"Assuming Arkane will continue development, clearly there are many areas for technical improvement, with some annoying visual glitches, oversights and outright bugs remaining in the updated code. I'm not sure that any amount of patching will make Redfall a truly good game, but Arkane has at least delivered the performance level it should have delivered at launch."

There are some great stories from legendary program Giles Goddard (Star Fox, 1080 Snowboarding) in this piece.

He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed. "And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas.

Quick as a flash, he went to his desk and swapped the fried power supply for his computer's, and then - as if making a sudden, surprise discovery - announced, "Actually no it's fine - it's not broken." And it worked: Miyamoto was calmed. "But I did actually break it," Goddard tells me. "I just fixed it before he found out."

—-

The SGI Indy had a bonus feature Goddard was excited about too: a webcam. I know that doesn't sound exciting now, but back then, webcams were new, so Goddard started experimenting with it. He put ping pong balls on his face, because the camera picked them up well, and ended up creating a mo-capped facial animation prototype. He was impressed. Miyamoto was impressed. So much so, Miyamoto announced, "Well let's try and get a Mario face into that."

So, Nintendo did. Yoshiaki Koizumi took the prototype and added "bones and everything" for Goddard to use. "Then I just skinned all the polygons together - skinning was a new thing as well - and I got it all spongy, and then we just iterated on that to see what was fun." And that's how the famous N64 Mario face - the one you can pull around at the beginning of Mario 64 - came to be.

While Elon's then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to "insist" on being included in the game. "The studio guys were like sweating," Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds "I told them that I was armed but not dangerous".

Apparently, the developers relented at the time, though it's unclear if Musk did actually get the cameo in the end.

Starbreeze insists it is "working hard" to keep servers online after Payday 3 players endured a second consecutive evening of disruption.

After a three-day early access period for some players, Payday 3 released on 21st September, but players have struggled to get online at peak times due to continuing server issues that have shutdown matchmaking, making it impossible to play the always-online heist shooter.

I can say, unequivocally, if you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it's worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.

It's on developers to sort through these two types of costs, meaning Unity has added a bunch of admin work for us, while making it extremely costly for games like Vampire Survivor to sell their game at the price they do. Vampire Survivor's edge was their price, now doing something like that is completely unfeasible. Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you're not sure how well it'll do, you're punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success. Not to mention that sales will now be more costly for developers since Unity is not asking for a percentage, but a flat fee. If I reduce the price of my game, the price unity asks for doesn't decrease.

IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions survey showed that most respondents said they worked an average of 40 hours a week, but a quarter of people who answered said they worked for 41 hours or more.

The longest reported average was 95 hours a week.

Over half (58%) of respondents said they were paid with an annual salary, and 26.4% worked under hourly pay. Many salaried developers reported issues with overtime pay, with some claiming they were "exempt".

It's disappointing to see this is still the normal state of things for developers, and not the rare exception.

If you thought this was too good a deal to be true, I guess Microsoft agreed. A short excerpt:

"You can no longer claim a trial of Xbox Game Pass for £1/$1, just days ahead of Starfield, the year's biggest Microsoft launch.

"The option has been removed from Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass sign-up website (thanks, XGP). Now, you must simply pay the full amount for your first month."

Is anyone else having this issue? If I have it enabled during the day, it sets itself to dark mode.

I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox's current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:

"The possible future that we originally saw for Xbox – the excitement about Microsoft’s renewed commitment to building up its studios to the point where it could be a genuine rival to Sony’s software slate – hangs in the balance. The alternative, in which almost a hundred billion dollars in total is spent to buy enough publishers to make Microsoft a major player, is probably the reality we’re getting.

"The extent to which that will hamper further development of Microsoft’s own game studios and first-party publishing remains to be seen, but it’s highly unlikely that the effect will be zero; no company, not even Microsoft, has unlimited bandwidth to keep every plate spinning all at once."

"The urge to play a violent video game in the midst of the most brutal land war in Europe since World War II may seem baffling. But it’s a way to cope."

"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn't share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage against Xbox, but perhaps the split is even worse than that beneath the surface. "