If you can successfully operate a studio somewhere like Eastern Europe or South-East Asia rather than in Los Angeles or London, you can bring down development costs significantly – at least in theory.
They hate us that much. They won't even consider opening a studio in Wausau, Fort Dodge, or Albert Lea. They're like "Whelp, we can't be in Hollywood so let's move to fucking Poland."
They aren’t opening studios in America and Western Europe because those countries are diversified and subject to diversity hiring mandates.
This isn’t about cheap labor. It’s about competent labor. Holding anyone other than white males accountable for their productivity is racist/sexist, so the only way you can get your money’s worth is to hire exclusively white men. Poland is the new hotness for game dev because they have both a large pool of skilled white male game devs and fewer diversity initiatives. The wages are lower, sure, but not third world tier. That budget goes a lot further when you’re not required to throw extra salaries at unproductive demographics.
I'm not so sure about that. CD Projekt Red has been importing a lot of SJWs into Poland these days, so I expect the amount of dangerhairs to still be a problem for studios in Poland.
So many people in Europe are into American culture. They have SJWs. Or even Western culture. Whatever; there's no boundary. They can find these people in Europe.
This isn’t about cheap labor. It’s about competent labor.
"Quick, let's move all our studios to 2nd and 3rd world countries with a bunch of low IQ populations who will work for a fraction of the cost of 1st world developers."
A lot of shitlibs are homegrown, meaning they're from flyover country and hate it there because they get made fun of for acting like fags. So lots of these types move to places like Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco, etc.
It's not just shitlibs from California ruining formerly red states like Colorado and Arizona, California also gets the "not sending their best" crowd from red states too.
When the US finally goes the way of the USSR, that's when it'll be time to take California back. It used to be a beautiful and prosperous state, and it can be liberated from its current vampiric ruling class without the feds to protect them.
You can’t affordably produce a AAA game using western game devs because they are saddled with diversity hiring mandates. Every AAA studio is paying a bunch of incompetent diversity hires who add no (or even negative) value to any production. Every multimillion dollar budget has to pass through the prism of diversity, which siphons off a majority of the value.
Indie devs run circles around AAA because small indie studios get a pass on diversity mandates. You’re still allowed to start a small company with a dozen friends and create indie bangers without a feminist hiring manager stuffing unqualified retards down your throat.
Polish game dev is blowing up because it’s a racially homogeneous white nation with a decent average IQ. The lower wages are exaggerated; game dev wages are garbage everywhere. The unspoken appeal of Poland is that you actually get what you pay for.
If you're on desktop personal recommendation: I still don't care about cookies. Continuation of the original that sold out and just skips all the cookie shit.
Y'know, we all dislike DLC, and we can't really stop people from buying them, we can only just not buy them ourselves. You can encourage others not to, but you know they sell, as in game shops are in almost every AAA game now.
But the other side of this sword is that I honestly do not remember saying "I'm not going to buy this AAA game unless it costs more than the GDP of a small country just to make."
I was happy when my games were made by a team of less than 15, and the experience was fun and unique. You can't get a fun and unique experience hardly anymore with how it has to appeal to every single person on earth who has heard video games exist. It has to have mass market appeal because it cost a quarter billion dollars to make.
It'll also have to have an in game shop with high priced FOMO items and all the other garbage they can cram in there that you used to be able to unlock as you played.
There's no way this samey game with the one new thing is going to get enough people to buy it to cover the cost of making it. So the devs get sacked in favor of retaining money after the sale, even if it sells millions of copies. It won't be enough.
You wind up with this genre flavored samey game that is only a tiny bit different than all the others because this one company does this new thing. And don't worry, if new thing is accepted as innovative, it'll be copied into every other game in and out of the genre until people are tired of it.
And that's not even dipping into the always online BS that does not need to be in every title it's shoehorned onto. Or the DEI to the rescue bucks where they tack on the gayness and the brownness just to cover some of the development costs.
Anyway, none of that is why I play video games. It's probably why retro titles continue to hold their value. And for those that don't like retro games, why the indie scene is exploding in popularity. You just put the retro game in and you're playing within seconds. No in game shop, no FOMO items, no always online server.
"I'm not going to buy this AAA game unless it costs more than the GDP of a small country just to make."
It was inevitable when the graphical appearance of a game was the biggest "challenge" for most of video game's early life. The mechanical complexity of something like an action game or an RPG didn't really jump a lot from the 80s-00s, so the focus was entirely on being less blocky and ugly.
And because each game that was "mindblowing" did usually become a massive seller, it taught those companies to chase that shit forever. Look at the just released Hellblade 2, which thought that having absurdly realistic character motions and graphics would turn a niche cult sequel into a huge seller.
