The consoles have enough garbage as well. Like "life of black tiger" which is a bad console port of a horrible mobile game. Its trailer is featured on the official PlayStation channel even though it's apparently using copyrighted background music without permission. Nobody knows why Sony allowed this all to happen.

But to be fair the Play Store definitely has more of such low-quality games.

Yes, the quality net has holes in it, and since 1983 not all decisions were done correctly.

Yet it is still better than not having a net at all, leading to a bunch of "Hello World" games, half finished game demos, copy cats that dilute branding.

Alone on iOS there are around 3000 submissions per month on average, even taking around 50% away for updates, it still leaves us with an enormous amount of low quality games to triage, per month.

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/submissions/

Not even the modern variants of Crash!, YourSinclar, Amiga Format can keep up with such submission rate.

I don't buy that as a justification to create a walled-garden. Curation and quality control don't require locking everything down; it doesn't make the manual review process any less expensive.

What it does do is make it less expensive to exert total control over the associated branding. This might seem like a good thing for customers if this branding wasn't already for sale to the the highest bidder, but it is. The practice of hardware manufacturers paying for exclusives proves this.

Yes it is, we are just back in 1983 in what concerns play stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Game publishers love exclusives, it means there is no way copy cats land on the same medium.

For example, how Naughty Dog tried to turn Crash Bandicoot into Sony's mascot against Sega's Sonic.

"Crash Bandicoot Co-Creator Andy Gavin: Extended Interview"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSHj5UKSylk

It is ironic how disparate these kind of discussions on HN feel versus the general themes on game developer forums, magazines and conferences.

Same thing with APIs, on game developer universe "what cool things can I do with it", here "boo yet another way for the man to subjugate us".

The play store is not really relevant to what I was talking about because it is intentionally not curated. There will always be at least one place like this where the developers who can't afford the expensive fees to get on the curated stores will congregate. It also seems irrelevant to me to keep referring to the "crash of 1983" when that was very obviously caused by Atari having a monopoly, i.e. the exact opposite of there being an open market for hardware.

I personally have avoided many game development communities for exactly the reasons you describe — overly extreme fear of "copy cats" to the point of paranoia, coupled with way too much enthusiasm to adopt certain pieces of cargo-culted technology without considering the question of who will support it and for how long. I think Godot is a step in the right direction, but it will take these companies time to let go of these other APIs that cost them high prices just for the privilege of being able to read the documentation. They are not immune to these price dynamics.

> should switch to the new century already and drop all their NDA garbage.

> we already have enough garbage

That's not an issue of NDAs but discovery (or lack of curation). NDAs may exist as a proxy for some companies, but that's still a separate issue that can be addressed in the vacuum.

Nobody is asking you to play the garbage. At least on those platforms you have the option to play whatever you want, unlike consoles where you can only play games that managed to secure a deal with the manufacturer.

And yet people love to buy consoles, and game studios love to target them, go figure.

This is like complaining about what Apple allows or not on their platforms, if you are not happy give your money to someone else.

Lock-in proponents like NDAs, I'm sure. No one else like this garbage.

Some material to educate yourself about how things roll in the industry, instead of the usual rainbows and minibus speech.

https://www.gdcvault.com/

https://igda.org/

https://www.mcvuk.com/

https://www.gamesradar.com/edge/

https://rebootdevelop.com/

https://www.makinggames.biz/

https://dev.paxsite.com

https://igf.com/

https://www.assembly.org/

https://2020.revision-party.net

Now if you refuse to accept how things work fine, but then do something about it instead of cursing and trolling everyone that actually have experience in the industry.

I don't know, create an association, start a movement or something else.

If no one likes the garbage as you say, it won't be hard to get people to join your cause, after all it takes one person to change the world.

From the previous discussions, it's pretty pointless to debate proper development practices with lock-in proponents. They don't get it or if they do, but they don't care, since they are after anti-user practices by design.

To me it looks more like it isn't that easy to gather people to your cause as you affirm.

After all you argue against everyone like myself, with games development experience, as apparent in several games related forums on Reddit and who knows where else, and yet don't get anyone to pay attention.

Yes I am perfectly alright defending industry practices, try to offend me won't change anything on the games industry.

If you want to change anything start a revolution, writing comments is easy.

I call anti-user practices what they are, instead of whitewashing this trash. Since you are defending them, don't be surprised.

What keeps surprising me is how angry you are against the industry, and yet are unable to do anything useful to our society besides writing rants on online forums.

After all I would expect that with such energy we would have seen you at some GDC(E) teaching us the true path, leading the way out of the slavery from game development industry practices.

But no, we get rants on online forums instead.