Don’t forget to tip the self checkout.

As far as I know you also can’t just buy the Larian engine. It’s proprietary.

I’m happy to see someone else pushing back against the inevitability line I see so much around this tech. It’s still incredibly new and there’s no guarantee it will continue to improve. Could it? Sure, but I think it’s equally likely it could start to degrade instead due to ai inbreeding or power consumption becoming too big of an issue with larger adoption. No one actually knows the future and it’s hardly inevitable.

I’ve been here since the third party app culling and it’s been steadily growing I think from my anecdotal feels when using it. It definitely has a long way to go to replace what reddit was, but hopefully it just keeps growing bit by bit. I see posts like yours frequently these days so you’re definitely not the only one leaving.

Very sad to hear. Cyan is a massive influence on me and I’m always rooting for them. They definitely haven’t had a smooth or easy road over the years though.

Good correction, thanks! I didn’t know about that. I suppose the key there are google play points. Do you know if you could do it separately from that?

Not in google play or iOS I don’t think. Someone else may know more, though.

Store credit is not necessarily simple. There are tons of laws about that kind of thing that differ country to country and in the US state to state. For example in my state, gift certificates can’t expire, so once you give one away as the dev you have to track that on your books forever, even if no one ever uses it. In your free example it’s even worse, because the company has to write that money off as real money, because it can never expire. It’s basically the same as giving away real money from a bookkeeping perspective (at least in my state). Someone with more bookkeeping knowledge can probably give a better answer but that’s my limited understanding of that as a sole proprietor who does my own books.

I would also question if store credit is actually any less predatory than a premium currency. If the premium currency is transparent and easy to understand it’s basically the same thing, no? Hypothetically, if I’m a scummy developer, I could sell $5 in store credit, and then make all the items on the store cost $8. That’s the same result for the player as bad monetization schemes with premium currency. I know in your example you’re saying give it away, but somewhere in there the developer is going to need to make money. They can’t give credit away for in-game currency and hope to stay afloat as a business for long without some deeply predatory stuff going on like in roblox.

At the end of the day I think everything you’re saying is probably feasible in some form for a AAA dev, but not for small devs. Personally I’m also thinking about small devs without an army of compliance specialists and lawyers. I’d like indies to also be able to make money, not just the conglomerates.

For example, saying a system could be worked out to localize an in-game economy is a hand wave. Every game works differently under the hood and in how it paces things, and this would be a huge undertaking to implement and maintain (probably a nonstarter for a small team). It involves more than simple conversion.

Does someone from a weak currency country get different rewards by playing the game than someone from a strong currency? How does that work if that reward is a whole item, not a bit of currency? Do we really want capitalistic shenanigans to extend into the gameplay directly? Personally I prefer that stuff to be cordoned off in the in-game shop.

That’s my take on all that. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t work for a AAA dev, so take this stuff with a grain of salt. My experience comes from having to tackle all these issues as a tiny indie dev.

Can you give me an example of one you’ve seen?

The original poster was saying paid currency shouldn’t exist, so I think in that scenario, you could only have vouchers for a whole in-game item. So for example if an item costed $5, then yes you could give away codes to redeem that item.

There’s also an operational overhead to doing it that way compared to in-game currency though, because setting up products in google play/iOS can be kind of a pain compared to adding them to your own systems. Generally the dev wants as much to be under their control as possible because they have more flexibility that way compared to making products in the app stores.

Also worth noting that iOS will block your app if you provide ways to get products (meaning things that cost real money) through ways other than the app store. So that means the dev wouldn’t be able to ever give you something in the game itself if that thing can also be bought. They could only give coupon codes (these are manually generated) for products to use in the app store interface.

I’d be interested to hear an example of one you’ve seen because it might be a way to approach it that I’m not thinking about.

There are many many examples of predatory uses of in game currencies, but here are some big reasons devs use them besides being scummy.

• Giving currency for free: giving people real money isn’t something any dev wants to deal with, so giving in game currency allows this to happen. This also applies to games where you can convert free currency to premium currency.
• Local currencies: currency packages can be set to local prices without having to localize the in-game economy itself. This simplifies development a lot.
• Weak promotion support on distributor platforms: believe it or not, iOS and android have incredibly weak promotion and sale support. By giving in-game currency, it gets around that failing of the platforms because the game can do whatever it wants with the in-game currency.

Transparency is good, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

OK good to hear!

I actually really have enjoyed the game itself but you aren’t fucking kidding about the rest of it. It’s truly insane how much friction there is between deciding to play and getting into a lobby.

I known I’ll like the game (the franchise is one of my all time favorites), it just had a lot of technical problems on launch so that’s what I’ve been waiting to see improved. Sounds like it might still be kinda rough based on the first part of your comment.

How’s the game state these days? I’ve been waiting to play until it got fixed up.

For real. I had a project to make two full since player campaigns and it was waaaaaay too ambitious. I’ve always been hopelessly ambitious with game dev stuff and I still am honestly 😅

So fun to hear everyone chiming about doing this back then.

That’s so cool sounding too! I made so many half baked ideas honestly. Tower defenses, single player campaigns (way too ambitious ones), and so many more. It really taught me a lot about proper game dev honestly.

That’s cool! I made tons of stuff but most of it never got finished or released cause I just kept starting the next thing. Probably the wildest thing I ever made was a prototype for a sidescrolling platformer in wc3. It had keyboard movement and ability usage, jumping, a heart counter in the top left, enemies, powerups… It was kind of janky but it worked surprisingly well considering what I built it in.

Hey another kid who grew up wc3 modding! I did a ton of that too.

This is a big moment for them. Can they redeem quarterly updates, or will we have another Nayos on our hands?

Not sure actually. I always use boost. Glad yours went away!