chameleon
@chameleon@kbin.social
i'm lizard 🦎
- Comment on Why do mobile games suck nowadays? 1 week ago:
If you're a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you're competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they're only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it's gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.
Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.
- Comment on Why does this website have a loading screen to process my cookie preferences? 1 month ago:
Unfortunately, it's definitively an instance of intentional design. This whole consent dialog thing became a booming "consent management platform" industry. Many of them advertise better acceptance rates than the competition, or used to but have removed those claims in more recent times now that the big GDPR boom is over.
This particular dialog is TrustArc, who are infamous. At one point they defended it with a "well, we gotta retry if it fails to make sure your preference is expected, and we can't know if your adblocker is causing it to fail or if it's just a fluke", which is one of those things where they say something that's not totally wrong but you know they're lying through their teeth.
- Comment on There is one uncleared level remaining in Super Mario Maker, with 18 days to go before the servers shut down 1 month ago:
Someone hacked in a clear (in-game). First time it happened to this level, but not the first time it happened overall.
- Comment on Any service cheaper than Backblaze? 1 month ago:
Storj is blockchain stuff with the storage and bandwidth provided by individual node operators. They've kinda tried to bury the whole blockchain stuff and generally keep it removed from their main signup/pricing/usage flow; customers pay in USD and never have to see any of it. But it's still there in the background and it's still the main reward system for node operators.
There's some clickwrapped T&Cs for operators that set some minimum requirements, they've made sure one node leaving doesn't cause data loss, but I'd still be very wary of using them for anything irreplaceable. It only takes one crypto crash or the like for the whole thing to die out, and while they might end up suing some guys running an old NAS out of their garage, that's not gonna get your data back.
- Comment on This indie dev (Indie RPG Inkbound) is removing all microtransactions after noting that "player sentiment is trending against" them 6 months ago:
The badness this game had at launch really can't be overstated, though. At launch, this was a paid early access always online mostly-singleplayer-with-coop game with a premium currency shop and a battle pass. And it was one of those games where the shop was the most fleshed out part.
They've added offline mode and are now reworking the microtransactions to Steam DLC, but I'm still very skeptical of them. That launch was so blatantly over the top bad.
- Comment on Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz 7 months ago:
Yeah on second thought it's maybe a bit more vivid than intended, but it fits what I think is going to happen. Below the top 1-2% of mobile games, it's one big pile of endlessly recycled advertising money. Spend a million in ads, make $800k in ads and $500k in microtransactions, and the $300k is where you have to pay everything else from. Unity is about to bite into that hard and doesn't care if it leaves behind some wounds.
- Comment on Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz 7 months ago:
I think this one will work. Most of these games are already "multihomed" on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren't that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.
And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you're going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.