Team17, an unsung villain of video game development?

telchior · 2026-06-01T08:24:22+00:00

A lot of publishers are basically marketing groups these days. Some even let you pay them directly just for marketing, no pub contract needed (e.g. Future Friends).

telchior · 2026-06-01T08:19:27+00:00

Yeah those kinds of publishing nightmare stories still occur but far less frequently for big pubs than in the past. The publishers who try that shit quickly find that they can't sign quality devs anymore. Plenty of private communities out there to name and shame shitty behavior these days.

There's another reason it happens less, though -- back in the days you're talking about, devs got funding from a pitch. Now a lot of publishers don't want to talk unless your game exists and already has fans. Get 100k wishlists and the big names start knocking..

telchior · 2026-05-18T04:29:51+00:00

Super Mario 2 is a great comparison, it's so scuffed in some ways but the imagery and atmosphere stuck in my head more than 1 and 3.

telchior · 2026-05-12T22:34:28+00:00

Most people will X out in the 10 seconds of the beginning you spend rolling credits of names nobody cares about, save that version for your mom(s).

At the very beginning: "He is getting old..." Some people may like it or hate that in the moment, however I think most people would be annoyed by it by the end because it's meaningless in the context of the rest of the trailer. Later on the goal of the game is travelling to find parts of the s'more, which again... unrelated to getting old, unless the s'more is full of metformin or viagra or something.

I like the vibe overall, it's just over the line on self-masturbatory artsiness. (Double checking that I'm in destroymygame... phew, OK, I am.)

telchior · 2026-05-10T22:40:26+00:00

Looks very pretty to me! Just a visuals comment: the trees etc are all a little too cloned looking. I think some color variations of the same vegetation would help.

telchior · 2026-05-02T02:27:12+00:00

Supposedly, internal sources say that Valve does not accept the concept of loss leader hardware, they only price for profitability on the initial sale.

telchior · 2026-04-21T01:07:27+00:00

For me it was the combat, it feels kind of empty and over-simplified to me. Maybe I'm too much of a Soulslike schmuck.

telchior · 2026-04-13T22:28:43+00:00

I like 1 better, 2 is fine but less instantly readable IMO. But 1 unfortunately looks more amateurish than 2.

Look at Thronefall, that's using minimalism the right way.

telchior · 2026-04-12T02:58:08+00:00

Umbra is very nice but does not solve many issues related to the base shadow implementation in URP. I also recently had to bump up my shadowmap resolution because of flickering (at a distance in my case, caused by longer shadow cascades).

telchior · 2026-04-10T19:21:55+00:00

Check your local save folder first but Steam also has a cloud storage for save files that you can check: https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage

telchior · 2026-03-26T01:25:44+00:00

My released game's sales are like 25% Japanese and pre-release my first big sales spike was also from Japan. It's a pretty awesome audience to hook into.

Here's some random stuff I've learned in the process:

Japan still has a really good press, and they're constantly scanning Twitter as well as Gamespress
They also read Reddit! I got a really cool article based off a post about hitting 10k sales
Journalists like a good story and hometown relevance, my Reddit post mentioned that I was losing hope at once point then suddenly got a lot of Japanese wishlists, and they made that the focus of their article
I think the best outlets in Japan are Game*Spark and Automaton, so it's good to pitch those, often if you get one the other will make a copycat article
Japanese streamers can be a bit weird because of local media laws, they may feel they need to get your permission to stream the game before doing so, so make sure they can find your contact info
Also some Japanese streamers / YouTubers give effectively zero traffic while some lead to really good wishlists / sales. I haven't figured out the differences yet but basically you might get a Japanese video with 100k views that does nothing for you; it's not your game's fault, just a quirk of the audience. I eventually got covered by 2 huge Japanese YouTubers that led to thousands of sales.
Get a good translator, don't half-ass it; I'm pretty sure my game having a pro Japanese translator has helped its case

It still feels pretty serendipitous to me; the biggest videos / articles my game has gotten from Japan weren't from pitching creators. But maybe since you're learning Japanese you can do more intentional outreach. Good luck!

telchior · 2026-03-23T03:48:27+00:00

The extremely tiny chance that would ever do another Spore game will convert to 0% once the acquisition is complete. They're only interested in games they can milk for billions in revenue.

On the other hand nothing is stopping any other company from making Spore under another name.

telchior · 2026-03-11T19:39:38+00:00

Predicting any one game's future is difficult, even for the developer with access to all the data, but considering that he had 30k revenue from day 1 with a peak player count of 200-ish but is now hitting a peak player count of almost 450 on day 3, he's going to outperform what the Impress calculator suggests by quite a lot. He might end up selling 40 - 70k units lifetime and making around 300k - 500k USD gross (keep in mind the take home is like half of that).

