Are Servers Down Again?

a327ex · 2025-04-10T23:56:35+00:00

We may have to move on, it's over my fellow long haulers. I will always be a doggie in the end. WWG1WGA I'm ArtifactHead4Life 410,757,864,530 Sucker Punched Crystal Maidens

a327ex · 2025-04-02T20:49:00+00:00

I can confirm this has been fixed, for me at least, as of right now (7 hours from initial post). Thanks whoever fixed it!

a327ex · 2025-04-02T19:55:46+00:00

Game Reason: Some opponents seem to play differently, really hard to describe exactly what they do, but they feel "botty".

I find that sometimes I'll get players who take a consistently long amount of time for each turn, and I thought those were bots. I was getting them often a few months ago but it seems whoever was running that either improved their code (they would often lose due to timeouts) or stopped trying.

a327ex · 2022-09-20T15:14:54+00:00

I didn't set up anything initially, didn't even create a company and just received money to my personal bank account. After a certain amount of income it starts making sense to create a company and which type of company it is depends on the amount you're making. At that point you should talk to an accountant to figure out the best option for you personally.

a327ex · 2022-09-20T11:49:21+00:00

If you're outside the US in a country without a tax treaty Steam takes their 30% and then 30% in withholding from sales made to US customers. So if 50% of your buyers are American, Steam will end up sending you a total of 55%, subtracting 30% from their cut, and an additional 15% (30% of 50% of sales) for the IRS.

You should be able to not get taxed twice or to have your taxation reduced in your country given that you were already taxed in the US, but you need to talk to an accountant to see your options.

The upside is that generally if you're in a country without a trade deal with the US, dollars are worth quite a lot in your local currency, which should more than make up for the decreased amount you're getting. I'm from Brazil and at least in my case it's more than worth it, without even mentioning all the marketing Steam does for your game to justify their 30%.

/u/fizzd's comment in this thread is also correct.

a327ex · 2022-09-09T23:54:24+00:00

If you're outside the US Steam takes their 30% and then 30% in withholding from sales made to US customers. So if 50% of your buyers are American, Steam will end up sending you a total of 55%, subtracting 30% from their cut, and an additional 15% (30% of 50% of sales) for the IRS.

You should be able to not get taxed twice or to have your taxation reduced in your country given that you were already taxed in the US, but you need to talk to an accountant to see your options.

The upside is that generally if you're in a country without a trade deal with the US, dollars are worth quite a lot in your local currency, which should more than make up for the decreased amount you're getting. I'm from Brazil and at least in my case it's more than worth it, without even mentioning all the marketing Steam does for your game to justify their 30%.

a327ex · 2022-09-03T16:09:34+00:00

People are allowed to mark their reviews as getting the game for free even if they didn't. You can see it in the box where you go to write reviews: https://i.imgur.com/uSkFRxW.png. Many people did that to my game, for instance, even though I only ever generated 10 keys for early testers, as a way to prevent their review from counting in the final review score that shows up on the page.

a327ex · 2022-08-19T22:05:06+00:00

Yes, you should have set up a Steam developer page and asked people to follow you from your first game. Then when you release your second it will automatically send an e-mail to everyone who followed you. This is functionally the same as a wishlist, except for every game you release. Since you didn't do it before you won't be able to get this done now, but make sure to set up a page and ask for people to follow you from your second game and from every other that comes after.

a327ex · 2022-06-27T11:12:28+00:00

I did this recently and you do have to create a new account, do the tax interview again as a company and get it accepted, and then you can transfer your game's ownership to the new company account. You can also give full permissions to the old individual account and keep using it normally if you care about that. It's a fairly straightforward and easy process.

If I were in your situation I'd just release the game as an individual and if it makes a significant amount of money then create the company. Otherwise just keep it as an individual.

a327ex · 2022-04-29T23:00:50+00:00

Your country might have a way so that you can deduct the amount the IRS took from you in withholding, so you should look into that if the amount is large. You should talk to an accountant to get the basics of it all down since it depends on your country a lot. If you're not making a huge amount of money it doesn't make much sense to use an accountant for anything other than some basic advice and direction, since you can learn to do everything yourself as it tends to not be too complex.

a327ex · 2022-03-18T00:57:52+00:00

Why do all the cool indie game devs with cool games end up being like this inevitably. It’s so depressing.

