- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Hello, just wanted to share my story as a reminder with all the lay offs in the gaming industry, it has been terrible outside of it too. I’ve been working as an automation QA for a pretty decent software company and I was about to hit like 11 years on the job. Also on the side I’ve been trying to get my own indie game dev studio off the ground with releasing 3 small games in the past 3 years.
After saving for like 10 years and living in small rented apartments, last summer I finally managed to secure enough money so I can get a loan to buy my first apartment. After a year of dealing with contractors (yes, they are that slow!!!) I finally moved and was hoping to be able to focus my free time on my game again. However literally first Monday we have a meeting with a head of our department and they said we are practically being replaced with A.I. So around 60% of the company is gone across all offices in 3 different continents…
I guess my dream has always been to go full time game dev, it’s just I was hoping to be able to do it on my own terms and not kinda being forced into it. But with no real money coming in from my previous games I might not be able to make payments for the place I bought and spent most of my adult life saving for.
So now I guess I don’t have a choice but to go all in on my current game. If you want to check it out and leave feedback on how it looks or even wishlist, you can so here STEAM
Wish me luck guys and gals!
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Man I like Valve but I hate this shit about not paying you until it gets to $100.
They cite the cost of sending and receiving money, dude that is practically nothing for business I mean what like 3-5%.
Its a pretty shitty practice to be real.
On the other hand I suppose they do have a lot of games listed that probably never get past the $100 mark but still. They still got the 30% cut they take out of that fees and costs be damned!
The payout cost is probably less about the bank fee and more about accounting and other managing overheads. Remember that steam may have to handle refunds that happened after the payout. Would be a mess to chase a few dollars from a dev that doesn’t have a proper revenue stream. Just not worth it to steam.
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure the money not paid transfers over to another month, so you probably get most of your money sooner or later.
It’s not ideal but it is understandable IMO.
This makes sense thank you for pointing this out looks like there was a few things I didn’t understand about this process.
It’s a common practice, twitch does the same. It probably just scales with a very large amount of payments that would be needed otherwise, especially with all the shovelware steam gets these days.
The game has an intriguing premise. Will check out the demo when I have time.
So let me get this straight: you say its not generated with AI, yet you include the fucking Prompt of ChatGPT?
The translation:
Heres the Translation into German. I have chosen a clinical, depressing tone (spoiler: it didn’t, its quite meta) to underline the tension and hard ethical content of your game.
So what? I hate AI but blowing a gasket over using it for translations just makes you sound like a witch hunter. Like this is supposed to ruin all the hard work this person clearly put into their game? Yeah right
The gasket that’s gentrifying folks, polluting water, destroying habitats, and it’s overwhelmingly ineffective in it’s stated goal to solve, as we read on this very🧵. Why use a gasket when bombing valleys is more effective?
You were not kidding lol. Also the case for Italian. Not for French and Spanish though. Not very consistent copy paste skills
This is just the translation on the Steam page it has nothing to do with the development of the game. Simple as.
I don’t mean to hate. The game looks interesting and I’m sure you worked hard on it.
However, you got laid off due to AI, and then went straight to ChatGPT for translations? Sadly, most online translators are highly AI nowadays (and usually produce worse translations than before AI), but there are still better options than chatbots.
It just looks lazy, especially that you completely missed ChatGPT’s commentary. Such an obvious and easy mistake to avoid.
My advice would be: absolutely avoid using LLMs and Gen AI for anything related to your game, because your potential customers will blacklist you for using it. And ask yourself: do you really need to translate the game (or its Steam page) to many different languages if it’s not even selling enough copies for you to withdraw the money?
A lot of indie games are English-only, precisely because translation is too expensive and unnecessary at first. It’s great to make your games available to as many people as possible, but don’t forget about principles and quality. First, focus on those two, then maybe try writing translations for any languages you know well.
Language translation tools have been AI-based for nearly 30+ years now (Literally, ML based translation started in the 90’s). What are you on about?
Using ChatGPT is definitely egregious for language translation with other translation tools out there, but you seem to think that translation tools using AI are a bad thing. They literally only work worth a damn because they are ML models (“AI”). And have been since they started working well…
I loosely used the term ‘AI’. Most people don’t exactly know what artificial intelligence is or how it works, so using the terms according to their definitions sometimes creates more confusion than clarity.
Of course translation tools like DeepL have always been based on machine learning. The difference is that a few years ago DeepL worked well and its home page wasn’t filled with ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’. They seem to have transitioned from their old ML models to some of the newer LLMs. From my experience the translation quality is much worse than it used to be.
Man, I’m a laid off dev too. You really should know by now how scrutinous people are about AI anything.
You’re not even getting the 100 dollar monthly payments off steam. Forget “just use google translate like pre-AI”, why not just focus on one language and look into localization later if this game catches on? Now instead all languages will be scanning your game with a fine-toothed comb.
You really should know by now how scrutinous people are about AI anything.
