IMO your first mistake was not having an out when the director got fired. As nostrademons3 says, you should have been networking and finding your “next gig” within the company if you want to stay to vest.
Moving forward, be the master of your own destiny. Network, find the good teams with good leadership and good trajectory within the company. Get interested in their work. See how you can collaborate. Plant the seeds.
Agreed I’d rather spend more time on itch. But from a dev perspective poki has a chance to monetise while itch monetisation is near zero at the moment.
When the original article is talking about escaping the tyranny of the app store it sounds to me like they don't want to share the loot box revenue with Apple/Google, like our chinese friends at Epic.
Unfortunately for them, there are still pay once real games. Some of the good indies are on itch.io indeed.
Stop calling lootbox dispensers "games" please. I prefer paying for a game in advance instead of being monetized.
Web gaming might be a decent incremental revenue source (< 10%) for big developers or the main distribution channel for small studios that will never make it big.
But it will never be more than that.
1. Game ops is too entrenched in mobile. The entire stack (user acquisition, analytics, monetisation) is tried and tested on mobile. These are difficult problems that seem easy to port to web games, but “devils in the detail”. Eg When you’re waiting on appsflyer to ship an update to properly attribute reinstalls for 6 months and end up wasting 25% of your UA budget during that time.
2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab.
3. Unity’s dev network effects are too large. People who know how to make games use unity. People who want to make games therefore learn unity. It’s a flywheel.
4. Something psychological about downloading an app and seeing it on your Home Screen leads to retention.
Source: 7 years game dev and each studio I’ve worked in has been paid multiple tens of thousand dollars to port a game to web. Metrics were never anywhere near as good.
I'm sure there are problems with web games, but some of your arguments seem stem from ignorance about the modern web tech[1].
> 2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab.
Fullscreen mode mostly solves the misclick problem. PWAs solve it entirely. Do consumers care at all about what the underlying technology is.
> 3. Unity’s dev network effects are too large. People who know how to make games use unity. People who want to make games therefore learn unity. It’s a flywheel.
There's Unity web. And people who really know how to make games can also use e.g. Unreal, which as compiled for web for ages.
> 4. Something psychological about downloading an app and seeing it on your Home Screen leads to retention.
PWAs can install to Home Screen.
[1] There is admittedly one company unable to implement modern web tech.
Just played around with a PWA on iOS and added it to Home Screen. Works really really nicely and so it seems pwa have come along a lot since I last looked into them! Thanks for the prompt to update my understanding.
I do disagree in the developer point though. Those who know unity really do not translate well to unreal. Totally different languages and ecosystems. Also unity web has always really really sucked for anything other than gimmick games.
I'm not sure about the specifics of UE/Unity/Godot but I was under the impression that a Hello World in any of those for the web would be about 20MB where as the Three.js game I'm working on will be at most 1MB when done (not counting game music soundtrack).
The article was disappointing. It’s the first time in a while I’ve read the Economist but I feel the quality has really gone down.
Why did the Department of Health state there was a surplus? What policy decisions allowed them to make that recommendation? What mechanisms meant medical schools, who have an incentive to increase class size, reacted the way they did? What is the difference in salary for “DO’s”? What part do HMOs and insurance companies play, who surely have an incentive to lower the cost of medicine?
One argument is tacit collusion to “inflate salaries” which may be part of it, but if this accounts for all of the impact then it is a scandal and evidence of institutional corruption that should be paraded in the streets. I’d imagine a class action lawsuit by students who didn’t make it into med school against the DoH. I don’t think this answers it all.
In any case, I think the uppermost level of medicine will get decimated by AI. It’s mostly knowledge work with a focus on experience. It feels like the perfect use case for generative AI. On the other hand having more people doing the manual work (putting in a catheter etc) will likely last a lot longer as robotics has seemed to stall in advancements.
> One argument is tacit collusion to “inflate salaries” which may be part of it, but if this accounts for all of the impact then it is a scandal and evidence of institutional corruption that should be paraded in the streets.
The role of the AMA in restricting the supply of doctors has been paraded for decades, but it just doesn't catch on. People like their personal doctors and refuse to think ill of doctors, though they'll happily blame others in the medical industry. I find it quite believable that the doctors industry would err on the side of undersupply, making their own salaries high, rather than risk oversupply and a drop in salaries.
Is that "collusion"? That's just terminology. It's the standard "regulatory capture", as government officially delegates accreditation to the medical industry, despite the obvious conflict of interest. The AMA argues they're protecting doctor quality, even though they overtly worry about oversupply.
We seem to go in a circle:
CEOs “don’t have skin in the game” —> more share based comp —> Stock does well. Decry excessive CEO comp —> Depeg ceo pay from stock —> repeat
Such a breath of fresh air to read this. I choose to work remote and only look at companies that do that.
My first was Canonical.
Since then I worked at a startup and when they went office first, I left even though I had not fully vested. I choose life over career and its a tough choice at times but I’m happy with it :)
Moving forward, be the master of your own destiny. Network, find the good teams with good leadership and good trajectory within the company. Get interested in their work. See how you can collaborate. Plant the seeds.