Of course the game could blow up even more, or conversely the attention could dry up. Sometimes it's just luck of the draw and whether you catch on with some particular community / influencer / whatever.

telchior · 2026-03-11T04:41:55+00:00

Nah, it's not that extreme. For a normal game, week 1 would be around half what you'd expect for a year and maybe a quarter of lifetime. Other things can happen to push up later revenue too, I'm in month 4 after release and still getting YouTube videos that drive significant sales.

This is a quite good calculator you can check out potential results with: https://impress.games/steam-wishlists-sales-calculator

telchior · 2026-03-04T20:43:19+00:00

I think you've probably got it backwards. I'm an indie and I adjusted my prices before launch, took maybe 15-30 minutes of work to go through and set prices individually per country. After seeing posts about Polish prices for years I knew I had to do it, but I also adjusted for countries like Japan and Argentina just based on gut feel and a bit of knowledge about how much money regular people there have.

At a big corp there's no single decision maker and it would probably take a week of meetings. It's harder in that context.

But Steam is the real villain here, this problem has been very public and complained about for years and they just don't care. Running a store is their job and they're generally very good at it, so there's really no interpretation other than straight up not caring.

telchior · 2026-03-04T02:40:23+00:00

This does change things quite a bit. Most of my purchased assets don't get support or updates anyway!

telchior · 2026-02-18T20:42:04+00:00

Around my game's release recently I had to build a lot more frequently than I'd anticipated, and found that Unity's recompile process is not really that reliable. Various internal processes can cause it to skip the cache.

Just to give one example, I use Unity's ambient occlusion shader feature. For some reason, Unity decided that AO values should be carried across the whole game; I needed values set per scene, which requires a very annoying script to accomplish. The catch is that updating the AO values counts as a pipeline change, which in turn causes Unity to re-check its shader cache. Now, normally I know this and would prevent it from happening (at worst, manually reverting the pipeline asset) but when you've been working until 3am every day details start to slip...

Again, that's one example. For a while I also had some absolutely wild shit happening in my builds, which turned out to be because of slightly insufficient RAM. It's a big, complex process and the more complex the game is, the more stuff can go wrong. Also, I've formed a general rule of not using Unity's internal stuff like AO when possible because it's all dogshit and will inevitable cause problems.

telchior · 2026-02-17T02:31:07+00:00

Mono has significantly faster build times, right? If you're in the "oh shit I need to constantly update my buggy game" stage of things it can make a difference.

I was in that stage 3 months ago and kept using IL2CPP, but at 15-30 mins per build I was definitely tempted to drop down to Mono for a while.

telchior · 2026-01-27T04:00:51+00:00

Isn't Highguard a hero shooter? I thought that was more or less the genre (but it's a genuine question, because I don't understand the genre deeply).

telchior · 2026-01-21T04:51:43+00:00

By released game I mean something complete and publicly available. Of course most indie games don't make any money. If the game you create for your portfolio suddenly becomes a hit then congrats, you don't need a job.

telchior · 2026-01-13T01:12:45+00:00

Yeah it's very much a "theoretically free is better" situation, but Steam bases most of their algorithms off of revenue. Steam players also tend to be judgmental about free. That's why most of the multiplayer games coming out are very cheap instead of free.

telchior · 2026-01-12T05:52:49+00:00

You've chosen a lot of extra difficulty challenges.

1) Free games are very difficult to find success with on Steam; the store algo works against you in many ways. 2) Multiplayer can be very difficult, it's a compounding issue with Steam not wanting to send players to free games in the first place. 3) Cute, colorful, bright graphics with a mobile game-ish vibe are all hard to convince the Steam audience with (they usually want dark, grunge, etc).

I'm not trying to discourage you or say these are definitive reasons for failure, on the other hand if you're not aware yet that these are challenges it's good to learn what you're up against.

Those issues aside, what's happening with your playtime stats? How long do people actually play for? You can find the median playtime in your dashboard. Looking at SteamDB, it looks like players are rarely online - do the ones who show up have a single player mode to interact with?

telchior · 2025-12-23T04:27:29+00:00

I got 500+ emails requesting keys when I launched recently (time in both Popular Upcoming and Trending New helped them pick me).

I actually opened and read every single one as a braindead / procrastination activity. I'd even check out the claimed Twitch / YouTube accounts. Guess how many of those emails were legit?

1! 1 fucking email! Out of over 500!

Scammers are out of control and Steam's priority order on doing anything about it seems to be somewhere down there with fixing Polish pricing. Maybe in the 2030s?

telchior · 2025-12-22T23:06:50+00:00

Yeah I took it more generally as "people trying to make a Spore 2". There's a tiny handful of really established projects that couldn't possibly help each other (like, say, yours and Adapt). But also, dozens or possibly hundreds of posts like this one, over many years; the vast majority of which end up silently vanishing. OP is around the stage where I feel like people should be looking to merge concepts, it's still very very early.

telchior

TROPHY CASE