Well, we are on the Fediverse here where there’s a very loud echo chamber of anti-AI sentiment. Outside of this bubble, there’s a loud minority that’s anti-AI, but the vast majority of end users are more neutral on the subject.
Bro even the rural chuds and soccer moms shit on AI here in magaland
That’s completely incorrect when it comes to gaming, especially the indie gaming scene. Every use of AI that has been found in an indie game has had a lot of controversy to it. Look at The Alters from last year for example. There’s a large enough amount of indie gamers that REALLY hate AI and WILL boycott a game over it. Those people are also usually the most open to new and weird indie games.
deleted by creator
Still, marketing is a part of the game, and also one of the easiest things to do without AI via deepl or something
without AI via deepl or something
This deepl?
Also note that Google Translate is AI too. It uses neural networks. Has for like a decade I believe.
Really what it seems to me you’re saying is that nobody should use machine translations and one should always hire a translator for translating things into/from languages they don’t speak?
For professional work - yes everyone should hire translators.
Yes, people who got laid off from their day jobs surely can afford paying other people.
What about indie development is ‘professional’? This is not Blizzard or EA games you’re talking about.
He’s selling it, so it’s at least somewhat profesional. And no one expects the game to be translated to every language ever. Most indie games only release in English, especially at first.
AI translations just cheapen your art, and as someone who speaks multiple languages I can tell you first hand - AI translations are NOT good when it comes to stories. They’re barely good enough for translating a conversation coherently. And on top of it all is it not incredibly ironic for someone who was laid off because of AI to use AI?
The demo for the game at least is English-only. It’s literally only the Steam description page like he said.
At worst this is slightly misleading because someone might expect it to have translations in the game as well, but quite literally, such a non-issue to nitpick an indie dev over.
Yes, Google Translate has used neural networks for quite a while. Recently they’ve also switched it to using the same Gemini LLMs that they give you chat interfaces with, so it’s pretty equivalent to using ChatGPT for translations. It’s just another company’s version of the same thing, wrapped in a translation interface.
It’s not an LLM IIRC (the deepl one at least, Google now uses gemini)
Edit: apparently Deepl has been converted to an LLM since some time
what in blazes do you think is a «large language model»?
All LLMs are AIs but not all AIs are LLMs (and LLMs are what y’all are hating)
not all AIs are LLMs
Pray tell what AI isn’t trained on ❝large contested data❞
LLMs are what y’all are hating)
🧵, blatantly. But asset diffusers from stolen assets are also highly discouraged, as they are illegal, and it demonstrated the planet the two classes than ever before: corporate power can lobby copyright infringement, while everyone else cannot. Many hate it for quality reasons. I hate it because it’s fascism in its purest form: appropriating assets without consent.
Deepl was around way before LLMs. It was still made with neutral networks trained on research papers and the like but it couldn’t be communicated with or generate stuff for you. So u can see why axolotl thought that it didn’t use LLMs. However it seems to nowadays use LLMs
It was still made with neutral networks trained on <u>research papers</u>
Deepl was around way before LLMs…
What makes one think NNs are not LLMs?
without AI via deepl…
Will somebody tell him?
I know he means “without the use of LLMs.”. That’s the big thing being forced down People’s throats that they don’t like.
I doubt people are rebelling against reinforcement learning for physically based animations, or prediction engines to forecast the weather
For any AI Translations, it’s good practice to open up a different chat with the model, and have it translate the output back to your original language so that you can double check what is being said.
Tangential: There used to be a website that used Google translate to translate a phrase back and forth between a bunch of different languages until it reached ‘equilibrium’ and stopped changing with each translate. You could get some really crazy stuff out of it.
And the funny thing is, the company isn’t even doing bad. I found out from a friend who still works there that they are aiming for a sale at the end of the year, so effectively this is a way for them to pump up the stock. They will say their profits went up by 50-60%, but it didn’t come from more clients, but from not paying wages. And this way stock go up. Also same friend said they are struggling a lot with AI. It can be helpful with coding, but It can’t do everything, and they are literally asking it to do everything or at least hold long enough until the sale goes trough . Just greed… and hundreds of families put in a bad spot, so already rich people on top can make a lot of money fast instead of also a lot of money, but slower…
Well, on the bright side, at least this teaches you the real value of AI is that it tells people what products to avoid:
If it wasn’t AI it would be something else though. Working for the man always sucks.
We will watch your career with great interest
Thank you!
If you really want to sell the no gen AI thing, you might want to consider cleaning up the steam page translations. For example the finnish translation contains these lines:
Tässä on käännös suomeksi ilman pitkäviivaa:
…
Jos haluat, voin tehdä myös tiiviimmän ja myyvemmän version, joka sopii pelin kauppa- tai esittelytekstiin. Haluatko, että teen sen?
which roughly translate to:
Here’s a translation in finnish without a long line:
…
If you want, I can also make a more dense and a better selling version , which fits in a game’s store page or decription. Do you wan’t me to do it?
