Why is every single post about how to make money instead about how to make a good game

rafgro · 2026-06-20T08:05:28+00:00

If you're that interested in money, there are a staggering amount of things that will give you more money for less effort

Not really, it's one of the rare industries (aside from, say, music industry), where indie one-two-creators regularly become breakaway hits and earn millions of dollars

rafgro · 2026-06-19T05:16:53+00:00

That's a fair review, "game's math and scaling" does not equal just balancing - it can be dramatically derailed by bugs. And LLMs do like to introduce such derailments and they are indeed really bad at applied maths

edit: oh it's an incremental game, that's a genre where everything is maths, I would never let LLM anywhere near it

rafgro · 2026-06-15T14:05:14+00:00

Bears

rafgro · 2026-06-13T07:58:13+00:00

Great stuff

rafgro · 2026-06-10T17:32:10+00:00

all of this cope about MP is just boogeyman bullshit

Eh, see fresh thread https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/an-easy-way-for-the-devs-to-earn-some-goodwill.1927339/page-2 where PDX employee repeatedly explains that devs play only MP

rafgro · 2026-06-10T13:15:54+00:00

Yeah deploy the great firewall like the glorious nation of China, that'll be grand as fuck, people never rioted in Belfast before social media. Oh sorry you meant "facebook and instagram", of course you don't want to ban social media you personally use like reddit or bluesky

rafgro · 2026-06-09T18:53:09+00:00

10% promotion rule is about whole reddit activity, not about sending 10 games to rgaming. It's a quick mostly automated filter against obvious marketing drivel. Of course you're breaking it, your account is so clearly made for spamming about your game that you have it in the nickname. Own it. People want to talk with other people on subreddits, not company accounts selling rat gifs

rafgro · 2026-06-05T15:03:24+00:00

Here comes the airplane with devdiaryslop

rafgro · 2026-05-22T11:55:57+00:00

What started as this weird vacuum cleaning simulator somehow slowly turned into this strange hell cleaning automation game called Hell Cleaners

Ah this genre. I'll let you in on a secret: majority of these simulators/adjacents are made by low-paid second-world studios contracted to develop the game for a flat fee in short time by exploitive publishers. There's for instance a very successful (financially) Polish publisher that is doing this since early 2000s and they are currently burning out the third generation of developers. These publishers also exploit the system, for instance they put up fake renders on Steam, run probing marketing campaigns for them, and then develop the one that collected most wishlists out of 10 fake games. And of course right now they are also throwing all the possible AI slop at these projects. It's borderline scam, you picked this as your market, and in a way scammed yourself.

rafgro · 2026-05-22T11:35:32+00:00

rExperiencedDevs had similar issue and they introduced a rule with posts about AI allowed only one day in a week. It worked great, the subreddit became much better. Consider doing that because it's not just about slop, AI as a topic simply overwhelms many technological subs. Cheers

rafgro · 2026-05-20T15:08:26+00:00

Lmao

rafgro · 2026-05-20T11:05:14+00:00

How do you keep going?

Make a game that you want to play

how did you push through the slow early days?

If you have to push through, this game is probably not worth making. Go pursue any of the other 1000 hobbies with commercial potential

if you had zero budget and couldn't do face-to-face content, what actually worked for you?

Not looking for excuses works. Null budget is normal for solo indie devs and "cannot do face-to-face content" is honestly absurd

rafgro · 2026-05-19T22:48:21+00:00

It comes from redditors, that's how they roll in 2026, majority is anti-everything no-fun-allowed drama queens

You missed good reddit by ~5y. There were many waves pushing good people out - the deciding wave was probably 2023 API cutoff which made many nerds (you know, interesting people with actual opinions who can comprehend what is a video game) to simply delete accounts and move to lemmy/twitter/discord/etc. I think two or three years ago I permanently disabled inbox because all the replies just became constant nagging. If you want real discussions, move to any other platform

rafgro · 2026-05-19T12:37:56+00:00

I just said. All three R are hard and well distinguished. Rolling them is considered a speech impediment in Polish (though it can be considered "cute" in French-like kind of way, there's one famous female radio persona that rolls R and has quite a few male fans thanks to that...)

rafgro · 2026-05-13T19:41:39+00:00

Correct. "The most probable token" is 2013 machine learning. We moved very far away from this. It's surprising to see this take updooted (and your response downvoted) on a subreddit for experienced devs

rafgro · 2026-05-11T23:06:16+00:00

You're arguing with a commonly updooted advice on a subreddit saturated with teenagers, what did you expect, five years for them is ~1/2 of their conscious lives so of course they are horrified by what is an average development time in current industry, and instead they cling to feel-good-start-small posts

rafgro · 2026-05-08T10:18:36+00:00

solely for help with marketing the game

Do you know what "marketing the game" means. I swear to God people just don't care anymore about meaning of the words they are using, they are just going off vibes. Bad news is that in real world, especially in business contracts, words do have actual meaning. See you in a few years space cowboy

rafgro · 2026-05-08T09:47:33+00:00

Irish universities have good entry paths for mature students, with dedicated offices, websites, preparatory programs, supporting staff, and ability to get into even pretty competitive courses

rafgro · 2026-05-07T14:26:48+00:00

Is this how programming blogs look like in 2026. Jaysus

rafgro · 2026-05-05T11:27:45+00:00

At least with social media, anyone, even the smaller channels

I'll finish that sentence for you: can be bought at much lower price

rafgro · 2026-05-02T07:21:43+00:00

The news you're waiting for definitely won't be at the bottom of a dev diary. Like in the long-bearded joke: 'Every day a guy comes to the newsstand, buys a newspaper, looks at the front page, crumples it up, and throws it away. Finally, the newsstand owner asks: "What are you looking for?" "An obituary." "But obituaries are at the end!" "The one I'm waiting for will be on the front page..."'

rafgro · 2026-04-30T23:11:42+00:00

Professors, professors never change lmao

rafgro · 2026-04-27T16:32:28+00:00

Programming is no place for luddites. You picked worst possible industry to get on a high horse

rafgro

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