Red flag: The I.MX8M Plus is painfully slow...

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Quoting: Mountain ManHow broad do we expect this law to be?

The original introduction video to the campaign talked about this. They also mentioned that in an ideal world, all of what you mentioned would be regulated in a way that allows people to keep accessing the content they bought a license for. However, the initiators were aware that it would never happen if it was that broad, so they picked games as a smaller target. That's not perfect, but it's a start.

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@soulsource how much difference is there between a cloud platform and, say, a Linux PC? Besides the scale of the cloud. Is it possible to reuse the software designed for a cloud and run it on a conventional x86_64 Linux device with perhaps minimal changes to the game client so it can locate the custom server? Same for Arm64 Linux, I don't know which one is more popular on cloud

The big difference is the software. Which is owned by the cloud platform providers and not available to the game developers. Of course it can be mocked (as TheShEEEP pointed out), but that's work too, that needs to be paid for.

I, as a player, would rather prefer that games will never be designed around an ingame store anymore.

As a gamedev: I wished so too. However, often the options a publisher gives are "live support title with in-game store", or "the project won't happen". Since it isn't easy to find game project funding at the moment, the second option might very well mean having to fire people, or even closing the studio, so it's about as much a choice as the Patrician's offer of "freedom" in Going Postal.

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As a gamedev: I think you got it perfectly right.

Nowadays online multiplayer games with dedicated servers and in-game store are usually designed around a cloud platform. Not because it couldn't be done otherwise, but because it's cheaper to develop around a ready-made cloud API than developing the server-side software yourself. Those cloud-APIs tend to end up everywhere in the game though, simply because once one has them as a dependency, it's just too convenient to use them whenever they are suitable.For instance, if you have an in-game-store run by a cloud platform, it is just natural to also have the player inventory managed by the cloud platform, because then the server can just modify the inventory when the player uses the store. When the publisher stops paying for the cloud platform though, the players' inventory management becomes unavailable, and has to be coded again, from scratch. The same is true for all other features handled by the cloud provider (matchmaking, score-tracking, etc.).

Implementing all those things so the game works without the cloud provider is probably doable within a couple of man-weeks, but it's not nothing, and publishers need an incentive to pay for it.

(That's why I, as a gamedev, support Stop Killing Games - it offers us developers leverage that we can use to convince publishers to pay for features like an offline-mode or direct-IP support.)

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People can say close to 100% of companies are/will be using AI for coding, but what they mean is "some kind of clump in my immediate view are all doing it". I don't think anyone actually knows how prevalent or otherwise it really is.

Indeed. I'm regularly checking mastodon.gamedev.place, and from what I read there my impression would be the opposite, namely that LLM tools are barely used for coding.

(As far as I am aware, at my workplace we do not use generative AI for anything that goes into our final products. We do use it for placeholder artwork and for writing shell scripts or other tooling that doesn't end up in the games though.)

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I played it on the Switch.
The game itself is pretty good. The requirement to be logged in with a Ubisoft account is horrible.

I cannot recommend the game therefore.

(On Switch, at least, you could work around the login-requirement by disconnecting from the internet. I don't know if that's an option on PC.)

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Don't those visual give you nausea and/or a headache?

I quite often suffer from motion sickness when playing 3D games. I cannot play Minecraft on PC for instance. However, I have no problems playing Hyper Demon. Might also be because I suck at the game and my usual session length is shorter than 5 minutes.

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Noice! Finally raising a drawbridge isn't an "I win" button any more.

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Quoting:
Purple Library GuySo what if you had a game where overall, you're placing the widgets. But, the efficiency they work at is based on you doing the process manually in a minigame--they operate at speed and efficiency based on your best run of handling the job personally.

Warning: Shameless self-advertisement:

We use such a mechanic in Bus Simulator 18. You can hire NPC drivers and assign them to drive bus routes for you, but the income they generate depends on your own best result on that bus route. If you haven't driven a route yourself, the NPC drivers don't generate any income on it at all.

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It would be so nice if all bigger banks would invest the time to come up with a solution that allows to cut out those payment-processor middle-men.

There are solutions, but those are all insular solutions... For instance, here in Austria, we have EPS. That's a Web-API that online-stores can use for payment processing with Austrian banks. It's the most user-friendly solution that I know, but it's limited to Austria...

Similarly, in the EU there would be SEPA Instant Transfer, which could be used for a payment processing solution. However, it's optional for banks to implement it, and again, it's limited to EU...

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