Awesome news! Love Facepunch for what they are doing. I’m not a game dev yet, but I really hope “Obviously, if a country has sanctions against it, we won't be able to send money to people in that country until the sanctions are lifted.” does not mean that people from Russia or China won’t be able to get payouts, considering how many people from these countries (Russia, at least) are interested in s&box and game dev in general.
As much as I appreciate these self-monetization ideas, they always feel like an all-or-nothing gamble. I don't believe s&box has the same level of audience as Gmod. Since this is still early in development, not many people know about its existence yet. I do hope you can attract more advertisements and interest so that people can create more content in s&box.
I love the mention of countries that are hard to pay out to. goes to show how much you think about the particularities/specifics of every feature you implement. huge W.
"These are called "Game Developers". I'm not going to be mad at people optimizing their games to make people want to play a lot."
You should, because what WILL happen is that games will be made that don't make the player want to play more because they are fun, but games that use manipulation tactics to keep players playing, the same tactics ad infested mobile games use to get more eyes on the ads and drive up revenue. The same tactics casinos use to keep people gambling more and more
A system designed around player retention is a system asking to be abused with an influx of games designed to manipulate the player into playing more
things we ALL hate in games, things like Battle Passes, Loot Boxes, daily log in rewards are things this system rewards, because even if you don't allow microtransactions games will still use systems like Lootboxes to keep players playing
If you want a platform filled with greedy people motivated by profits over passion, then this is a perfect system
but if you want to reward quality over quantity, this is not it, this system rewards games with as little effort as possible into the actual game and the most effort possible into payer retention
I feel like if there's a quality game that also makes people want to play a lot - they'll choose that quality game over a low quality game that makes them want to play the same amount. It's really a natural selection thing.
Yes people will optimize their games to make people want to play them more. Game developers have been doing that for 60 years. I'm not sure what kind of games you want?
As long as the discorvery algorithm promotes highly rated and popular games as well it shouldn't be a problem, ideally games like Opium will still have good visibility even if each play session is quite short.
I literally can't wait for S&box to become a fully-fledged game engine. I can't imagine opening Steam, playing a game made by the developer of Garry's Mod, and then, after months or so, releasing a game running on ( a modified version of ) Source 2. It just sounds crazy. I'm really, REALLY interested in how Facepunch (and Garry) will handle exporting games.