Its also partially a problem that games journos don't get blamed for enough. Because they will write gushing articles about beautiful graphics over and over, but their sheer lack of gaming skill or knowledge means they can't really understand or hype up anything else. So Game Corporations, who still treat games journalism as a legitimate focus, will push graphics to get that article mill going.
Unironically, I think if gamergate had happened a decade prior and prevented the strong bond between games journos and Game Corpos from forming, the graphical fidelity (and thereby budget explosion) focus might never have happened.
Eastern Europe is gonna drop a lot of costs without affecting the quality much at all - hell, the innate cultural pushback against DIE stuff might actually end up making it better, assuming their hiring managers look for literally anything but the dumbest stooges. 30% of a san francisco salary is kingly living in Romania.
south east asia, though? lol, aren't outsourced rakeshes already ruining all their code?
I thought India was “South Asia,” and “Southeast Asia” was Thailand/Vietnam/Cambodia (which I’m sure have their own issues, but I can’t imagine they deserve to be lumped in with India).
San Fran folks sitting in their comfy playrooms eating sushi and drinking lattes, trolling on X all day long colonising the coding space for the biggest of bucks and denying hungry minorities (Granted, almost the entirety of the population of the country they are in) basic food and shelter and the ability to get recognition for their innate skills with promotion or awards.
These pieces of Western filth who try and tell me who to feel attracted to or think politically! Totally pushing the modern day slave trade and drinking coffee and tea no doubt picked my farmers related to their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
With A.I. taking over journalism, the Developing World taking over coding and shareholders looking for a return on their investments we might finally see games which are good and are promoted well.
It never made any sense at all for game dev studios to be located in SanFran. GameDev is not known for high salary positions, and then you sit your offices in the highest/second-highest rent place in the US?
There are a lot of super inconvenient things about SF and the bay area. yet people still commute t hours and live there. I think it was just a density of talent that California had bred which is now leaving. But yeah the rent goes up every year, and conditions get worse, and makes it less and less feasible for them to center the culture there.
True but I met a guy over a decade ago who had offices in San Fran and outsourced all his coding to the Philippines and made a mighty packet from it.
It was only a matter of time before that would find its way into every aspect of computer programming.
Code doesn't have a gender or a race, it works or it doesn't.
It certainly doesn't need a humanities degree and to tell everyone who came before it that they are scum.
Someone working for 1/10 of the wage in a part of the world where that's a great wage will work twice as hard to stop it going to their neighbour.
San Fran have always been making themselves feel like they are the top of the ivory tower without realising that they have always been the oppressors or people with skills, but no ability to show it.
Third World programmers will certainly change the attitudes in San Fran and across the programming world and we shouldn't ever let them forget it.
When they said "Build your own Twitter" they didn't realise that they weren't the ones who built the one they were using and they'll all be against the next big thing but what are they going to do about it, moan on Mastodon?
third world programmers are mostly retarded, even the "good ones". any game studio that chooses Jar Punjab and Miguel from Brazil over any European country (even the cheap ones) is going to find out really rapidly that it's much cheaper to pay one guy to do it right over a month instead of 10 guys to each fuck it up over a year.
the only reason the outsourcing industry is this large is because most software jobs are copy/paste idiocies to make yet another checkout page on a website, and Rakesh can handle that just fine. any game they lay their hands on goes to shit, though.
Good programmers don't work for game devs and those who do have shown that they don't know what they are doing these days.
The minute you think a 150 Gig game with 3 hours of gameplay is good programming is the minute you have shown that you don't know squat about programming.
Even today on Reddit some "Game developer" was talking about how they are (Dreaming of no doubt) putting a limit on their cutscenes which denies streamers from talking over them. An they were laughing about it like they were some sort of power hungry Nazi wannabe.
I'll take Samir and perhaps buffing up the code afterwards than put up with an eternal committee of what colour of teal to use on the Pride flag and so would anyone else that's got any knowledge of getting a product out working and on time..
I think it's pretty obvious. The programmer could write extremely optimized code but if it ends up being packaged with unoptimized assets - a decision they may have no control over - the end result is still going to be a massive size for the game as a whole. It's not like the code itself takes up much storage.
I take it that all games that are 150 gigs are excellent examples of programming then?
Those 150 gigs have nothing to do with "programming,"
A few seconds of video will take up more disk space than the entire game engine. A few detailed, textured 3d models will take up more disk space than the entire game engine. The size of the code has very little to do with the size of today's game.