Personally I don’t mind AI being used for the store page translations, and I can see how easy it is to make a mistakes like that, but maybe anyone reading that would get a slightly better impression of the game without those extra bits.
I’ve been on the receiving end of “making the bride look good” for selling the company too, 3 times in my life. Either you still have a job but everything around you falls apart because there aren’t enough people to keep shit running, or you lose the job; both variants suck. I always was on the team “keeping my job”, but it also always ended with me fleeing as soon as i could because working conditions deteriorated fast.
Wishlisted your game !
Thank you! We actually had a few changes in ownership before, but it didn’t really impacted us. This time the current ownership got real greedy!
So many people’s lives are damaged by corporate decisions… Hope things look up, and that Steam excuse makes sense but damn that sucks.
As for the game I love explorations into real-life fucked-up experiments! Will definitely be playing aha
Thank you! Yeah, like I said the company was already doing good and it’s not like people or on top were poor. Just pure greed
You may want to try to deliberately get away from the “unreal fivey” look.
I like the underlying style but the strong reflections and resulting high contrast image really hits that “unreal five” look in a bad way, which I suspect will turn a lot of people off.
It’s unfortunate but “indie unreal five game” is the new “steam asset flip”, in that it is something that makes people skip a game. It’s easy to slap realistic lightning into games now, so it has stopped being an indicator of quality, and slowly become the opposite.
Try to find something that works with the games style that you can do to the shading or post processing that sets you apart.
I might mute reflections a bit and add at least some grime and imperfections to surfaces. The cleanliness of surfaces together with unreals realistic lighting is a big part of the “indie unreal five” look.
That isn’t the first impression that I got, although of course I’m just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn’t seem that consistent. IDK what’s going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there’s very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it’s not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it’s trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn’t necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.
IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn’t have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt
At this point, if your game has the UE5 look and runs like shit, then I won’t consider it all.
Runs 90 fps for me. I try hard to optimize it, which isn’t that hard, but just takes some extra effort.
What are your pc specs?
I got burned out developing business software and lost my job after 13 years. I’m lucky if my previous game makes $100 in a year at this point. So now I’m wondering at what point I’ll need to give up on my dream of being a full time indie game dev and start looking for a new job.
Start looking. It’s a very saturated market. Unless you can get some YouTubers or streamers to play your game then it’s not going to make much of anything.
Can you expand on why you think the market is saturated?
Games are some of the most complex pieces of software you can make and they rely heavily on artistic elements, meaning that it’s not 100% technical work.
It makes it hard IMHO to even become a game dev and make a game in the first place. Wondering why you think the game dev market is saturated given that assumption.
Can you expand on why you think the market is saturated?
Not the one you responded to, but:
More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 — Chris Zukowski’s tally puts it at 20,282, which works out to about 55 games per day. And 2026 is running faster: SteamDB counted 11,979 releases in the first half of the year alone, a pace of roughly 66 per day that projects to something near 24,000 for the full year if it holds. (source)
and roughly 3/4 of them has less than 50 reviews, and half has less than 10, which means basically no audience (source)
Will this be steamdeck compatible?
Right now it’s not. We will try to get there when it’s close to release and all other work is done.
Hey, the game looks genuinely interesting, I hope to play it sometime soon
Thank you! Yeah it’s coming at the end of the year :)
That game looks good from the trailer! Great sinister vibes, and it kind of reminded me of portal a little bit with the omnipotent computer voice. That elevator music -was- pleasant! Lol
Thank you! A fan in chat of one of the streamers called it Portal with murder hah
“Layed”
That’s not a word, independent of meaning and context. It’s “laid”. And what’s with the capitalisation of every word in the title? That’s not how it should be written at all. It feels very “this is a big deal to me so it means it’s a big deal to the world and big letters mean big thing”.
And just to be clear, I’m in no way trying to minimise what happened to you and everyone else in the game dev industry. I have friends who have been and are in the same or similar situation, you just need to not fail at basic writing.This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole! Apparently “layed” used to be a well-accepted form. “The hens layed 22 eggs each”, etc.
But it looks like it was tapering off in use during the 1700s. Laid was almost always more common even during the 1500s according to Google ngrams.
So you’re saying we’re dealing with an 18th century game dev here?
Is that truly the impression you got from my post, or are you just being snarky?
Snarky
Nothing worse than prescriptivists that are fully incorrect
Spoiler
I edited the image for a joke
Would love to play your game when its out.
Thank you! It’s coming soon enough!
uuh I had the demo for your game already installed but still havent played it, maybe today…
I was also inspired by the explosion of weird indie horror games to pick up Godot, but time is what it is, good luck!
Thank you!
@Road_Warrior_10 It sucks that you got laid off. Hope things go better for you.
I don’t like the genre but from the trailer it seems very interesting, good job 👍🏻
Thank you so much!
