And the funny thing is, the company isn't even doing bad. I found out from a friend who still works there that they are aiming for a sale at the end of the year, so effectively this is a way for them to pump up the stock. They will say their profits went up by 50-60%, but it didn't come from more clients, but from not paying wages. And this way stock go up. Also same friend said they are struggling a lot with AI. It can be helpful with coding, but It can't do everything, and they are literally asking it to do everything or at least hold long enough until the sale goes trough . Just greed... and hundreds of families put in a bad spot, so already rich people on top can make a lot of money fast instead of also a lot of money, but slower...
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Well, on the bright side, at least this teaches you the real value of AI is that it tells people what products to avoid:

If it wasn't AI it would be something else though. Working for the man always sucks.
We will watch your career with great interest
Thank you!
If you really want to sell the no gen AI thing, you might want to consider cleaning up the steam page translations. For example the finnish translation contains these lines:
Tässä on käännös suomeksi ilman pitkäviivaa:
...
Jos haluat, voin tehdä myös tiiviimmän ja myyvemmän version, joka sopii pelin kauppa- tai esittelytekstiin. Haluatko, että teen sen?
which roughly translate to:
Here's a translation in finnish without a long line:
...
If you want, I can also make a more dense and a better selling version , which fits in a game's store page or decription. Do you wan't me to do it?
Personally I don't mind AI being used for the store page translations, and I can see how easy it is to make a mistakes like that, but maybe anyone reading that would get a slightly better impression of the game without those extra bits.
I've been on the receiving end of "making the bride look good" for selling the company too, 3 times in my life. Either you still have a job but everything around you falls apart because there aren't enough people to keep shit running, or you lose the job; both variants suck. I always was on the team "keeping my job", but it also always ended with me fleeing as soon as i could because working conditions deteriorated fast.
Wishlisted your game !
So let me get this straight: you say its not generated with AI, yet you include the fucking Prompt of ChatGPT?

The translation:
Heres the Translation into German. I have chosen a clinical, depressing tone (spoiler: it didn't, its quite meta) to underline the tension and hard ethical content of your game.
You were not kidding lol. Also the case for Italian. Not for French and Spanish though. Not very consistent copy paste skills
So many people's lives are damaged by corporate decisions.. Hope things look up, and that Steam excuse makes sense but damn that sucks.
As for the game I love explorations into real-life fucked-up experiments! Will definitely be playing aha
Thank you! Yeah, like I said the company was already doing good and it's not like people or on top were poor. Just pure greed
You may want to try to deliberately get away from the "unreal fivey" look.
I like the underlying style but the strong reflections and resulting high contrast image really hits that "unreal five" look in a bad way, which I suspect will turn a lot of people off.
It's unfortunate but "indie unreal five game" is the new "steam asset flip", in that it is something that makes people skip a game. It's easy to slap realistic lightning into games now, so it has stopped being an indicator of quality, and slowly become the opposite.
Try to find something that works with the games style that you can do to the shading or post processing that sets you apart.
I might mute reflections a bit and add at least some grime and imperfections to surfaces. The cleanliness of surfaces together with unreals realistic lighting is a big part of the "indie unreal five" look.
At this point, if your game has the UE5 look and runs like shit, then I won’t consider it all.
That isn't the first impression that I got, although of course I'm just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn't seem that consistent. IDK what's going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there's very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it's not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it's trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn't necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.
IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn't have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt
Man I like Valve but I hate this shit about not paying you until it gets to $100.
They cite the cost of sending and receiving money, dude that is practically nothing for business I mean what like 3-5%.
Its a pretty shitty practice to be real.
On the other hand I suppose they do have a lot of games listed that probably never get past the $100 mark but still. They still got the 30% cut they take out of that fees and costs be damned!
The payout cost is probably less about the bank fee and more about accounting and other managing overheads. Remember that steam may have to handle refunds that happened after the payout. Would be a mess to chase a few dollars from a dev that doesn't have a proper revenue stream. Just not worth it to steam.
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure the money not paid transfers over to another month, so you probably get most of your money sooner or later.
It's not ideal but it is understandable IMO.
This makes sense thank you for pointing this out looks like there was a few things I didn't understand about this process.
It's a common practice, twitch does the same. It probably just scales with a very large amount of payments that would be needed otherwise, especially with all the shovelware steam gets these days.
I got burned out developing business software and lost my job after 13 years. I'm lucky if my previous game makes $100 in a year at this point. So now I'm wondering at what point I'll need to give up on my dream of being a full time indie game dev and start looking for a new job.
Start looking. It’s a very saturated market. Unless you can get some YouTubers or streamers to play your game then it’s not going to make much of anything.
That game looks good from the trailer! Great sinister vibes, and it kind of reminded me of portal a little bit with the omnipotent computer voice. That elevator music -was- pleasant! Lol
Thank you! A fan in chat of one of the streamers called it Portal with murder hah
Hey, the game looks genuinely interesting, I hope to play it sometime soon
Thank you! Yeah it's coming at the end of the year :)
The game has an intriguing premise. Will check out the demo when I have time.
uuh I had the demo for your game already installed but still havent played it, maybe today...
I was also inspired by the explosion of weird indie horror games to pick up Godot, but time is what it is, good luck!