Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!
The newsletter is a bit late today because I just ran the Lisbon Half-Marathon! It's an awesome race along the river, really nice. And it went surprisingly well! I thought I would do just a chill slow race but I felt great and ended up finishing in 1h57! Much better than I expected!
Also yesterday I published my Problem Solving course! It's finally out! I've been wanting to build this for years to teach you the MOST VALUABLE skill and now it's finally here! I really hope you like it and I hope it helps you a lot in your learning journey.
The launch comes with a bunch of awesome bonuses (1on1, live chat, mechanic challenge) so there's a limited number of slots in order for me to really help every student who picks it up, let me know what you think!
Game Dev: 100k Wishlists flop
Gaming: CS2 Billions, Halo PS5
Fun: Build a DB from scratch
Game Dev
How to WASTE 100k Wishlists!
Here is a very interesting story, a cautionary tale, of a game that had everything going for it but ended up being a massive flop.
This is the story of CUFFBUST, a game that got a very valuable free slot during Summer Game Fest, it gathered 100k wishlists before release, it had a lot of hype with tons of streamers dying to play it, it's by the same developer that did the massively successful Choo Choo Charles ($7 million). And last week it came out to Very Negative reviews.
This is a great example of how having people hyped for your game is awesome, but you NEED to deliver on it! In this particular case the game launched with just a single map that only has about 10 minutes of gameplay, then it launched at a very premium price point of $20, it did NOT have a launch discount, it launched with another $10 worth of DLC and a $30 plushie. Players were pissed at such an expensive game, overly monetized, with so little content. Then the developer quickly dropped the base price to $10 which made the original buyers even more pissed and the game briefly dipped into Overwhelmingly Negative reviews, it is now back up to Mixed.
The good news is the reviews do mention how the game itself seems to be good, just massively lacking in content, so with future updates this could end up good but this is likely one that should have been delayed.
With 100k wishlists you have basically guaranteed success, but look at this game for a cautionary tale to remember how you still need to deliver and not to let the hype get to your head and become overly greedy with pricing and DLC. This game had everything going for it to make millions and millions of dollars, and perhaps it will still find success but it makes me wonder what could have been.
The excellent Jonas Tyroller has an interview with the dev behind Cuffbust that was published a few months ago. It's a very interesting video and even more interesting now in hindsight. What he mentions at 1:05:00 might explain everything that happened with this launch.
| I was definitely shocked to hear about this. It seemed like this game was the most easily guaranteed win ever, but I guess it goes to show how you still need a good game to back up all your marketing efforts. |
Affiliate
Synty Bundle! FREE Quest System!
It’s FINALLY back! There’s an awesome Synty HumbleBundle!
I think it’s been over a year since a bundle like this came out, this is an excellent deal with thousands of meshes for 97% OFF!
Like I said I haven’t seen a Synty bundle in a year so if you like their style then DON’T MISS this bundle! Get it HERE!
The Publisher of the Week this time is Catsoft Works, publisher with lots of add-ons for Game Creator 2.
Get the FREE Quests 2 | Game Creator 2 which is a tool for helping you manage quests in your games.
Get it HERE and use coupon CATSOFTWORKS2025 at checkout to get it for FREE!
Gaming
$Billions wiped out in CS2 update
Counter Strike 2 is one of the biggest games in the world, it's constantly at the top of the Steam charts, currently has 1.3 million concurrent players! And one thing related to it that is also massive are the weapon skins. Some knives can go for literally $millions!
This week Valve put out a seemingly minor update that has massive consequences. You can now trade up 5 semi-rare items into one super rare item, meaning that the knives that used to be insanely rare and expensive just became quite a lot more achievable by combining less rare items.
The result is the skins market had a massive meltdown dropping over $3 Billion in value in a single day! Which honestly to me just made me surprised at how big the market was, I knew it was big but I didn't know it was $5 Billion big!
| I have actually made quite a nice amount of money speculating on CS loot crates. When I used to play around 10 years ago I bought literally hundreds of boxes, I got tons of Operation Phoenix cases and Winter Offensive cases, I bought them at around $0.15 each and currently they're worth $4! Thanks to that I haven't had to spend 1 cent of my own money in the past years on Steam, anytime I want to buy a game I just sell a few crates. However this was absolutely just sheer dumb luck, definitely do NOT look at these kinds of digital goods as any kind of investment, it can all go to zero in a single day just like this happened. |
Gaming
Halo on PS5!
Oh how the world changes! Console exclusives used to be the "thing", and over the past few years it has become less and less so. PlayStation games have been on PC for quite a while (The Last of Us, God of War), and Xbox games have started to show up on PS5 (Forza Horizon 5).
Now the biggest Xbox franchise is coming to PS5 with Halo: Campaign Evolved! This is a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, widely considered the best Halo game.
This comes after the shocking massive price hike that Xbox Game Pass got, and also after reports that Microsoft is pushing the Xbox team to achieve insanely high 30% profit margins.
It's a good thing that people can play whatever games they want on whatever system they have, I wonder if Sony will ever put PlayStation games on Xbox. The day Nintendo puts their games on another system will certainly be a day to remember.
| I never quite got the Console wars, except for once during the Wii generation. I had a Wii and I remember refreshing a website that showed the sales of all consoles and being "happy" that the Wii was winning. Obviously it was all very silly and it didn't impact my life at all, I guess I'm happy I never got sucked into the console wars like some people who are apparently willing to die for their console of choice. At the end of the day these are just fun videogames and multi-billion dollar corporations. |
Fun
Build a Database from scratch
Have you ever wanted to build a database from scratch? Or just learn how such a thing could be done?
Here is an excellent website that shows exactly that! It starts with a simple file and adding records, then it implements updates, deletes, compression, searching and tons more.
The website has some really excellent visualizations to really understand how everything works, neat!
| I love when something is made so understandable thanks to clever visualizations. This website has both that and very clear discrete steps that help you see how to go from nothing to a fully fledged database, super cool! |
Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!
(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)
Thanks for reading!
Code Monkey
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