Month: October 2020

My Big Stupid Mouth

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Trying to leverage LinkedIn and participating in a discussion about parenting, revenue models, and publisher trust may have recently landed me deeper in enemy territory than I intended to go. Get the full story, hear a good rule of thumb for dealing with publishers, and learn a two-word phrase that lets you know to stop listening to anyone immediately.

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The Public Opinion Trial of Alex Hutchinson

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A creative director at Google Stadia makes surprising comments about the relationship between streamers, studios, and publishers. The community points out it’s not the first time he’s gained controversial attention. Jason Schreier emerges from the Fortress of Condescension to dunk on…everyone. We look for the dividing line separating fact from fiction about Alex Hutchinson.

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Golden Axed!

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SEGA celebrates its 60th anniversary by releasing a cancelled Golden Axe reboot on Steam, complete with a tongue-in-cheek title sequence and apologies for its bugs and jankiness. The developer cries foul and tells the story behind its chaotic production.

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Wheaton’s Law Has Consequences

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An email from a familiar name illustrated a perfect example of why you should be kind to people in your content space, or failing that, at least be quiet. We’ll also discuss why a sky-high number of followers on social media isn’t exactly what you should be chasing.

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Pricing Your Game

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By community request, we look at what successful developers have to say about pricing your indie game. I’ll talk about my experience, too, so you know what not to do.

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Supporting Your Game

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Do you really have time to support your own video game? If you’re an indie game developer, the answer is probably no, but app and game stores expect you to provide this service for your customers. In this episode of GameDev Breakdown, we’ll take a look at some strategies you can leverage to make this part of life a little easier.

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The Time Sierra On-Line Nearly Unionized

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Ken Williams has released a new book, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line. In the process of telling Sierra’s entire story from his perspective for the first time, he reveals what was surely among the very earliest attempts at unionization within the game industry.

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Founder Ken Williams Discusses the Time Sierra On-Line Game Developers Nearly Unionized in New Book

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Sierra On-Line founder Ken Williams clearly stayed busy during the pandemic. Earlier in October he released a new book, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line, which tells Sierra On-Line’s complete story from his perspective for the first time.

In one Sierra story I’d never even heard hinted at before, Williams spent part of a chapter describing the process of clamping down on the company’s wild start-up culture—or trying to “bring discipline,” as he describes it—and pushing his team to a point that he admits became abusive.

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