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From Transactions to Relationships
The last decade of games has seen the rise of Games as a Service (GaaS) and the inglorious falls of games attempting this business strategy. However, service-based games remain the dominant business model: they are almost exclusive on mobile and the major titles on consoles have adopted many features of service-based models. Yet, this does not mean all games should be service-based. In this blog post I’ll dig into the main reason why this transition happened and why we have seen so many games fail. In short, the whole reason for live games is that there’s more value in building relationships and not just selling a game in a one-off transaction. However, this approach also has higher costs and these are not apparent from the beginning. Many underestimated the cost and complexity involved.
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Cairn-roolipelin kääntämisen työkalut ja prosessi
Käänsin noin kaksi vuotta sitten Yochai Galin Cairn-roolipelin ensimmäisen laitoksen suomeksi. Tämä oli tavallaan jatkumoa syvään sukellukseen RPG-sääntökirjonen lukemisvimmaan vuonna 2022. Kiinnostukseni johti myöhemmin yrittämään kääntää pienempiä avoimella Creative Commons -lisenssillä olevia indie-roolipelejä - kuten DURF - suomeksi, lähinnä omasta kiinnostuksesta. DURFin ja 24XX:n sääntöjen kääntämisen ohessa viilasin kääntämistä varten työkalupakin ja prosessin, jonka käyn läpi tässä postauksessa.
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Chatbots Scraping an Ancient Forum
Among other projects, I maintain a phpBB based forum about old freeware games, Curly’s World (of Freeware). It’s way past its active days, the forum was originally started in February of 2006, so over 20 years ago. The world has changed a bit from there.
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The Simulation of Scarcity that Is Play-to-Earn
Like the Metaverse, Play-to-Earn (P2E) has mostly retreated from the headlines but I’m sure it is one of those zombie ideas that won’t stay dead for long. The core promise of P2E was that players could - through gameplay and engagement - earn actual real world cash.
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Skill Ratings and Matchmaking, Part 1
As multiplayer games grew in popularity, matchmaking - the backend machinery that decides who plays with whom - became far more noticeable. Back in the old days of lobbies, people more or less randomly piled together to play a game. However, people vary in skill and experience so wouldn’t it make sense to group people of equal skill to play together so that everyone can have a good time and not suffer (or enjoy) pubstomping? To do this, we need two things: first, a process to automatically matchmake people according to various attributes - like skill and latency - and second, a measure of a player’s skill.
76 more posts can be found in the archive.