New article (a hairy one!) is out

Julie Belzanne@juliebelzanne.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Why video games cost so much to make? Ok dev costs have 📈. But it's like saying “patient has a fever.” It's a symptom. What we want to know is WHY? Take a 2015 game and a 2025 one, same genre, same ambition: does that game really cost more to make today? newsletter.hushcrasher.com/p/why-video-...

Relying on Steam to set your regional pricing is like using a water filter but never changing the cartridge: you think you’re doing the right thing, but it's actually hurting you. And this cartridge is 3y old 🤢 Do yourself a favor, update them. And use updated data: hushcrasher.com/tools/steam-...

Stop trusting Steam recommendations to set your game regional pricing. They haven’t been updated since 2022.. It’s not just unfair (hi Poles 👋), it’s costing you money (we'll write an article to show HOW MUCH you're losing). We fixed it, so you’ve got no excuse 👀 open.substack.com/pub/hushcras...

We fixed Steam regional pricing recommendations

Steam regional pricing recommendations are broken, so we built this free tool to fix it.

open.substack.com

Hey @thegameawards.com, what if you used a better way to classify games? We proposed a data-driven one. It's not perfect, but at least it doesn't say crazy things like ClairObscur being indie. This game has many qualities but it's definitely AA. And that's okay, haha

How much does it cost to make a game today? We built a model to estimate the budget of 100,000 games and find out. Come see what we learned: open.substack.com/pub/hushcras...

How much does it cost to make a video game?

We built a model to estimate the budget of 100,000 games. Here's what we found.

open.substack.com

I love this analytical take on video game categorization from Antoine Mayerowitz and Julie Belzanne: hushcrasher.substack.com/p/taxonomy-o... Instead of trying to vibe-intuit the definition of an "indie" game, the authors analyzed the data from the perspective of game size and credits length

People talk about "indie" games, AA, AAA. But no one agrees on what those really mean. With @juliebelzanne.bsky.social we went down the rabbit hole and used a data-driven approach to provide a definitive answer. hushcrasher.substack.com/p/taxonomy-o...

By the way, what are AA?

Instead of fuzzy labels like 'indie' and 'AA', we propose a new data-driven system to classify video games based on their actual production scope. This new framework reveals the real economic and crea...

hushcrasher.substack.com

Do you (really) know what a AA game is? Or even what an indie game is? We do, now 👉 open.substack.com/pub/hushcras... It's free to subscribe! It's a great way to show your support 🫶 #gamedev #gamedevelopment #gamedevs #videogames #indiedev #indiegame #IndieGameDev #datasciencetalk #clustering

Cooking our 1st article 🍲 👀 #gamedevs, publishers, video game enthusiasts, be ready #data #journalism #indiegames #indiedevs