boletus

Try gambling with your friends

What the fuck

Jeff Goldblum

Depends on the publisher, but unfortunately there’s enough grubby publishers out there that the word is associated with bad execs. I automatically assume a publisher is unethical unless they prove otherwise. Even annapurna showed their true colours eventually.

That said, I have seen multiple instances of publishers actually saving games by stepping in and putting their own devs into the process. One example would be Valve, with left 4 dead.

Most cheat codes got removed because game devs got better at separating debug tooling from game logic, but especially because publishers and console verification are very strict about what games are allowed to ship with. Shipping with debug tooling is one of the easiest ways to fail validation.

The most common practice nowadays is to build it with modular assets, and part of the games build process is to combine static meshes that share a material so it can be rendered more efficiently. This is a oversimplification of a complex topic, and there are far more advanced tools now. Most terrains aren’t even modelled anymore, but generated and sculpted in engine using PCG tooling.

Note, this is mostly for the contemporary AA and AAA games industry.

Hey! I got all of them working using bottles and the all in one launcher.

Every gimmicky feature on steam is fluff to lock you into an ecosystem. Buying steam games for achievements for example is really silly.

Truth is if you care about a sustainable games industry, then drm free and maximising developer cut is the right choice.

Choose the option that gives the developer the biggest cut, like itch or directly, and just use a launcher aggregator to manage it from one place like heroic launcher or playnite. I personally use gog for most but will use an alternative if it supports the dev better.