They removed the de minimis exemption the day before they announced the tariffs so it's conflated all the time, but they are technically different policies enacted with separate executive orders
The reason we chose to prioritize client support, then server, was replication. If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind. It would also allow us to make Librebox more practical for game development in its early stages.
We'd love to see how you could do the client-server model though. Perhaps, there is a new and more efficient way.
>If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind
Unless you are running the client against server, you will never know if the client features you are writing are any good.
The games need to run on the server by default, and the clients are just a "view" into what is happening on the server.
For ease of development, your app is a fully functioning server and a client in a single application.
When playing single player, the game is still running on a local server, with only a single client connected.
I strongly recommend building everything around the communication pipeline between the server and client. Make it very easy to dial up latency and packet loss.
Makes total sense. It's even better for motivation of the developer. The offline client proves that it is possible to continue working on this huge project since it gives you "quick" feedback that you are making progress.
For people not aware, Grow a Garden is the most popular Roblox experience ever released. It achieved one of the highest peak concurrent player counts of over 21.3 million players. To this day the active player count hovers around 2-8 million concurrent players at any given hour
Famitsu (a Japanese magazine) has top ten sales of console games in Japan every week. Until the Switch 2 launch, Mario Kart 8 was there nearly every week.
Wii Sports enjoyed a similar status, as it was also bundled with a console. I don't think console bundles are necessarily a fair way to count video game sales.
Mario Kart was not originally bundled with the Switch and the Switch has never been exclusively bundled with Mario Kart. You've always been able to buy a Switch by itself or bundled with other games - Mario Kart was not even the first bundle. It was like the 8th or something - two years after release, and has been re-issued every Black Friday since, but there have been numerous other bundles since as well.
A pro scene is absolutely not a sign of a popular game. Oftentimes it's the reverse. There are so many strange externalities with a healthy pro scene that can positively destroy your general appeal. Leaving you with perhaps 10,000 really insane players, and no community outside of that.
I’ve not gathered any data to prove it, but I’ve long held a hunch that there’s something of an inverse correlation between multiplayer games’ popularity among highly competitive players and the masses.
Most people don’t want to spend large amounts of time “getting good” and don’t enjoy getting matched up against players that absolutely destroy them, but instead prefer more casual games against other players with middling skills. The thing is though, even if highly competitive games include an unranked queue intended for casuals, it ends up being filled with smurfs[0] and the like looking to smash lower skilled players, which drains the fun from the game for those players. Thinking about it that way, it’d make perfect sense if the most popular PvP games would be those that are shunned by the highly competitive - a lack of “pro” players might be considered a feature rather than a bug.
An unranked queue is often just like "well, we didn't do any game design for you on meta-progression".
Normal players would like to participate in the progression systems you design! Having a ranked queue that is uninviting to normal players due to skill, and an unranked queue that is uninviting to everyone due to progression design, but less uninviting to normal players than the ranked queue, is a pretty suboptimal result.
It's lately become a lot more popular to just secretly (or at least stealthily) put people in with bots. Marvel Snap was really successful at emulating opponents at low ranks and gradually increasing real opponent density the higher you are. Battle Royale games with 100 players per game can easily add a bunch of bots so you aren't at the bottom and can even win. I noticed Mario Kart World also has bots in most knockout matches (and I highly appreciate that it is transparent about this fact.)
There's also a ton of multi sale per person in overwatch. Especially before role queue existed, it was easier to just spend 10 bucks on a new account to learn a hero than to suffer ELO hell while doing it. People are so toxic in competitive shooters, and playing at the ELO of your best heroes while on a hero you don't even know the abilities of is very very unpleasant. I struggle to think of a person I played with that didn't have multiple accounts, some with as many as 5-10.
This is to say nothing of the rampant cheating in the game, which if a person ever gets banned for, there is nothing stopping them from just spending 10$ on a replacement account.
It’s rare for any product to have more success in later invocations than the first edition, that is where the narrative is fresh and strong- and even in the event sequels are stronger, they tend to increase sales of the first season/movie/etc; because people want the whole experience.
Video games I feel like reverse this general trend, though. Unless they have a major story component (and sometimes even if they do) many games get iteratively 'better' (better for the purposes of making sales if not of making original fans happy) for various reasons: improvements to the core game loop, polish that makes the game more appealing to new audiences, and most importantly graphics.
Story-based content is what struggles with sequels because it's really hard to both capture the feeling of the original sufficiently to satisfy existing fans while also telling a new story that's interesting in its own right. Being derivative without being too derivative.
I remember in the 80s/90s when it seemed every movie sequel sucked. Just cashed in, and not really planned for from the beginning.
I don't think it's ever really been true that video game sequels sucked. Maybe Zelda 2 and to a lesser extent Mario 2 - but game developers seem to break new ground on sequels a lot. In fact I think sequels have been better than originals more often than not throughout game history.
For one thing it may just be more common for the first to not reach its full audience.
But my experience as a game developer is also that, when you start out making a new game, you probably kinda suck at making that game. Games sometimes suck for most of their development until they suddenly get good near the end.
And by the end, you get really good at making that specific game. A lot of game design has to come together to enlighten further game design decisions, and you really come to know what's fun by the end of it. Not to mention the technology you build for it!
A lot of game development is trying to find an idea that hits. When developing a new game, there are a lot of unknowns, budgets are tight, a lot of compromises are made, and often there are plenty of rough edges.
A sequel allows the same team to build on the shoulders of the first game, keeping what worked, adding features that players missed and refining those that didn’t work. It’s seen as a safer investment, with an existing fan base to leverage, and so this often leads to larger development and marketing budgets with a focus on growth.
There’s no fucking way they would have spent so much money on three WH titles and a fuckton of DLC to make an absolutely colossal RTS game if it was niche. Total War Warhammer single handedly saved WH Fantasy with how well it sold.
PC games are relatively niche compared to console gaming for one. And RTSes tend to be heavily PC biased from the control schemes. Although these days you should be able to keyboard and mouse to a console due to being USB or Bluetooth connected anyway, using it on a couch without a desk would be awkward.
Team Sonic Racing is also available on iOS and android stores while Total War Three Kingdoms is PC only. The price must also be widely different, so the sales numbers are complex to compare.
Frameworks like Vue 3 don't actually work on older browsers since it requires ES2016 support in the browsers.. that means IE 11 and older browsers are out. With Svelte you need Microsoft Edge (IE 11 is not supported). Also, it requires Firefox 74 (released in 2020) or newer Firefox versions.
With React, you can make it work with older browsers using Polyfill etc.
I think the author chose these two shows as a comparison because they were created in roughly the same time period, so they're more directly comparable. Mister Rogers was created in a different era, with different media environment, funding and monetization strategy, and functionally in a different medium.
Responsible, maybe, but Liable? I don't think so. So long as you genuinely try to do your best and don't break the law, the a company can do is fire you.
Multiple sources have pointed out how they fail at the their. Saving pennies while losing pounds (in the form of things like National Parks and NOAA) is bullshit.
