Nearly at the end now… which is kinda cool, although I have 2 micro-events tomorrow I am looking forward to. Frankly five nights living out of a hotel on my own is more than enough for me.
Today has been pretty cool it started bad with me having to drenched on the short walk to get in a queue to buy a coffee because again… US hotels seem to be resistant to providing coffee machines. Are they part-owned by starbucks FFS? I then handled emails and social media stuff before I headed off for lunch with Jake (Grey Alien Games) and Tommy (Super Meat Boy), which was cool, and good fun, from that…it was off to ichiros cool micro-GDC thing to discuss the good and the bad of steam, and questions we had for them.
During the chat, prompted by ichiro very sensibly pointing out that its better to be positive than negative, I realized that many of the ‘toxic community’ problems that steam has can be solved by carrot, not stick. Sometimes, especially in early-access, players mention really good ideas, or give great feedback, or reply to other users tech support requests and solve problems for you.
Right now… I have no way to reward those players. Maybe we should take just 0.1% of steams cut, and covert that into ‘gems’ or whatever the best way to generate a steam ‘currency’ is, and allow developers to give that out on the forums? Nice steam guide you created there… here are 100 gems. Thanks for answering that users tech request… here are 5 gems. People who act like total asses, swear a lot, are rude or abusive… yeah they aren’t going to get any gems. Carrot, not stick.
Anyway… GDC 2018 has already been good, from my POV. I don’t feel ill, I’ve had some great times, some fun meetups with fellow devs, discussed some interesting industry stuff and learned some interesting industry news, and am confident it was worth my while in a business sense, as well as a sociable / personal sense.
I am looking forward to seeing my wife, my own bed, tea! my cat jack, and to get back into coding mode though.