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Hateyou

Not Great, Not Terrible
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It could also be it is no longer a niche hobby anymore like the 80s and early 90s. It’s massive corporations and thousands of indie studios.
 
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Caliane

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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I do think its lots of factors.

1. just too many games. any famous dev is going to be famous in their circle and not really break out. Everyone thats played PoE knows who Chris Wilson of GGG is. regedit (andrew spinks) of terraria is pretty famous in his circle. concerned ape, Eric Barone of Stardew valley. and so on.

2. dev time on games is long these days. ultima 1- 81, ultima 2-82, ultima 3- 83, ultima 4- 85, ultima 5-88 and so on. every ultima was 1-2 years after the previous.

3. dev teams are also huge. back in the day 1 guy being THE guy for a game was the norm. or even a handful of core people that could become famous. now dev teams are hundreds of people. its impossible to even tell who does what.

4. dev time and "forever games" is a thing too. A lot of those famous guys are famous for basically just fine tuning their games for decades, instead of pumping out many games. terraria, stardewvally, minecraft- and markus, etc. chris with PoE.
 
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Caeden

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Vanilla WoW was like 40 people. You can’t even come close to that big a game and that quality for that number of people.

I’ve also wondered if the whole DEI push and then the explosion of AI and other shit have resulted in guys saying fuck that and just dropping out of game dev for something more meritocratic and lucrative.
 
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M Power

N00b
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Vanilla WoW was like 40 people. You can’t even come close to that big a game and that quality for that number of people.

I’ve also wondered if the whole DEI push and then the explosion of AI and other shit have resulted in guys saying fuck that and just dropping out of game dev for something more meritocratic and lucrative.
Look at John Carmak for evidence of moving on to more lucrative things. Easily a once in a lifetime game dev.
 
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Cybsled

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End of the day, money is what changed stuff. Games suddenly had budgets like Hollywood blockbusters because big publishing houses were willing to toss more money at projects in the hopes it would equal big returns. With more money comes more expectations, so you need to bring on more people to meet those investor expectations. You also had the "Peter Principal" thing going on where your former MVP devs get promoted for the good work they did on those prior games, leading to new people coming in and those former MVP devs now primarily focusing on management and team coordination instead of actually making stuff themselves. Or those former MVP devs figure they will go it alone and leave (with mixed success).
 
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M Power

N00b
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End of the day, money is what changed stuff. Games suddenly had budgets like Hollywood blockbusters because big publishing houses were willing to toss more money at projects in the hopes it would equal big returns. With more money comes more expectations, so you need to bring on more people to meet those investor expectations. You also had the "Peter Principal" thing going on where your former MVP devs get promoted for the good work they did on those prior games, leading to new people coming in and those former MVP devs now primarily focusing on management and team coordination instead of actually making stuff themselves. Or those former MVP devs figure they will go it alone and leave (with mixed success).
It's even more Hollywood than that. Bigger budgets mean less risk which means more remakes and safe franchises. Luckily, things like Steam have allowed indie developers to achieve success that 10-15 years ago was not really possible.
 
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M Power

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Microsoft Patent Would Use AI to Play Games For You
A newly discovered Microsoft patent describes a cloud-based system that would allow an AI or another player to take over your session and complete difficult parts of a game for you.
Screenshot 2026-03-08 at 3.15.38 PM.png
 
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Malakriss

Avatar of War Slayer
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"For you" no they're literally patenting bots. For the player would be a skip system that immediately auto-completes and doesn't waste time and resources mimicking an actual player.
 

Fucker

Log Wizard
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Yeah, when you were a kid you did two things if you were at the drugstore or the grocery store, you'd either go to the magazine section and read video game magazines, Mad magazine, comics, or even things like guns and ammo. Mom always allowed us to typically get a magazine or something a week. That or you'd bring along some quarters and go play whatever arcade game they had.

Life was so goddamn different back then.
Now there aren't even magazine racks at grocery stores. There are some at the book store, but most of them are $15+ and nearly all ads. Hell, there aren't very many book stores at all anymore. There used to be one in every mall or adjacent to grocery stores. Bookstore I went to as a kid was in the same mall as the grocery store. Books and magazine on a huge number of subjects. Look at all the great books written in the 60's, 70's. So much quality stuff to read. Now, I bet there isn't anything on that level, and I can't name a single popular author of the last 20 years.

The same with music stores. Most of them closed down, and with them any type of variety was lost.

Kind of amazing that all forms of quality entertainment has been eradicated. Movies? All trash. TV? All trash. Books? Trash. Music? Trash.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Vanilla WoW was like 40 people. You can’t even come close to that big a game and that quality for that number of people.

I’ve also wondered if the whole DEI push and then the explosion of AI and other shit have resulted in guys saying fuck that and just dropping out of game dev for something more meritocratic and lucrative.

Yeah, this is the absolute truth of Software Engineering. If you are any flavor of Software Engineer other than like art assets/model maker for games specifically then the you can work in just about every industry for more money and less stress. So the best developers all do that.
 
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Kajiimagi

<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
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Help me out bros. I dl the demo for Esoteric Ebb and added it to my wishlist. I know I added the demo to my library and dl it to make sure it worked but only played like 2 minutes (basically to make sure it would work). Now the demo isn't in my library any more. It's being compared to Disco Elysian and frankly I didn't care for that game. Was going to play the demo more to see if I click with it (you know the point of a demo). Does Steam remove them now?
 

Fogel

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Help me out bros. I dl the demo for Esoteric Ebb and added it to my wishlist. I know I added the demo to my library and dl it to make sure it worked but only played like 2 minutes (basically to make sure it would work). Now the demo isn't in my library any more. It's being compared to Disco Elysian and frankly I didn't care for that game. Was going to play the demo more to see if I click with it (you know the point of a demo). Does Steam remove them now?

Still see the demo on steam, did you accidentally hide it?
 

Utnayan

F16 - Having fun in Iran
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Help me out bros. I dl the demo for Esoteric Ebb and added it to my wishlist. I know I added the demo to my library and dl it to make sure it worked but only played like 2 minutes (basically to make sure it would work). Now the demo isn't in my library any more. It's being compared to Disco Elysian and frankly I didn't care for that game. Was going to play the demo more to see if I click with it (you know the point of a demo). Does Steam remove them now?

If you uninstall a demo it removes it from your library. Not sure if you did that or not.
 

Fogel

Mr. Poopybutthole
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yeah I probably did but would the demo not still be on the store page?

Did you DL the demo before the game released? If then, the demo was its own store page, and now that its released you need to go to the released game page to DL the demo again

1773027899296.png
 
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