Not to shit on you in particular, but you seem to have a bit of a chip on your shoulder about other forms of software development being done.
Everyone rationalizes what they do. People working in those other industries will usually tell their version of your story: "I'm not working on some shitty game that will be forgotten in a year... I'm working on building a social revolution!!!!"
Sorry. For the most part it's all about someone's bottom line. Indie game development isn't any purer than working for startup X on Bush st. that has similar lofty goals about "making people happy."
> get bigger returns for a financial firm
This is especially funny to me. If you're working for even a Mojang-sized studio, I hate to tell you but: You're definitely using technology to get bigger returns for a firm.
Sure, it's not a financial firm. Let's not pretend that the differences are all that meaningful. Instead of stock market returns, game studios just seek to maximize the return they get on game development time.
EDIT: s/Riot/Mojang. I didn't realize how large Riot has gotten.
> I'll never grow tired of that.
Great. And EA will never get tired of people working themselves to death for what inevitably amounts to minimum wage given the hours worked. Guess it's win-win.
All points well said. You spoke my mind really. I felt the same way. All of the stuff that I've worked on, it's not just so some company can get richer. The story is that we're helping people. They also will likely use our products for a lot longer and get a lot more productive use out of it than any game.
Side note: Didn't Mojang get bought by Microsoft? Are they still considered small? (NOTE: I've not researched this is a serious, not-loaded question..)
> which brainwashes citizens to conform and support foreign wars at enormous expense to human life and effort
Lol.
Not that I disagree about the americans spending too much on defense, but how can you say this with a straight face while India continually engages in a military dick-swinging contest with Pakistan?
a lot of pakistans intelligence services are financed by the cia (seriously, search it) and it is well-documented that the 'militants' coming over the border r paki agents. the dick swinging is over ownership of Kashmir, and no surprises, US-published maps of India do not include Kashmir as part of it. and india is never the aggressor in borded encounters, this is verifiably true.
please i sincerely request u to watch this - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHzAinRH4g - to see the sort of propoganda us regularly engages in to dupe the global discourse. it is a very intense 1 hr watch and i daresay ull enjoy it more than many movies. noone has anything against americans themselves. just that their money is going to finance a govt that is increasingly mort aggressive at establishing global domminance, and that too using underhand tactics. please watch it and tell me ur opinion of it. my american friends liked it a lot.
> And yeah, Pakistan is obviously doing some awful stuff too. But you're not gonna convince anyone sensible that India is completely innocent.
"some awful stuff" such as three invasions, several incursions by army regulars and by proxy, actively financing and training militant groups that attack India? Are you seriously comparing that with a couple instances of artillery shelling? Pakistan also routinely provides artillery cover fire for militants infiltrating into India.
You know it's much more than that right? Read that wikipedia page.
Just based on 10 seconds of skimming through that page: BSF shot and killed a couple of kids, in one instance BSF fire killed a 60 year-old man while he was farming.
Are you seriously giving the BSF a total free pass?
> people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop?
Er, because that would be really silly.
I like reading HN from time to time. I would never install an app, because I don't use it frequently enough. I definitely would never go through the pain of installing a HN app every time I wanted to read HN. I really doubt I'm alone or even abnormal in that regard.
That's the beauty of a browser: I can be reading HN in under a second when I want to, with no cluttering of my desktop just so I can read HN from time to time.
I'll go a step farther, I typically don't install apps on my phoens.. why, because most of them have additional spyware and ask for permissions they should never need... I uninstalled Facebook over a year ago, as it was the biggest battery user... I get annoyed at websites that don't work on my phone, and more so for sites that try to get me to install an app, where there's no advantage to the stand alone app.
Everyone rationalizes what they do. People working in those other industries will usually tell their version of your story: "I'm not working on some shitty game that will be forgotten in a year... I'm working on building a social revolution!!!!"
Sorry. For the most part it's all about someone's bottom line. Indie game development isn't any purer than working for startup X on Bush st. that has similar lofty goals about "making people happy."
> get bigger returns for a financial firm
This is especially funny to me. If you're working for even a Mojang-sized studio, I hate to tell you but: You're definitely using technology to get bigger returns for a firm.
Sure, it's not a financial firm. Let's not pretend that the differences are all that meaningful. Instead of stock market returns, game studios just seek to maximize the return they get on game development time.
EDIT: s/Riot/Mojang. I didn't realize how large Riot has gotten.
> I'll never grow tired of that.
Great. And EA will never get tired of people working themselves to death for what inevitably amounts to minimum wage given the hours worked. Guess it's win-win.