How The Internet Changed Game Dev

I talk about how the rise of the internet changed game development, for better and for worse.

[chukkie]

Father of a friend of me who worked at an University send an email to Bethesda that Daggerfall was bugged and could not play it anymore. Then Bethesda send floppy's with patches and a walk-trough book for the main story. That was in 1996.

[TheGTAVC]

In Mortal Kombat 2 there’s a shout out to “Our friends on the Internet forums!” in the special thanks credits. Can’t imagine that today LOL

[mikeuniturtle]

The internet has made collaborating and learning easier but I noticed that I actually struggled learning through a lot of tutorials. I found that they were really good at teaching specific things but lead to rabbit holes that tunnel my comprehension of the greater picture. through the years I slowly learned to refocus myself, but younger me would still be in those rabbit holes.

[roberteltze]

I can't confirm this but i heard that the makers of Wizardry would repair or replace floppy disks that were damaged.

On the sequel games some of the enemy parties you would encounter in the dungeons were player parties they had read off disks that people had sent in.

[teakettle]

I remember being so excited about a game, finally buying it at the store, and opening it and reading through that whole manual on the way home. That feeling was pure magic.

[JudgeBeard]

I remember the first time I ever patched a game via the internet. It was Diablo 2. With my terrible dial up, I had to try and convince my parents to let me have the computer on overnight. Trying to explain to them the concept of a patch for a game was nearly impossible.

[devinshipwreck]

I miss manuals and game boxes so much! Thank you for the video Tim! Love these!

[Druid_Ignacy]

Oh about manuals - have you seen Tunic? On the surface, it's simple adventure game, but it has somewhat hidden layer of late game puzzles. But whether you play only first layer or both, you will experience this game manual nostalgia, as it is weirdly smoothly present in the game itself.

[AndrewS]

One thing that the industry still hasn't adjusted to is how quickly the community learns and adapts now. If there is a balance problem it will be discovered and communicated in days, if not hours. It isn't the Olden Days when it would take months or years for the community to adapt. Its almost instant now.

[Psilocervine]

Beyond just the internet making tutorials that much more accessible, something I will never forget is when I was struggling trying to figure out how to implement something in a now long-backburner'd project and went "hey, Red Faction 2 did something very similar to what I want to do on the Playstation 2! I wonder if I could just ask somebody who worked on that."

This lead to me looking up the credits on Mobygames and then seeking out one of the programmers on twitter, and I went "Hi, I was wondering how you implemented the terrain destruction features in real time on hardware like that" and I got an answer. All I had to do to figure out the answer to the biggest technical challenge I was having was to just ask!

Of course, that didn't solve the problem where the game I was trying to make wasn't very fun, but that's a way harder problem to solve a lot of the time.

[vaniellys]

I miss boxes and manuals. Warcraft and StarCraft came with booklets that had the lore for every faction, unit and building, which was very cool before we had wikis. And I still love my StarCraft 2 boxes, they look beautiful.

[IndusRiverFlow]

Regarding 3:25 - I can imagine that is both a blessing and a curse, as you have to deal with bad faith whining from toxic individuals.

Although as a fan it is very cool to be able to directly engage with the people who make the games we love.

[Postal]

I really liked the Half-Life, Unreal, Homeworld, and similar manuals. Very cool reads. I think I enjoyed the Homeworld manual more than the gameplay. I do miss games working well with out day 1 patches. There were games I played for years without any issues, and then later I found out that patches were released fixing small bugs that I never noticed. Now it feels like most new games have major game breaking bugs on release that soon get patched. I'm grateful they are getting those patches they need.

[MrLarsKoch]

It's interesting how all situations both a 'bad' (negative) and 'good' (positive) elements to them. Is it easier to get access to game dev tools nowadays? Sure! But more competition and more clutter in the marketplace (harder to stand out) immediately come with that. Thanks for pointing out all these different aspects, @Tim!

[jasonstegner]

In light of the point that people who enjoy the content just silently enjoy the content while a disproportionate number of people who have a complaint express it, let me just say I quite enjoyed this video.

[stuartmorley]

I first used the internet was at University in 1994. Email seemed like magic. We quite often sat there waiting for replies like it was an instant messanger. I do remember that even at that point you eventually got drowned in random spam porn. Except it would be "drawn" in letters rather than pictures.

I really do miss buying games before that where unless you saw it a magazine you had very little clue about what happened in it. You couldn't have a game spoiled unless your friends had played it.

On the piracy front though when games were on tape or disk we literally traded copies at school all the time. It was so easy to copy stuff that kids would come in with lunch boxes of them. I lived in the country, and we were all pretty poor. Anyone who got a game the whole village would have it in a couple of weeks. Obviously not on console with cartridges but only a few of us had them.

[PretendCoding]

I recently made halfling banana bread, thanks Tim!

[LTPottenger]

I used BBSes before the internet, I don't think they count as I never heard that word til the early 90s. I would mostly read and download a few things here and there but I asked a (probably dumb) question on one and Scorpia from Computer Gaming World, which I avidly read, answered. I was awestruck not just because she responded, but at the time it was very dumbfounding that someone far away could instantly respond to you. Sort of like how people must have felt when they heard radio for the first time.

[obiwankenny]

I didn't play Fallout 4 for about 2 years after launch because I listened to the internet trolls saying what a horrible game it was. Bought it on Steam for $19 dollars on a whim and I've now out in 4200 hours on it. Lesson learned.

[DamianReloaded]

Many if not most AAA games do come with gorgeous PDFs manuals. Regarding piracy, being able to buy a game online with a credit card surely made piracy go down in places where game prices are affordable. The old argument that people who pirate games because they can't afford them wouldn't have bought the game anyway. I am also off social media since 2016 it really is not necessary.