The median monthly gross income in Poland as of 2026 is 7.6k PLN ($1.9k USD) and like 80-90% of it will go towards your living costs, EVs will probably be a thing here in a decade or so when there's second hand market for cheap used ones coming imported from richer countries.
I run a few private MMO servers, we have a website with a support forum, in order to post, you need to register, log in, fill in account data, then create a thread, each of these pages is protected by Turnstile as well as a general bot check for the website, we frequently get automated spam from RMT (real-money trade) services for the OG game. Turnstile is maybe effective against simple bots that just try to call curl/requests/whatever but if you have bots that use a browser driver it's completely useless.
It reminds me of those things that restaurants put on your table that you're supposed to use to play games, or pay with, but just end up spying on you and getting in the way. Like Olive Garden.
It's not really possible. Eric Barone was an unemployed bum working on the game full time while his girlfriend worked double shifts to support both of them financially, that alone means what took him years to finish, would take you a decade. Another thing is that during the time SV released, there were maybe around 50-80 of releases weekly on Steam, now it's in the upper hundreds - there's no organic discoverability anymore, what matters is having a good marketing campaign that requires high budget. And last but not least, with each passing year, the content requirement for games keeps going up - what could pass as a fully featured game a decade ago, would be called a boring game with no content today. All other games that blew up was mostly through sheer luck (look at Among Us being a <4k people game for 2 years before becoming one of the biggest games).
It's almost certainly possible, just not very likely. You have to understand that there were probably thousands of devs working on solo passion game projects during the same timeframe that are not widely known. This one hit a social percolation cluster and became wildly successful. Making a good game is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
This would imply that there have not been a large number of indie games that have rocketed in popularity which is just patently false. The so called "friendslop games" have been in and out of rotation now for about 2 years generating millions of dollars each.
Statistically, you're right. But still, party-game-focused games have a chance of succeeding. In other words, it feels like the trend cycle has gotten faster than the "super jackpot" works. Rather than impossible, you could say it's become harder... and in fact, games themselves are statistically few... but even so, everyone wants a miracle.
I mean I agree with you, if your goal is to turn ANY game into potential profit then the best way to tackle the problem is to vibecode quick friendslop/incremental titles (or whatever the flavor-of-the-game genre may be in the future) and proverbially keep throwing shit at the wall until something sticks. I was more hinting at the fact that passion-project-turned-retirement-money pipeline is almost entirely closed unless you get lucky.
People who want to support a game studio will buy the game anyway. People who do not want to support the studio will pirate the game anyway. It's the same reason why piracy does not matter at all, those people weren't going to pay for your game either way.
If GTA6 shows up for free in a web browser day one, it will for sure hurt sales. Not sure how anyone could argue otherwise: people are paying to play GTA, not paying to support Rockstar. These older games though, I agree with you.
Relying on support / the kindness of strangers is quick way to financial ruin. It's about providing a service / product that has value that consumers will, if forced to, pay for.
I don't think that's true. I'm contemplating buying a Switch 2 just to play the new Zelda remake. But I might also now just play an upscaled emulation of the old game or even perhaps a recomp of the remake if it gets made fast.
> Before injecting this cocktail into your bloodstream, would you want to know that there is at least one human cancer expert who understands the mechanism behind this cure?
> Or a human mathematician who understands the mathematical model used to locate the cocktail?
If we're being fair to AI - it contains collective knowledge from all fields, which means it's probably less likely to miss something that a human would.
AI does the work, it does not replace the thinking. It's like saying a tech lead in a project does not do any thinking because there's some junior dev doing tedious and boring tasks.
> Byte-matching has been a side-effect of gaining an understanding of how the software works.
No? Decomp sources are often full of comments that claim that there's no clear reason as to why something is done a certain way or straight up full of question marks. Byte matching often is a result of bruteforcing a solution rather than understanding the original idea behind the code.
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