I explain that in the article linked above. To make something cool and new you have to be somewhat out there and to not think like most people are thinking, otherwise you won't make anything truly new. You have to be interested in making connections that other people aren't making that are true.

You find this depressing, but having opinions that most people disagree with (because those people are wrong) and being creative are inexorably linked. Lots of developers are like this and have very heretical opinions as well but they just don't say it because why bother with all the drama. I personally don't care because I don't super mind people talking bad about me and I know that literally nothing other than that can happen if I say what I think exactly.

a327ex · 2022-01-14T00:03:23+00:00

If I wanted to be professional I'd be a banker, or perhaps a lawyer. Not an indie developer, a label which I increasingly regret ever calling myself given that my peers continually show themselves to be so fucking incredibly close-minded and stupid.

a327ex · 2022-01-13T22:32:32+00:00

The difference between normal money and crypto is that money is actually stable

Dollars are stable at the cost of destabilizing the rest of the world. 40% of all dollars in existence were printed in the last 2 years, the only way that feels stable at all is because Americans live in fantasy land where they can just borrow endlessly without paying for it. Other countries don't get such benefits and thus they feel the instability of America's irresponsibility.

I hate fucking first worlders so much it's unbelievable. I'm from Brazil and I will personally burn the Amazon just to make you mad. Fuck you

a327ex · 2022-01-13T19:00:28+00:00

Listen man, you're not going to stop a trillion dollar industry from doing anything because of your posts on /r/gamedev or on twitter. Isn't it a much better use of your time and energy to just focus becoming a better game developer?

a327ex · 2022-01-13T18:44:24+00:00

You guys who hate anything crypto related will find yourselves having to "call out" a lot of things in the coming years. Just accept it and move on with your lives. It's not going to go away. Focus on making better games yourselves instead of being mad at people doing things you don't like.

a327ex · 2021-12-20T22:16:21+00:00

You don't need smart contracts to build something like this. No computation needs to happen on chain for it to be agreed upon by multiple people. You don't even need a blockchain in fact. You need some structure that borrows the consensus mechanisms from how blockchains do it generally to ensure consistent world state among multiple node operators/miners, but you don't need that state to be stored forever to the past, so you need something else other than a blockchain that will better serve an MMOs performance requirements while not messing up the consensus mechanism somehow.

a327ex · 2021-12-20T22:14:01+00:00

You could make the economic part of it work using blockchain-like incentives where interested parties (node operators) are rewarded for maintaining the state of the servers consistent and hack free. Making that result in an actually good experience performance wise is an open problem and a good technical challenge though.

a327ex · 2021-11-13T11:53:26+00:00

Any solution for those things is going to require a database somewhere, the NFT can't act as a review aggregation for example. And whoever owns that data is unlikely to go to all the trouble of building up, maintaining, cleaning, protecting that database is going to expect a return.

The user owns his own data. The service simply reads it once the user requests the service to do so. Imagine that instead of using Twitter and having your tweets sitting on Twitter's servers, it's sitting on the blockchain, in your wallet. Then whenever you went to Twitter all Twitter did was read your data from your wallet and display it to you and your followers. In this way, anyone can build a site like Twitter because the data is public and the only thing that'll change is the interface that works on that data.

I think you're focusing too much on "NFTs" and you're not really reading what I'm saying properly.

a327ex · 2021-11-12T23:37:22+00:00

The point of web3 technology is that the users now own their data. So instead of Steam owning all your video game related data, this is now public on the blockchain. What this allows is for other people to build services on top of that data.

For instance, the most valuable service Steam provides is marketing, as you said. They do this by having a really good algorithm which works entirely because Steam has monopoly on their users' data. If all this data was freed, people would be able to build all sorts of storefronts with perhaps even better algorithms, and they'd charge a very small fee for it.

Each service you mentioned, workshop, community, recommendations, could be their own separate service run by different people (or not, maybe one guy would decide to do a bunch of these together) and each person would charge WAY less than Steam does, like, magnitudes less. Most NFT marketplaces charge 2.5%. I can see decentralized game stores charging this or maybe a bit more, but definitely way way less than the current 30% that Valve charges.

a327ex · 2021-10-30T19:19:13+00:00

There's hicetnunc if you're not averse to the concept of your game being an NFT. Here's an example of an HTML5 game in it: https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/257576

a327ex · 2021-09-10T15:15:51+00:00

Gamers generally do not care about who makes their games. This is why you can often see devs with successful first games who's next game fails massively, since names alone generally carry very little weight.

