/v/ - Video Games

Define developers. System shock kikestarter is not good developers.

Depends on the dev team, but a publisher is going to make meeting the deadline more likely.

I think a mixed model would be nice, where backers on kickstarter could legaly demmand their money back or something if deadlines were not met, you would have to set up a deadline within X month/year and if the devs does not uphold it, they would have to convince the backers not to pull out.

They most likely wouldn't get their money back before the indie shit company goes bankrupt, but it would be a huge insentive for devs to do their jobs. For the economy to work, projects must also be allowed to fail if they're doing a bad job.

Depends entirely on the devs.

If they have no experience in time or money management then probably.

Yeah because then you have retards like David Rosen who spend 8 years into making a game that's worse than it's predecessor because they really wanted to cram every single bullshit that comes to mind into their special snowflake engine.

>>14372097

>Do Developers NEED a publisher breathing down their neck to get them to meet deadlines?

Yes. Without supervision western developers would spend all the money on smoking weed and diversity seminars.

Nowadays even a publisher isn't enough as 4 hour long linear shooters end up costing 50 million+ if developed by any American/Canadian/Nordic studio.

>>14372146

>If they have no experience in time or money management then probably.

Experience certainly doesn't help.

Look at Obsidian, Inexile and previously Troika. They have worked for years but still struggle to ship a finished product every time.

A lot of devs are personified ideaguys and can't get anything done without publishers reining them in and pushing them to something coherent.

Obviously sometimes publishers go too far with cutting down mechanics and rushing deadlines and other times you are the publisher's liason for Tim Schafer.

Then there's also the business side of things, being a good dev doesn't mean you can manage a company but obviously there's the hyper monkey-focused publishers like EA.

I see it like this. Did you need your mother to tell you to brush your teeth everyday past the age of 9? You will need a publisher to do the same with your games.

>>14372097

>Do Developers NEED a publisher breathing down their neck to get them to meet deadlines?

yes, publishers back in the day kept a tight leash on those fuckers and stopped them from fucking shit up and inserting their pozzed shit

Without a publisher, devs seem to somehow transform into overly ambitious ideaguys, and then get bankrupt because their scope is out of control and they run out of time and money even though they got 2000% of what they initially asked for.

>>14372215

>and inserting their pozzed shit

Nowadays the publishers themselves are injecting the poz and trying to make the lost sales up by microtransactions

Xonotic has been fan supported for over 7 years, but it's not a commercial video game in the least. So as a broad philosophical question, yes- applicable to commercial games, unlikely.

>>14372097

It's more that they need a publisher to get and keep the fags it takes to make a game together for the process, set the deadlines in the first place, fund the thing and thus set the budget, keep the game on-target so it doesn't end up a mechanical clusterfuck, and breathe down the dev's neck so they meet deadlines.

>>14372097

They need a publisher breathing down their neck to have money to make the game and advertise it enough to sell it in the first place.

Deadlines are a byproduct of this. The developer can sometimes arrange the deadline along with the publisher. I know what you're thinking, but in many occasions the deadlines aren't met because the developers themselves underestimated the amount of work required or kept adding more features to the game as they went along.

>Is fan support really enough?

Rarely through stuff like Kickstarter or the very occasional hyped self-advertised indie game.

>>14372097

Shouldn't have hired a lolcow into their divershitty team. https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Maxofs2d

>>14372097

For publishing your game on Steam or GOG? No. But what if you want to have ads, sell discs and merch?

>>14372097

Only if they are incompetent.

Problem is that devs regularly promote based on the ability in their old job instead of considering if they'd be suited to the new one, and that many view businessmen as useless, meaning they don't have a single guy on staff that keeps proper watch over the budget.

>>14372853

What in the god damn happened to higher education to make all of the programmers coming out of college so fucking worthless?

>The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

>It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical.

>>14372880

A lot of colleges have created "Game Dev" college programs which are just CS degrees with even less coursework involving actually learning how to not shit out pajeet tier garbage/discussing abstract concepts and tend to be a mix of entry level business courses, "history of gaming" bullshit, and a healthy dose of SJW indoctrination with the bare minimum required to be able to say

>I can code video games

They don't seem to have even introductory courses on Assembly or any serious math.

Most of them are going to be using premade engines of varying quality or squeeze out a Candy Crush clone or something similar because they think it'll be an easy paycheck. Those people end up working for localization companies after they realize nobody cares about the new match four.

The people going in and majoring in EE/CE tend to get drafted into shit that pays better because they don't write spaghetti.

Yes they do. Developers need to learn how to produce what they can to the best of their abilities in their allotted time. Budget themselves. The "b-but we didn't have enough time" mewl we often hear from many Western studios is bullshit excuse for everything else sucking. Cut content is a shame, but that's why you make what you can and if anything gets cut? Repurpose it for expansions/dlc or a sequel.

