• DarkMetatron
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    5 days ago

    Creating a good emulator takes a lot of time and money, and that I think is the true reason why.

    What they have released is a MVP, a minimum viable product, it checks all the boxes for a releaseable thing and that’s what the higher ups, the product leads and other finance stakeholders want to hear.

    Additional features or proper scaling? Yeah, nice we put that on the list for MVP+, for sure! When will that come? Nobody knows and we have no development time to work on it because now with the release the focus was shifted to the next project, but it is on the list and we will come back to it.

    I have heard that so often in so many projects I was part of, as a grunt with no power, and for nearly all of them I still wait for the MVP+ time to ever happen.

    • Titou@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Them, the ones having full control on the platform, failed were foss developpers succeed. They have no excuse.

      • DarkMetatron
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        5 days ago

        FOSS developers have no cost reporting, no meetings with C level and stakeholders, no shareholders, no release plans, no schedules. What they have is passion.

        They just created what they want to create, they have a deep personal agenda to make something they want to use for themselves and that has to have therefore the polish and quality they want to have it to have.

        The corporate developers wanted to make a good product too I am very sure, but if the higher ups say that it has to be released by a fixed date then there is not much that the developers can do about it.

        So yes, the company has no real excuses, besides money.

        • Titou@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          Many situations proved to us that passion make better things, sadly today’s AAA game developpers dosn’t have any passion anymore, mostly because of pression made by boss who are only driven by money.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to buy a license from an emulator project, hire one or two from the team, and give them access to internal info to help fix things up? Then your internal team just integrates it with the console and you ship it.

          That sounds way cheaper than NIH…

          • DarkMetatron
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            5 days ago

            There are not much good commercial emulator projects, and open source emulators are not easy to license due to the nature of the open source licences (often GPL 2 or 3) used.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              5 days ago

              A iot of the FOSS projects are developed by a handful of people, often just one or two. So you buy a licence from those individuals and remove and replace the rest. Or just hire the one or two devs and they can pull in the bits they wrote. You’re always free to relicense your work.

              And if it’s GPL v2, there’s no problem because you can probably treat it as “firmware” since it’s a console and not a PC (e.g. like TiVo did). GPL v3 blocks that loophole though.

              • DarkMetatron
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                5 days ago

                Sounds complicated and like a lot of potential legal trouble, have it done by their own staff seems easier.