it's used for.

Well, I guess that's what people care about. I mean the questions he's really answering are "Are you arguably ripping off other artists' work?" and "Is the resulting art going to be crap because AI?" and he is taking pains to give a pretty convincing "no."

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualVery interesting usage of LLM tooling. I wonder what the benefits are; it almost seems more costly and more work to do it the way they're doing it.

Maybe they just have/know more coders than artists.

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Quoting: scaineLooking at the top 100 games, it's dominated by multiplayer titles. A few single player games stand out, like Slay the Spire and a handful can be played single player, but there's a big focus on gaming together there.

I think that's all it is. There are so many games that encourage group gaming now, so we're seeing this rise in numbers, both from organic growth, but also from a desire to play with others, either against them (battle royal, or team games like DOTA, PUBG or CoD) or together (co-op focused games, like Helldivers).

Hm. This could be a problem for Linux and the Steam Deck, since those games are more likely to have anti-cheat that won't work on Linux.

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Maybe Supermarket Simulator lets you imagine a supermarket without all the recent price hikes . . .

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAmazon takes 75%, for those curious, and 60% if you agree to make your audiobook exclusive to Audible. This is before the publisher even takes their cut.

It's actually generally considered pretty good deal, the audiobook stuff is.
You come off pretty well. You may earn a little bit less. […] The money is not as good as print but that's because they also have to hire all these people to do these wonderful audiobooks and a lot of money is going to them as deservedly so. So, you can expect to earn around 2 bucks an audiobook. And that's good money.

Brandon Sanderson on Audible, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C59eOLX2K-A&t=2106 [External Link]

If I was doing all the work then I'd take more money, too. Whether it's generally a fair deal is a different question (the lecture is almost ancient) but it's also not generally unfair.

/edit: Published too soon by mistake.

Those are revenue shares for any audiobooks you do that you want to put on Audible, including your own. I don't know what the deal is with Audible Originals. There's an argument to be made that there are much larger files involved than ebooks (about 100-200 times larger, in some cases), but that's still incredibly cutthroat. Audible can demand that because everyone uses Audible for audiobooks. Where else are you going to go?

The publisher that pays for the audiobook to be done (either in-house or contracted out from a studio Audible has no ties with) gets 25-40% of the revenue, as compared to 70% on Kindle. You have more options for ebooks. Way more options. Apple Books is probably the most profitable store, actually.

Edit: I've watched the bit of the lecture you linked. Yes, Brandon's argument that you have a captive audience is a good one. Audible's monopoly on audiobooks means that, despite earning a lot less, you can expect to make more sales than selling direct on your publisher's site, for example.

If you had the marketing budget, would it be more effective advertising on Amazon to get more Audible sales, or more effective driving traffic to your own site and getting 100% of the revenue? Would advertising on Amazon get you 4 sales for every 1 sale you get driving traffic to your site? Bit of a tough question without analytics, but i don't think it's quite 4 times as much in most cases. But if you exclusively sell on Amazon and get the 60-40 revenue share? Well, then Audible starts to make more sense...

The downside, of course, is that you can't sell DRM-free audiobooks on Audible. So you could screw over your customers by taking the exclusive deal and not offering them a DRM-free version on the publisher's site, and possibly make more money, reinforcing Audible's monopoly.

The basic problem comes down to monopoly. Something should be done about that problem. On this topic a good read is Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's "Chokepoint Capitalism".

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: 1430%? Now, let's talk about Audible....

Amazon takes 75%, for those curious, and 60% if you agree to make your audiobook exclusive to Audible. This is before the publisher even takes their cut.

When it comes to concentrated evil, it is hard to beat Amazon. They seem to work very hard at it.

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Quoting: Marlock

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: Marlockimho relentless virtual protests in nintendo's virtual world squares (now that all games are MMOs) would be cheaper

Guessing this might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, since none of Nintendo's games have live virtual squares and they don't run any MMOs? :tongue:

From what I remember, even the hub-cities in the Splatoon games just pulled names and outfits from a pool of users who are online when you log on and then just put them in random poses in your personal temporary local instance of the area. The maximum interaction you have with them is to view a message or such (if that), so long as displaying them hasn't been disabled by the user or parental controls.

Quoting: Marlock(zero cost for nintendo users, which are the primary interested parties)

Nintendo charges for its online service, though... :huh:

Yep, it was all tongue-in-cheek

Nintendo is too controlling and too murderous for any in-game protest to actually work..
They'd probably ban and sue users over it, same as they do with emulators, spin-offs...

... 3rd-party mods... ... ow wait, there are none either because their platform is ludicrously closed off

AFAIK (but i'm not a nintendo cult follower) the only pokemon square in a nintendo game that's an MMO was real world squares in Pokemon GO

hum... now where did they place those rare pokemons?! :p

This points to a more general problem with the virtual town square as opposed to the real one, when it comes to popular power: In the virtual one, it's like the authorities have doctor Manhattan. "Listen closely: You will all return to your homes." "Yeah? And what if we don't want to, ya blue-faced freak?" "You misunderstand. It was not a request." (Poof! Crowd all gone)

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Quoting: PoliticsOfStarvingI just installed ChimeraOS on a htpc. Would I have been better off with Bazzite?

Depends. How well off are you with ChimeraOS? :wink:

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Sweeney's point here is that Valve make a lot of money from that 30% cut and goes on to say "If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made" and complains that when you add together Valve's cut, marketing and so on that the cut for developers is small.

So his first argument is that Valve is making more money from the games that sell really well than the publisher themselves.

Valve almost immediately reduces their cut of games that sell really well:

It was only a few days later (quite cheekily then), that Valve suddenly publicly announced their plan to reduce their take for the top-selling Steam games.

And then Tim Sweeney complains about Valve not doing it for everyone and only the big publishers benefit (that isn't necessarily true; small developers occasionally ship hits).

If Valve reduced their cut for everyone, what would his next argument be?

I'm trying to take Tim Sweeney's side here because it's true that Valve has a near-monopoly on PC games (I wish they had a monopoly on Japanese VNs too) and monopoly power should not exist, but these arguments don't seem to be coming from a place where I can assume good faith.

What I find even more absurd is that it to me sounds like he actually is quite ok with Valve taking 30% but is having more of a problem with Apple doing it and wants Valve to lower their commission to thus somehow force Apple to lower theirs as well.

I could probably make an argument that Valve does deserve 30% but Apple do not. After all, one thing that's been pointed out repeatedly in this thread is that Valve does a lot more than be a store--they got all these features, community, support for modding, yadda yadda, and the claim many of us have made is that it's this extra stuff that makes Valve worth the 30%. I don't think Apple does any of that stuff, so it would follow they're not worth the 30%.

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