iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

gotta say recent stuff with the game industry economics in the US have been bleak but it's made me reflect on experiences like that over my career and how shocking the gamedev talent explosion in places like Poland, Brazil and China has been over the past 20 years. CDPR in particular is frankly nuts

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So, to be fair, I am a certified QTE hater 99% of the time. But the idea that you take a game with the kinds of QTEs these games have, and change them from ones you can't fail to ones you can, and the end result is a better game? is crazy to me.

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I mean... I'm showing my political leanings here, but there's two main angles: - weaken the dollar - attack costs in a way that recalibrates wages with the rest of the world. TL;DR universal healthcare and getting housing costs under control in every way possible. broad social democratic stuff. BUT

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main point - if you wonder "why don't more ppl make AA games on $40mil budgets target sane sales numbers" the answer is - it's impossible, unless you pay poverty wages and can find people to work for them. Every game I worked on at Obsidian (2005-2012) would be impossible to make in the USA now

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nathaniel @pedrothedagger.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

for context, 30k usd is about 110k zloty. median annual available (post-tax) household income in the USA is ~$76k usd, or ~289k zloty. Median available available annual household income in Poland is 42k zloty, or 11k USD. TL;DR, RIP game dev in high CoL countries

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you know people talk a lot of shit about bobby kotick but I don’t see any of you scamming this asshole out of 20mil

nathaniel @pedrothedagger.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

it’s really tempting to assume that our tech shitheads are the worst and weirdest in human history but, can you just imagine if jack parsons had social media

nathaniel @pedrothedagger.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

both lol. I never could pick a lane

it's always funny to me that, like, they assume that the superhuman AI is intelligent enough to take over the world but not so intelligent that they can't understand and predict its motivations or value structure

also in that they are doing the slenderman murders but to democracy and human society

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I do think the AI doomer stuff is in a superposition of goofy and not goofy. the universal paperclips stuff is pretty goofy. the "some dumbasses hooked an llm up to something they shouldn't have, didn't monitor the actions it was taking, and it did something insane as a result" risk is real

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the investment situation in games is brutal right now. really sucks, man

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nathaniel @pedrothedagger.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

crunch is never "good" but to be honest... in the burnout hierarchy, for me working 40 hours a week on a bad team or bad project or one where I don't feel like I have agency as a designer is a psychologically worse experience than doing the occasional burst of 60 on a project or with a team I love

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Finally watched Edgerunners. I really enjoyed it! It felt very studio trigger haha. I couldn't help but feel it could have used like 2 additional episodes? and a slightly less manic pace? to give the characters and themes a little more space and help build some of the relationships. super curious

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nathaniel @pedrothedagger.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

oh no spoiled jadugaar by reading wikipedia lol

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broadly speaking, I think this often feels like a side effect of designers looking at an open world as basically a marketing constraint imposed on the game design that has to be worked around rather than an intentional choice that always informs how players interact with the world

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they did it... they made the first good piece of anime merch apparel

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i have to say 9/11 happening like 5 days before I moved away to start college really amplified the "leaving behind the ignorant 'innocence' of the 90s" vibes

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