In that case, please, define "developed the game" for us. Is doing all the programming "developing" the game? Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
I wonder how are they taking in 5 billion per quarter when their latest console barely outsold the first Xbox. I doubt it was making a bit less than 5 billion per quarter with quotes like "Ultimately, Microsoft lost an accumulative total of $4 billion from the Xbox, only managing to turn a profit at the end of 2004." on wikipedia.
So how are two consoles with roughly the same sales numbers so far apart in revenue?
I remember a big debate "back in the day" about the effects of shutting down your PC at night and the effect on the health of the CPU. The theory at the time was that by shutting down your PC every night, the temperature fluctuations would put more stress on the CPU, shorting its life span. However, the other side said that leaving on your PC all day and night would spend more time running and reduce its life span, so only having it running when you needed it was better. I think a website did a test and found it makes no difference, but I remember it being a big topic around the 2000's (it might have been related to AMD chips at the time running extremely hot)
I'm sure that the steam machine will sell out just because A) it's a small batch B) It's Valve C) It's a neat form factor.
But as someone who was originally going to pick one up (thinking it was going to be a great little gaming PC powerhouse), seeing it come in close to last in most of the GamersNexus benchmarks was pretty disheartening (pulling 20-50FPS at 1080p on most recent games).
I was hoping that they were going to bring a console mindset to PC building to create something that exceeded what a DIY-er could do with off the shelf parts. But the fact you can make a faster DIY machine for cheaper right now feels...eh, what's the point?
My guess is they sell the first few batches, then Steam Machine goes on a small vacation for a few years while they wait for prices to come back down.
I'm goofy footed as well - skate boarding with my left foot forward is like trying to throw a ball with my left hand. I also found that if I was rollerblading or ice-skating, turning to my left (counter clockwise) with a foot-over-foot action I can do super easy, but turning turning clockwise I always struggled with.
I wonder if this comment thread is going to go better than your "I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language" from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932974
The Pro plan quota seems to be getting worse. I can get maybe 20-30 minutes work done before I hit my 4 hour quota. I found myself using it more just for the planning phase to get a little bit more time out of it, but yesterday I managed to ask it ONE question in plan mode (from a fresh quota window), and while it was thinking it ran out of quota. I'm assuming it probably pulled in a ton of references from my project automatically and blew out the token count. I find I get good answers from it when it does work, but it's getting very annoying to use.
(on the flip side, Codex seems like it's being SO efficient with the tokens it can be hard to understand its answers sometimes, it rarely includes files without you doing it manually, and often takes quite a few attempts to get the right answer because it's so strict what it's doing each iteration. But I never run out of quota!)
For some comparison of difficulty, there's an old game called Squares which is very similar to yours. It does a good job of ramping the difficulty up pretty fast, but it allows the game have fun short gameplay loops because of the extra gameplay mechanics (ie, you are not just moving but collecting squares too).
"It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege"
I think that's specifically what made GiantBomb so different in the first place - people were tuning in for the personalities, more so than the game news. There were already a lot of places you could just go for game news and updates (like IGN and Gamespot), but GB had decades of industry stories that were worth tuning in for. All sorts of 'behind the scenes' stories and faces would show up, Jeff finding out about the Dreamcast being cancelled in a conference call while on the toilet with food poisoning, Drew going to a Starcraft tournament in South Korea when they were still fairly new, the crew getting blind drunk at a birthday where they duct taped whisky bottles to their hands, stories of the sheer nightmare of lugging equipment and setting up for E3 every year with Drew and Vinnys video diaries. It was a peek behind the curtain into how the industry works with a group of very likeable people that made it different - more than just a place to go and watch people play games.
I once heard someone say a phrase which feels relevant to this article:
"If you know nothing of what they are doing, you suspect them of doing nothing".
I've used this sentence to catch myself over the years where I've been quick to judge someone as doing nothing at their job or day-to-day, and then used it as motivation to (if possible) learn about what their days actually look like. I'm almost always finding out I just didn't know enough about what they did.
As the article points out, this goes the other way too. It doesn't matter how good you are at your job if nobody at a decision making level understands what you are doing.
>Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono
In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).
One thing I didn't understand about the original video - why didn't they just CG in the bins instead? Why go to all the effort of CG'ing out the ball, changing the trajectory etc? It seems like it would have been easier to have him make 3 random kicks then add some bins in where they landed. But, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing.
>And they managed it just fine despite working with auto-incrementing big ints.
I wonder how. I've had to do several big merges in my career, and it was always a nightmare because of all the external systems which were already referencing and storing those pre-existing ints. Sure, merging the databases is easy if you don't mind regenerating all the Id's, but it's not usually that simple.
sits back with popcorn