- The Play Store being bad does not mean the App Store is not also bad

- How do you know most of the world likes the authority of the App Store? Is it not more likely that most of the world are ignorant of its rules, and assumes a free and open marketplace?

I think an over-reliance, or perhaps any reliance, on AI tools will turn good programmers into slop factories, as they consistently skip over a vital part of creating high-quality software.

You could argue that the prompt == code, but then you are adding an intermediary step between you and the code, and something will always be lost in translation.

I'd say just write the code.

The developers of Risk of Rain 2 were undoubtedly aware of the hitches, but it interfered with their vision of the game, and affected users were left with a degraded experience.

It's worth mentioning that when game developers scope of the features of their game, available tech informs the feature-set. Faster languages thus enable a wider feature-set.

At the top of my list is Factorio, and second is actually World of Warcraft.

More generally, there is a lot to learn from game design that you can learn through playing. The question of how to make taxes palatable, for example, is really no different to the question of how to challenge a player without frustrating them.

I believe the value of games are poorly understood, partially because chess, a game that has nothing left to teach us, muddies the conversation

Absolutely not. The vast majority of games released on Steam are not good. You can verify this yourself by looking at new releases. Maybe one or two out the ones released the 19th of June are _potentially_ interesting.

Quality, defined as well-produced games in unsaturated niches, is really the only thing that matters, but marketing can be a multiplier of that quality. I've seen many games that blame marketing for their failure, and I have seen many games that fail despite their marketing. Usually those games are not compelling, and reviews will confirm this. It's rare to see games fail despite their high quality.