>>14372097

No, kikestarter doesn't work, anon.

>>14373093

lol

>>>/digipen/

They need a reason to meet deadlines, yes. Fan support is the opposite of that because they already got their money and they can't do anything about it if they take the money and run. Just about all the best games made in the 90s and early 00s were published by someone with the noted exception of id games.

Why do you worry so much about this? Those who do not put effort into their craft will not succeed and will die out. The ones that make it without effort are aberrations of the market, Minecraft being an example.

>>14373096

it sure works for the jews scamming retarded goyim for millions

>>14373318

>Fan support is the opposite of that because they already got their money and they can't do anything about it if they take the money and run.

I would say this is one of the benefits of the developer/publisher model because the publisher can keep somebody on the hook to finish the game, even if it becomes shit, or eat the losses themselves rather than fucking over several thousand fans with no recourse.

If Kickstarter had some sort of caveat that there would need to be refunds for fuckups nobody would use them because games die all the time. For publishers it's a cost of business, for backers it's an SoL try somebody else situation.

>>14373423

There are dozens upon dozens of no effort studios that thrive with several different developer models on PC

Heavily shilled "diversity" companies, They do make money just not in the millions like one-hit wonders like Minecraft did. I have no company examples but Ladykiller in a Bind was shilled to high heaven even though it was antithetical to SJ beliefs.

Pump and dump "porting" companies, Think of companies that port their, or other companies, console games to PC, do no bugfixing and move on to the next game. Bamco, KT, etc they're rewarded because PC gamers are apparently retarded and fall for the same "We'll do better next time this is a test run" bullshit repeatedly.

Steam transaction fee companies, The companies that make buggy and/or halfassed unity asset flips and give away thousands of copies to make pennies on trading cards. I would also include shit like Rust, PUBG, etc due to the lootbox/store garbage because although they do put in some effort the majority of their money is microtransaction garbage from their whales.

>>14372097

>Do Developers NEED a publisher breathing down their neck to get them to meet deadlines?

The bad ones do. The good ones are better off without being forced to a deadline. Usually the games that were rushed for deadlines aren't very good. Corner-cutting and rushjobs ruin promising games.

>>14372097

Reason why System Shock Remake failed as because of idiots from Bethesda who thought "lets do what we did to Fallout to System Shock" forgetting that this is basically what Prey was. An "Accessible" System Shock for the moron generation. Actually I'd even say that Prey was the main influence that convinced them to give up entirely on Unity and focus their efforts entirely on making a shallow heap of shit of a game for a "much wider audience". The fact that they came to that conclusion without a publisher only goes to show the types of idiots we're dealing with here.

The kickstarter model is fine- IF you're upfront with what you're intending to do (see Kingdom Come) if you're pulling a bait and switch on people or flat out neglecting to tell them info, then it all falls into a massive heap of shit.

The inherit problem is that the calibre of game developer in today's industry are some of the worst people imaginable because of a flood of SJWs. The taint is real. Simply stop giving your money to idiots. And the people here frankly should know better. Go look up who is making your games, then you'll know not to support them. Looking at the track record of the staff that worked on the new System Shock it was BLATANTLY obvious they would pull this shit. People threw money at the IP, not at the team. If they weren't idiots, they'd be patiently waiting for (((Warrens))) system shock and pirating that fucker when it finally comes out. He's at least not a total moron like this team turned out to be.

>>14378968

>The good ones

THERE ARE NO GOOD ONES

At least not anynore.

There are just those that can get their shit together for long enough to make a game or two before the inevitable failure follows and those that can't even do that much;and the failure always bears the same symptoms as the bad ones which are overpromising&underdelivering on a project

>>14379038

The only good ones are ones abused by a producer that can whip them to make a product that isn't complete garbage, that's how companies like Rare got successful, the owners breathed down their workers' necks.

Absolutely, just like most writers need a good editor.

Fucking auteur egos are only beneficial in small doses.

I wish someone could have gotten Valve to get Episode 3 (and the contracted-out Episode 4) out the door 8-9 years ago.

>>14379107

Valve was done making good games when they released Steam, everything after that was just trying to get people stuck in the ecosystem.

Similar to PS/Xbox/Nintendo digital sales, the longer you own the console lines the less likely you are to leave. You begin to attach value to the account even though the ToS state the account is worthless and can be banned or service discontinued whenever.

SS never really had a deadline anything they said was bullshit as they kept changing the scope. You can't keep adding new bullshit and completely changing things and keep the same fucking deadline even the inevitable delay deadline was bullshit.

Fucking scammers.