The state of the industry does not look good, especially in the AAA world.
Gearbox started firing people as soon as it was bought by Embracer
Nintendo restructures it's testing department
Skull and Bones is slashed by $25 after three weeks on sail
Relic entertainment sold by SEGA
_B: EA Losses
EA drops star wars games and fires 650
EA is looking away from licensed games
_B: Saber Sold
Embracer sells Saber interactive along with other companies. This includes Metro series and new Warhammer 40k Space marine game
Space Marine is still being made
It's being delayed though
They don't seem to care either.
Valve created an orb for video making using steam decks they had lying around. Half Life 3 is still not released.
Activision QA has a large union now
_B: Warner Bros keeps on losing path
Warner Bros Gaming would rather commit suicide squad than make another successful Harry Potter game.
They really want that Fortnite style money
This has made them lean into the DEI money like Sweet Baby Inc
How Sweet Baby Inc ruined a game called Flintlock
Interview with women who work at Mojang. Buzzfeed article says diversity will help us all.
It also means companies leaning into milking the existing player base Instead of trying to grow it.
A lawsuit is coming for game makers that accuses them of making addictive practices to make more money. The response has been, “you can't sue us for making good games”.
Why I stopped being a framerate snob… advert for Steam deck
A business model designed to milk small amounts of players, rather than selling well overall. Comparison to the Cable channel model.
This has meant the Game Developer Conference has some awkwardness.
_GDC: AAA and Creativity
It costs too much to be creative in the AAA field.
Maybe AAA deserves to die. Corporations are greedy! Become an indie!
_GDC: Scream
A group go together to start
Screaming in a park
Meanwhile Monopoly Go has a huge publicity budget.
Monopoly Go had a nearly half a billion promotional budget.
And Toys for Bob is finally making their own game
Toys for Bob is making their own game. They usually make them by assignment, and have been very successful at it. The NFC toy games were started by them, and they created Tony Hawk Downhill Jam.
Also, Capcom has raised the pay of their employees.
Capcom raises salaries in tough times
So there is a silver lining.
Why QBasic and not something more modern (Python, for example?) And if you're concerned with them learning low level concepts (which python admittedly would be bad at) why not supplement with c/c++ (or even some form of assembly of you want to get really low level?)
I want to I produce them first, and then move from there. Assembly is a terrible idea for a beginner. I don't need my entire processor to be destroyed by a bad command.
If they get to something like Assembly, do it with a simpler setup like a Gameboy, NES, Genesis, etc. Z80, 68k, or 6502. It's all super well documented, simple, and you can do most of it with an emulator so you can get live access to the contents of the address space and registers and such. It's really useful to learn how the computer actually works, how putting things on the screen is really just a memory location, etc.
It's still an awful place to start though. I'd do QBasic just for ease of playing around and debugging. That's what I started on years and years ago I was probably 6 or 7. It's also got a nice help file for syntax. Then see what they are interested in. I personally love low-level programming and optimization, which is kinda a useless skill anymore. Everyone likes engines and high-level stuff now.
Sadly, QBasic isn't around much anymore.
You can run it in Dosbox still. Modern equivalent has gotta be Python for ease of use and learning. I’ve used quite a bit for data parsing and things, but i have no idea what kinds of things kids could do in it that’s interesting. Godot has its own scripting that’s pretty easy to use, so there’s that.
This is a really cool project I’ve messed with before: https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK It’s a C-based SDK for Sega Genesis. It’s slightly beyond “Hello, world” level beginner, but you’d be surprised how simple it can be to load in some graphics and move them around. There’s a lot of tools and support resources for it too.