[podocarp]

Also quite common for me is like someone says X is good (usually a PM) but common sense says it's crap, and when you actually ask the user they also say it's crap. If only LLMs could email a bunch of people for second opinions.

[shermantanktop]

Or fire the PM?

[RugnirViking]

PM = politics maestro

They will out-corporate you. Better to be friends with them, or failing that, move from under them

[stevefan1999]

Or fuck them, fuck the managers, fuck the c-suites (intentionally decapitalized), go for a flat organizational structure like Valve where you have no one to report to (well maybe Gabe Newell or the team leader for that project occasionally), but the culture is that everyone can manage themselves organically rather than having hierarchies and forced, useless reportings

[nfbdhdfbf]

Valve ships almost nothing, and the engineering quality is mediocre. Their game design is good, but subsidized by a unique early mover monopoly market owner position.

There is almost nothing that can be generalized, and people who hold up their organization as an example to strive for are utterly clueless

[stevefan1999]

> early mover monopoly

Well, while I do agree it is an early mover (I believe Steam is not the first to do online game platform, but it should indeed be the first one to use a CDN for the solution), I'm sorry that you have Ubisoft Connect, EA Origin, Epic Games Store, itch.io, GOG, Humble Bundle.

So you do have a choice. That renders the statement of it being a monopoly impossible. It's simply because every other platforms sucks.

In other words, it's like Nvidia. You choose Nvidia because AMD and Intel sucks, not because you don't have a choice.

> engineering quality is mediocre

You should see how CS2's smoke system works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryB8hT5TMSg

tl;dw: it is a voxel ray marching plus flood fill with Mie scattering. I'd like to point this out that is not only a really good game design, but it also requires ingenious engineering quality. I tried to improve upon it by adding octrees (or in other word, making it sparse voxel octree) but it doesn't seems to add much.

Oh and plus their new bomb shock wave system. I tried to reverse engineer it with vector field, but I couldn't come up with the ODE equations to recreate it. I believe it has to be some kind of field, because in a high energy explosion, it scatter through air into fluid-like structure and hence we can use some aerodynamics for simluation

[syndacks]

Hierarchies are burned deep into our DNA little boy, u ever read Utopia?

[antonvs]

I’ve outlived many PMs and helped get at least one fired. If they were omnipotent they’d be better at product design.

[NamlchakKhandro]

ask Ed Zitron how well that statistically pans out