The harsh reality of gamedev — the real profit of a successful project
The creative director of Moon Studios (developer of Ori) shared on X (Twitter) some "sad" statistics about the revenue from a successful debut game by unnamed developers that sold two million copies. The tweet is discussed on Reddit.
This sparked a lot of thoughts, and I’m going to share every single one of them with you — whether you like it or not :-)
Feeds Fun: marketing test — or how I blew 650 euros
Since Feeds Fun has been in production for a long time and provides some value to users, I decided to run a test ad campaign to gauge how viable monetization is in the project’s current form.
Reminder
Feeds Fun is a news reader that automatically assigns tags to each news item using LLMs. Users can create rules that evaluate news based on tags. For example, nasa + fake-news -> -50. This allows for filtering and sorting news, enabling you to read only the most relevant ones.
The project is open-sourced: github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun
It turns out that one does not simply launch advertisements on modern platforms: one needs to implement GDPR compliance, a user agreement, a privacy policy, cookie consent, event/metric tracking, improve the GUI, create an acceptable landing page, and so on. The work spanned almost half a year (on the side, of course, not full-time), but in the end, I implemented everything, designed the experiment, and am now ready to share the results with you.
Thinking through writing
](https://tiendil.org/static/posts/thinking-through-writing/images/thinking-through-writing-cover.jpg)
From the manga Bakuman
Thinking through writing is the practice of translating one's own thoughts into written form to uncover gaps in reasoning and construct a clearer picture of the world.
It’s what I mostly do here on this blog — and, to the best of my ability, at work.
I’ve finally found time to elaborate on this.
Generation of non-linear quests
Non-linear quest with nested sub-quest
This is a translation of the old post
This is a translation of my post from 2013 about quest generation for the now-stopped game The Tale. I think it is still relevant, interesting, and could inspire other developers.
Please remember that the original post was written in 2013. I updated part of the post, but some statements and ideas may be outdated, and the flow of thoughts is not as clear as it would be if I had written this post now.
Despite the fact that the conception of automatic quest generation in RPGs is quite old, there are almost no publicly available working versions of such generators (rather none at all) if we do not count primitive ones. There are also not many posts on this topic, although some can be googled. So, I hope this text and the quests generator will be helpful.
You can find examples of generated quests in the repository.
Key principles on in-game virtual currencies in the EU
Last month, the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network, in coordination with the European Commission, released interesting guidelines on the implementation of in-game currencies.
- News
- The document on my Google Drive — just in case the originals move somewhere.
The document does not have the status of a law; it is a recommendation for interpreting existing EU consumer protection laws regarding computer games. As I understand it, each country decides separately whether to follow these recommendations or not.
I have mixed feelings towards such regulations.
On one hand, the nonsense that goes on in free-to-play games (especially mobile ones) should have been stopped a long time ago. From my ethical position, I fully support attempts to bring order there.
On the other hand, regulations always complicate life for small and medium businesses and have little effect on large companies. The larger the company, the easier it is for it to ignore regulations.
In the following text, I'll list the main theses of the document, speculate on how these recommendations should be implemented according to the authors' intent, and how they will most likely be implemented in reality.
Also, the document is small — only 8 pages — and nicely formatted, so you can read it yourself.
Disclaimer
I'm not a lawyer and have nothing to do with free-to-play for about 5 years, so don't take my thoughts as recommendations.
Think of this text as an interesting exercise, a free flight of thought.