Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
> despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die.
What many people have been saying in my experience is pretty much the opposite: that Mozilla isn't going anywhere because Google wants them (needs them) to be around. That it's their antitrust Trojan horse.
Does it maybe come down to changing licenses, as in a license expires and another is negotiated with different terms (to charge per household instead in the example above)?
If the market is spread so thin that, say, fairly original games released today would have been sure hits 15 years ago, where is the failure? Lack of six figure investment in marketing campaigns? Is creating success simply already having the capital to make a successful game? Is it being in the influencer "meta" (see right now e.g. PEAK)?
I don't think success/failure should be framed in any other way than "did the game break even for the dev/publisher" and that's beyond what any player perceives. Because crossing that line will send devs into despair, as you mentioned, it's just not sane.
I took "I can see a good reason why it failed" to mean, "There was an obvious flaw in the craftsmanship of the game": The story wasn't good (if it relied on story), the mechanics weren't good, the graphics were sloppy or ugly, it was buggy or incomplete or something else.
The claim is: Make a solid game - a solid story, solid mechanics, solid graphics, no bugs, etc., and the game will succeed.
And that's an easy claim to refute -- point out just one game that was at least "solid" on all those fronts which nonetheless failed. He's asking you to show him one, so that he can update his beliefs.
"They didn't spend $500k promoting it" doesn't seem like a "good reason why it failed".
What I’d suggest is taking a look through the games published by a company like Raw Fury that has a stellar reputation. There are plenty of good games by that definition that didn’t do well commercially on their books.
I picked a random Raw Fury game, Regions of Ruin. It looks like a Viking side-scroller, fighter, builder game. The art is pretty good, but amateurish. Overall, a pretty good game, though it would probably never catch my eye. I looked up the stats: it once had 3000 players at once, and has about 2000 good reviews. A game stats site estimated it had about $400,000 in sales. I consider this a success.
I should clarify that by "success" I mean the game had a good amount of attention and enough sales to potentially make a profit. This is what I care about as a potential game developer. Does the market still give decent games a decent shot at being profitable? Regions of Ruin is a decent game and had a decent shot at being profitable.
I looked at Phantom Spark. It's a simple F-Zero style racer through nice looking 3D stages. It's fairly minimal, only one type of racing vehicle with some color variations. The main draw of the game is improving your time trial times. There's some characters that put text on the screen, but their style doesn't really fit the game. Overall, the characters don't appear to contribute to a story or anything. I'm guessing there's maybe like a dozen tracks? This game was reviewed by several gaming sites, including IGN and received decent scores. One website estimated it made $80,000 in revenue.
Everyone will have to judge for themselves whether or not those two games had a shot at success. Judge for yourself the state of the gaming market.
For context since success is slippery I’d take it as able to recoup development costs and provide a runway for the next project otherwise being a professional game developer could not be sustainable. This is also the worst place to be in as a developer where each project has to recoup it’s very precarious.
Both are rated Very Positive on Steam so clearly both are good games in the opinion of the gaming population at large.
The thesis that all you need to find success is a good game is clearly not sufficient.
FWIW I think Regions of Ruin was most definitely a commercial success and that estimated revenue figure is probably very low for the review count they have.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US
Interesting, since when? I'm curious about how it's turned out in practise. For web services I mean. An for anyone hosting a message board or comment section.
The US states are just targeting the big porn sites like Pornhub to add ID checks AFAIK, I haven't heard of them going after random forums like in the UK. But obviously that sort of power always expands, just like how the UK went from arresting a couple people for offensive tweets back in 2010 to doing 12k arrests/yr in 2025
The UK law was designed to be all encompassing. Why block just the 'porn sites' when you can see porn on forums?
The UK law is actually a good implementation if you put child 'safety' as your number one priority, with any other considerations as, in practise, moot.
Unfortunately I think free civil discourse between adults, privacy, etc. are just as important as child safety which makes the current law a bit crap.
This is similar to the video game and MasterCard/VISA issue - you can buy games that promote sexual violence and incest. Nothing stops children downloading them for free, or using their under-18s debit card from purchasing the non-free versions. In this instance it was private companies leveraging their freedom of association rather than an all encompassing law from a sovereign state, but the intent is the same.
As a collective society we do really need to come to grips with what it is that we want. Allowing kids to freely access gang torture/execution videos and playing pro-rape entertainment should probably be tackled. I'm not sure I agree with the implementations though.
The mass of a star was at some point a nebula, which collapsed into the star.
That collapse reduced the gravitational potential energy of the mass of that nebula, which through accelleration, friction, and pressure, was turned into heat energy.
That heated mass will emit black-body emissions, and so the gravitational energy is now being radiated as light.
Yes, heat through pressure and friction as the matter tries to collapse under gravity. Not quite enough heat and pressure to trigger a sustained fusion reaction.
One interesting thing is that this star was detected at visual wavelengths, not infrared. While not undergoing fusion, it’s hot enough to glow blue-white.
What distro? It's niche enough of a use case. Have you considered releasing the code?
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