My current project deals with gigabytes of data at a time yet the engine is only about 5-10 megabytes.
you have precisely 0 idea how much a bad programmer can run in circles. you'll ask for 1 + 1 = 2 and they'll give you 3 + 7 = 37. undoing Samir's masterpieces when they inevitably end up in a dead end is always costlier than just spending the time to find one of many sane programmers from a civilized country where they don't bathe in cow excrement.
The minute you think a 150 Gig game with 3 hours of gameplay is good programming is the minute you have shown that you don't know squat about programming.
That you wrote this sentence has shown you don't know squat about programming. The amount of game content is irrelevant to the quality of the code.
Code doesn't have a gender or a race, it works or it doesn't.
If you can describe the code that well (to say objectively that it works or it does not), it is true that anyone can write it. But someone has to write the plan. Someone has to react when plans/hardware change midproject, which they always do.
I genuinely do use junior engineers to write that code. But I don't send it out to fucking India. I want them to tell me when my plan sucks. And I want them to be flexible and smart and to understand what I say. And for that I need Americans and Europeans, basically.
I don't do it much, but you can work with Eastern Europeans. Wages are somewhat lower there. Money goes further. Those costs are still much higher than a 3rd world country. You have to do it carefully, but there are ways to get work done in E. Europe, and save money on it, and it still be good.
And when someone can describe what they want so well there will be no need for anything outside of A.I.
But until then, bad managers will save money by going for cheaper solutions and there are plenty of them at the same level as those currently in the industry (Anyone who tweets while claiming to be a programmer is a perfect example of one).
I think it was another thread about defense, but they at least have to hire an American at some phase. At least an American middle man. Otherwise it's a precious project that can justify the value add to hire American programmers. Making those numbers work is hard everywhere.
They hate us that much. They won't even consider opening a studio in Wausau, Fort Dodge, or Albert Lea. They're like "Whelp, we can't be in Hollywood so let's move to fucking Poland."
They'd rather be dead than live in the midwest.
They aren’t opening studios in America and Western Europe because those countries are diversified and subject to diversity hiring mandates.
This isn’t about cheap labor. It’s about competent labor. Holding anyone other than white males accountable for their productivity is racist/sexist, so the only way you can get your money’s worth is to hire exclusively white men. Poland is the new hotness for game dev because they have both a large pool of skilled white male game devs and fewer diversity initiatives. The wages are lower, sure, but not third world tier. That budget goes a lot further when you’re not required to throw extra salaries at unproductive demographics.
I'm not so sure about that. CD Projekt Red has been importing a lot of SJWs into Poland these days, so I expect the amount of dangerhairs to still be a problem for studios in Poland.
So many people in Europe are into American culture. They have SJWs. Or even Western culture. Whatever; there's no boundary. They can find these people in Europe.
Why is it that I never see DEI types complain about the lack of racial diversity in the Chinese sweat shops that make 90% of their stuff?
Because it's about angry revenge fantasies from the filthskins on the group they know are their Betters.
"Quick, let's move all our studios to 2nd and 3rd world countries with a bunch of low IQ populations who will work for a fraction of the cost of 1st world developers."
Yeah, sure...
To be fair, a studio in Albert Lea is going to be a bunch of pink haired DEI loving commies anyway.
My best friend is a game dev in MN, and his company is infested with leftists.
A lot of shitlibs are homegrown, meaning they're from flyover country and hate it there because they get made fun of for acting like fags. So lots of these types move to places like Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco, etc.
It's not just shitlibs from California ruining formerly red states like Colorado and Arizona, California also gets the "not sending their best" crowd from red states too.
As they should, so when the San Andreas fault cracks and California drifts off we don't have to worry about stragglers.
When the US finally goes the way of the USSR, that's when it'll be time to take California back. It used to be a beautiful and prosperous state, and it can be liberated from its current vampiric ruling class without the feds to protect them.
You can’t affordably produce a AAA game using western game devs because they are saddled with diversity hiring mandates. Every AAA studio is paying a bunch of incompetent diversity hires who add no (or even negative) value to any production. Every multimillion dollar budget has to pass through the prism of diversity, which siphons off a majority of the value.
Indie devs run circles around AAA because small indie studios get a pass on diversity mandates. You’re still allowed to start a small company with a dozen friends and create indie bangers without a feminist hiring manager stuffing unqualified retards down your throat.
Polish game dev is blowing up because it’s a racially homogeneous white nation with a decent average IQ. The lower wages are exaggerated; game dev wages are garbage everywhere. The unspoken appeal of Poland is that you actually get what you pay for.
50 employees are when the woke mandates kick in.
So just keep splitting your studio every 40 people.
Make development teams fit in phone booths again.
https://archive.is/fEKhm
They might deserve the clicks, but being asked to deal with cookies this morning pissed me off, so I archived the article.
If you're on desktop personal recommendation: I still don't care about cookies. Continuation of the original that sold out and just skips all the cookie shit.
Original what?
The original "I don't care about cookies". They sold out, literally Spyware so someone forked it.
Archiving is about more than denying clicks.
Y'know, we all dislike DLC, and we can't really stop people from buying them, we can only just not buy them ourselves. You can encourage others not to, but you know they sell, as in game shops are in almost every AAA game now.
But the other side of this sword is that I honestly do not remember saying "I'm not going to buy this AAA game unless it costs more than the GDP of a small country just to make."
I was happy when my games were made by a team of less than 15, and the experience was fun and unique. You can't get a fun and unique experience hardly anymore with how it has to appeal to every single person on earth who has heard video games exist. It has to have mass market appeal because it cost a quarter billion dollars to make.
It'll also have to have an in game shop with high priced FOMO items and all the other garbage they can cram in there that you used to be able to unlock as you played.
There's no way this samey game with the one new thing is going to get enough people to buy it to cover the cost of making it. So the devs get sacked in favor of retaining money after the sale, even if it sells millions of copies. It won't be enough.
You wind up with this genre flavored samey game that is only a tiny bit different than all the others because this one company does this new thing. And don't worry, if new thing is accepted as innovative, it'll be copied into every other game in and out of the genre until people are tired of it.
And that's not even dipping into the always online BS that does not need to be in every title it's shoehorned onto. Or the DEI to the rescue bucks where they tack on the gayness and the brownness just to cover some of the development costs.
Anyway, none of that is why I play video games. It's probably why retro titles continue to hold their value. And for those that don't like retro games, why the indie scene is exploding in popularity. You just put the retro game in and you're playing within seconds. No in game shop, no FOMO items, no always online server.
Just you and the game.
It was inevitable when the graphical appearance of a game was the biggest "challenge" for most of video game's early life. The mechanical complexity of something like an action game or an RPG didn't really jump a lot from the 80s-00s, so the focus was entirely on being less blocky and ugly.
And because each game that was "mindblowing" did usually become a massive seller, it taught those companies to chase that shit forever. Look at the just released Hellblade 2, which thought that having absurdly realistic character motions and graphics would turn a niche cult sequel into a huge seller.
Its also partially a problem that games journos don't get blamed for enough. Because they will write gushing articles about beautiful graphics over and over, but their sheer lack of gaming skill or knowledge means they can't really understand or hype up anything else. So Game Corporations, who still treat games journalism as a legitimate focus, will push graphics to get that article mill going.
Unironically, I think if gamergate had happened a decade prior and prevented the strong bond between games journos and Game Corpos from forming, the graphical fidelity (and thereby budget explosion) focus might never have happened.
Lol.. like starfield outsourcing half its work to india?? Lawl.
Oh boy, games developed by SJW pajeets and mystery meats.
Can't wait to add those to my collection!
Eastern Europe is gonna drop a lot of costs without affecting the quality much at all - hell, the innate cultural pushback against DIE stuff might actually end up making it better, assuming their hiring managers look for literally anything but the dumbest stooges. 30% of a san francisco salary is kingly living in Romania.
south east asia, though? lol, aren't outsourced rakeshes already ruining all their code?
In a sentence, that's what I wrote an essay about, above.
I thought India was “South Asia,” and “Southeast Asia” was Thailand/Vietnam/Cambodia (which I’m sure have their own issues, but I can’t imagine they deserve to be lumped in with India).
Spread the wealth you filthy Western bigots!
San Fran folks sitting in their comfy playrooms eating sushi and drinking lattes, trolling on X all day long colonising the coding space for the biggest of bucks and denying hungry minorities (Granted, almost the entirety of the population of the country they are in) basic food and shelter and the ability to get recognition for their innate skills with promotion or awards.
These pieces of Western filth who try and tell me who to feel attracted to or think politically! Totally pushing the modern day slave trade and drinking coffee and tea no doubt picked my farmers related to their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
With A.I. taking over journalism, the Developing World taking over coding and shareholders looking for a return on their investments we might finally see games which are good and are promoted well.
Who would have thunk??!!??
It never made any sense at all for game dev studios to be located in SanFran. GameDev is not known for high salary positions, and then you sit your offices in the highest/second-highest rent place in the US?
San Fran was and is a leftist ideological Mecca. That’s why indie game dev was centralized there.
There are a lot of super inconvenient things about SF and the bay area. yet people still commute t hours and live there. I think it was just a density of talent that California had bred which is now leaving. But yeah the rent goes up every year, and conditions get worse, and makes it less and less feasible for them to center the culture there.
San Fran also used to be beautiful, before all the homeless and feces.
It was still inconvenient. A lot of old cities are sited on places that are hard to build.
True but I met a guy over a decade ago who had offices in San Fran and outsourced all his coding to the Philippines and made a mighty packet from it.
It was only a matter of time before that would find its way into every aspect of computer programming.
Code doesn't have a gender or a race, it works or it doesn't.
It certainly doesn't need a humanities degree and to tell everyone who came before it that they are scum.
Someone working for 1/10 of the wage in a part of the world where that's a great wage will work twice as hard to stop it going to their neighbour.
San Fran have always been making themselves feel like they are the top of the ivory tower without realising that they have always been the oppressors or people with skills, but no ability to show it.
Third World programmers will certainly change the attitudes in San Fran and across the programming world and we shouldn't ever let them forget it.
When they said "Build your own Twitter" they didn't realise that they weren't the ones who built the one they were using and they'll all be against the next big thing but what are they going to do about it, moan on Mastodon?
third world programmers are mostly retarded, even the "good ones". any game studio that chooses Jar Punjab and Miguel from Brazil over any European country (even the cheap ones) is going to find out really rapidly that it's much cheaper to pay one guy to do it right over a month instead of 10 guys to each fuck it up over a year.
the only reason the outsourcing industry is this large is because most software jobs are copy/paste idiocies to make yet another checkout page on a website, and Rakesh can handle that just fine. any game they lay their hands on goes to shit, though.
1+1=2 regardless of who you try to shine it.
Good programmers don't work for game devs and those who do have shown that they don't know what they are doing these days.
The minute you think a 150 Gig game with 3 hours of gameplay is good programming is the minute you have shown that you don't know squat about programming.
Even today on Reddit some "Game developer" was talking about how they are (Dreaming of no doubt) putting a limit on their cutscenes which denies streamers from talking over them. An they were laughing about it like they were some sort of power hungry Nazi wannabe.
I'll take Samir and perhaps buffing up the code afterwards than put up with an eternal committee of what colour of teal to use on the Pride flag and so would anyone else that's got any knowledge of getting a product out working and on time..
Those 150 gigs have nothing to do with "programming," and only someone who knows nothing about programming would suggest that it does.
I take it that all games that are 150 gigs are excellent examples of programming then?
I'm not sure what your argument is here?
I think it's pretty obvious. The programmer could write extremely optimized code but if it ends up being packaged with unoptimized assets - a decision they may have no control over - the end result is still going to be a massive size for the game as a whole. It's not like the code itself takes up much storage.
Those 150 gigs have nothing to do with "programming,"
Are you arguing in good faith?
A few seconds of video will take up more disk space than the entire game engine. A few detailed, textured 3d models will take up more disk space than the entire game engine. The size of the code has very little to do with the size of today's game.
My current project deals with gigabytes of data at a time yet the engine is only about 5-10 megabytes.
Do you know what "programming" is?
you have precisely 0 idea how much a bad programmer can run in circles. you'll ask for 1 + 1 = 2 and they'll give you 3 + 7 = 37. undoing Samir's masterpieces when they inevitably end up in a dead end is always costlier than just spending the time to find one of many sane programmers from a civilized country where they don't bathe in cow excrement.
That you wrote this sentence has shown you don't know squat about programming. The amount of game content is irrelevant to the quality of the code.
If you can describe the code that well (to say objectively that it works or it does not), it is true that anyone can write it. But someone has to write the plan. Someone has to react when plans/hardware change midproject, which they always do.
I genuinely do use junior engineers to write that code. But I don't send it out to fucking India. I want them to tell me when my plan sucks. And I want them to be flexible and smart and to understand what I say. And for that I need Americans and Europeans, basically.
I don't do it much, but you can work with Eastern Europeans. Wages are somewhat lower there. Money goes further. Those costs are still much higher than a 3rd world country. You have to do it carefully, but there are ways to get work done in E. Europe, and save money on it, and it still be good.
You are perfectly correct.
And when someone can describe what they want so well there will be no need for anything outside of A.I.
But until then, bad managers will save money by going for cheaper solutions and there are plenty of them at the same level as those currently in the industry (Anyone who tweets while claiming to be a programmer is a perfect example of one).
I think it was another thread about defense, but they at least have to hire an American at some phase. At least an American middle man. Otherwise it's a precious project that can justify the value add to hire American programmers. Making those numbers work is hard everywhere.
Comment Reported for: Rule 16 - Identity Attacks
I honestly can't tell where the satire ended in this comment.