Even Early Access devs of the time didn't really appreciate the approach: theindiestone.com/binky/2014/0...
(Plus the game had additional funding sources too, and promoted itself at release as something that would be supported for years. Budgeting being hard doesn't invalidate all pos. criticisms)
The general expectation, esp. in 2014 when most people's idea of EA was Minecraft or Rust, is that you're getting a game that's already fun & playable but just not feature complete or fully polished. Not that it will work like a Kickstarter minus any refunds. DF should've been better than solo devs.
Which is why I say DF misunderstood the point. They expected people to pay in pre-order like numbers despite the lack of any expectation of a finished project. Of course you need to have something worth buying in order to successfully sell it (or absurd hype levels a 2D base builder wouldn't get).
Had it been as eminently 'playable' as Minecraft's alpha had been, it would probably have pulled enough numbers to justify continued development. But as it is, they doomed the project by expecting people to buy an early just-past-prototype alpha version.
Which is why no one bought DF-9. Because the game hadn't reached the 'worth buying' point. That's the contract. You either release something worth playing now, in hopes of an even more complete experience, or you gamble. DF-9 was released far too early, so never got close to being EA-ready.
I'm aware development can be difficult, so the idea of a project falling apart isn't the issue. the studio chose to be in the 10th most expensive city in the world, it shouldn't be greenlighting titles if it can't afford more than 1 year of dev time on a game they're actively selling to the public.
The audience was there, they just didn't pay because the product they had actually released wasn't worth buying yet. They chose wisely. Whereas the major EA titles (Star Cit. aside) that were successful weren't just 'cuz the idea was more marketable, but because they were already fun experiences.
I guarantee the majority of purchasers didn't interpret that release as "feeling cute, might delete later". They are, notably, still charging money for it. They were clearly using the audience as the production fund, without the legal obligation of actually delivering a final product.
I'd suggest they either stick to free 'proof of concept demos' (they did make one), or allocate enough funds for a 1.0 release. It's not like if Avengers Doomsday gets released without any of the special effects they get a pass because they don't have infinite funds, they're still charging for it.
That lighting effect + that dash + that flowing hair effect. Celeste fan very confirmed.
Still bitter over that, since it was a good concept and it sounds like the team working on it had solid plans. But "hey, people aren't buying a game that currently isn't fun or long just based on the promise that it might get finished, let's kill it!" is some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
My point of reference being the absymally-managed Spacebase DF-9. Maybe some committed players put 10 hours into it, but it was functionally killed in the crib by Doublefine's inability to both understand what "early access" meant, and to estimate costs (BA/DFA repeatedly asking for more money).
Okay, yeah, not at all a scam in that case. But I could understand a game getting a negative review for functionally running out of steam due to funding/burnout issues still. It's one thing if it plays like Minecraft and another if most players only get an hour out of it.
I'd like to include misusing 'mid' too. I'll bet there'll be peeps calling The Odyssey mid, as if even if it ends up sucking it will be in any way middle of the road. "GTA V was mid, lol" What are you people talking about? It was a huge, hyper-ambitious culturally-impactful game that made billions!
Sorry, but the post-GG extreme misogyny/racism/etc takes the cake. Steam forums are genuinely mostly unusable because every single game's forums are just "IS THIS GAME WOKE? ARE THERE MINORITIES?! SWEET BABY INC???" I don't think I can ever overstate how widespread that shit is.
To be fair, it's been 6+ years since the dev has released anything outside of Discord (and if not for him having a Bluesky acc I might be fooled into thinking he'd been sent to the frontlines or something). That's very different than just 'game is finished' or 'unfinished game has some rough edges'.
But in terms of just the Apollo Guidance Computer versus the iPhone 17 pro max whatever, we can directly confirm the FLOPs (floating-point operations per second, or basically how much maths they can each do a second). His iPhone is 174,678,834 times faster than the AGC.
Factoring in clock speeds (2mhz for the FC, 2.6+GHz for the iPhone), then that's a 1000x increase (plus any gains for multicore processing, and more efficient instruction sets). So you might expect it to be roughly equivalent in terms of speed to 20x all the computing power in the world in 1969.
I don't think it's even close to just 'probably'. From what I can find, in 1970 they were producing around 1T transistors a year. That iPhone has ~20B. Forget the flight computer, that phone has at least the power of 1/50th of the world in '69 even factoring out the massive clock-speed increases.
Yeah but think about that tiny portion of people that got credibly vaccine-injured... from the one vaccine that didn't use mRNA. Totally worth just throwing all this amazing medicine in the trash. *sigh*
I like that the gif version makes it 10x more obvious what she's actually saying, instead of the actual film dubbing it over with "screw that". We were robbed!
It looks like it got crossed with Dune Part One's human spider.
"Hey, what do you think about my new ornament?" "The thing must leave."
It's running a modified desktop operating system and is already set up to play Windows-native PC games through Proton. It's hardly a stretch.
What's the light hitting to create the back glow? The moon's atmosphere? Dust cloud?
"Seymour, the computer is on fire!"
"No, mother. It's just the northern lights."
This is why I listen to 128kbps MP3s from 2002 on only the highest quality planar headphones.
This is how we get New Donk City.
That's also not the pale blue dot photograph that he was describing though.
nice earf
Earth confirmed for pizza, moon also confirmed for garlic bread.