gaming studios are full of people who are squarely in the target market for the product they're developing. this has downsides but in many ways is a huge edge, so in a sense ageism seems more justifiable in games than elsewhere as a close proxy for audience understanding
brutal job market in games right now. layoffs and studio closures all over the place, startups having trouble closing rounds, meanwhile ever more games on the market with 15k released on steam last year
thanks for reading and sharing your perspective! i'm arguing against my own interest here as VCs indirectly pay most of my income, but as you also observe the standard playbook doesn't quite seem to copy paste well
that's a good point. i was at a large dev for a while myself and a fair number of coworkers have gone on to start their own studios, taking VC money in the process. a second dinner or theorycraft does need deep pockets, and the teams themselves bring most of the execution expertise needed
you're correct, this was a basic error on my part - it's #5 all time (https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=peak). apologies / thanks for the catch, and i've fixed the text
hiya, author here. Palworld is a wild, wild game (think pokemon meets ark:survival evolved, or simply pokemon with guns), and it follows a number of other super-successful indie games that got made with no VC funding. i myself work heavily within the VC ecosystem, so it got me thinking about how games and VC tie together. while the article is written in an opinionated manner, i don't mean to present it as fact - more some musings and steelmanning of why VCs aren't needed
i don't know that it would be fair of me to bemoan the slow progress of long covid research given how new it is by medical standards, but at the very least i am glad that mainstream awareness and reporting seem to be increasing
it's quite scary that everyone who catches covid is rolling the dice on potentially debilitating, poorly understood complications, and i have to imagine people in general would behave very differently if they were mindful of this. and there's the systemic difficulty forced on current long covid sufferers, who have an uphill battle in persuading those around them (including, often, medical professionals!) that they have a real and sometimes severe condition
i have some familiarity with sentiment / intent detection in context heavy environments (gaming and VR) and absolutely agree that labeling is both a fundamental and very nuanced problem. an ML PhD was hired to work on toxicity detection, and a primary activity in his first several months was manually watching and labeling game replays - what a use of all that education!
there's something to be said for utilizing community-based reporting as a form of expert labeling for integrity issues specifically, but that's not a silver bullet and has its own baggage
this is a good example of the importance of comms and user education. robinhood didn't lock trading - or at the very least, they were far from the only brokerage to do so and had
very little choice in the matter. however, they were the front end that uninformed users experienced it through and thus took a huge PR hit