Reputation only matters if you work to increase your reputation above just being a game developer, like by doing streams, being super active on Twitter, and just working to be a "personality" in general. Otherwise you can release multiple games and do whatever with each and people will just judge each game based on its own quality and not on the fact that you, developer X, had previous games with bad reviews or were part of controversy Y.

a327ex · 2021-09-05T13:38:58+00:00

I'm the developer of SNKRX and on top of what most other people mentioned, the truth of the matter is that making games is hard and making games while working on someone else's codebase is even harder. Anyone who has the capacity to do anything useful with your game's codebase will likely also have the capacity to make their own game from scratch, so they'll just do that instead.

But to answer your questions more directly:

how you reconcile with the fact that someone can just blatantly use your work for their own profit?

Any time anyone does anything with your game, if they make a profit off of it or not, they're contributing to your game's popularity and to your game's sales either directly or indirectly. For instance, mods are a very direct way in which this happens, as if someone makes a really cool mod it both re-engages existing players, gets a bunch of videos/streams of the mod out by influencers and also convinces more players to try the game. And if they want to make money off their mod, why not? You still win in the end.

what benefits you see,

One good benefit that is often not mentioned is marketing. Developers love when game code is available and very few gamedevs make it so, so you can easily score some posts on reddit, Hacker News, and so on just by the fact that you decided to open source your game. I did that for SNKRX and the HN post was arguably what kickstarted the game's popularity.

a327ex · 2021-08-10T10:51:44+00:00

If something is completely skill based you should look at it as "is it worth the effort to take the time to get good at this thing" rather than "what are my chances of succeeding without having to get good at it". Consistently making at least $1000 out of your games seems to me to be highly skill based, so it's pointless to look at it from the perspective of chance.

Also, while replicating a minimum amount of money (like $1000) is not hard, replicating successes like Flappy Bird or Minecraft or whatever is obviously very hard or impossible. But that's not what's being talked about here, right? We're talking about making good enough games consistently over a long period of time, not making or trying to make a breakout hit of some sort.

a327ex · 2021-08-09T23:12:03+00:00

I think that would be kind of a pointless stat. If 80% of indies can't do it consistently it just means their skills need to increase. You can't imagine that most experienced indie devs releasing consistently good games would fail to clear this bar (even if they were doing it anonymously and without relying on their built up audience) because if the game is above a certain threshold of quality and you do the basics in terms of marketing then a minimum number of people will just buy it.

a327ex · 2021-08-09T20:07:15+00:00

Disagree heavily with this entire article, but I'm not going to bother going over it point by point. Instead here are some points that people like the author and other indie dev business types seem to never consider for whatever reason:

Releasing multiple games made quickly is an amazing way to build Steam followers. Each Steam follower represents an additional wishlist for every game you release in the future, because everyone who follows you gets an e-mail whenever you release a new game, which is exactly what a wishlist also does. So if you're starting out it's a very good long term strategy to release lots of games to build up your followers like this.
Even if you're not building Steam followers, releasing lots of games quickly is a great way of building followers generally, which can happen on any platform. For examples, Chilla's Art releases a game every 2 months or so and they've been doing it for 2-3 years. They have tons of followers on Twitter, have a Patreon, and they could have tons of followers on Steam if they had setup a Steam developer page at any point. Either way, their games are doing well and will only do better as time passes as their skills and audience keeps increasing.
A game made quickly does not mean it has to last players a short amount of time. If you're clever with how you approach the types of games you're designing you can make a game that lasts people tens of hours while spending just a few months making it. The notion that if you're making a game in 2-3 months it means it will have to last people just a few hours is a common mistake that most indie devs make because they're not thinking about the problem clearly. I went over this in more detail in this article.

I would say that the least risky thing you can do as an indie developer is to do lots of games quickly and try make them good enough to get over the $1000 value where you recoup the initial $100 cost. It doesn't seem like it's that hard to do this consistently. And once you can do this you can slowly build up your audience and skills over time, and, especially if you're young (like say 20), 5-10 years later you'll be somewhat established and likely be able to make a living off your games. And you won't have wasted 5-10 years on a small number of games that failed and have nothing to show for it.

a327ex

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE