luna the deer

the general mindset around game pricing has become so unreasonably bad, I don't even know what to say anymore.

i know it's not a vast majority of people but the fact that there well and truly is a subsect of players who won't even spend a measly DOLLAR on a game should just remind you that if the culture does not value you, then you should value yourself. the people who truly want to support your work will do so in kind.

think about how many copies you need to sell of a $1 game, just to be able to say you made a profit. you lose so much money between payment processors, distributor cuts, tax between countries, etc. that you would need to sell like 30 copies of a game to make maybe $10.
you sell one copy at $20 and you make more money, and to be honest, much more genuine support and positive treatment for even bothering to make the game in the first place.

a person who is spending $1 on your game, more often than not barely values the purchase that they have made, and the kind of entitlement that i see from people complaining about the games they spent ONE DOLLAR on would honestly... well... actually, it probably wouldn't shock most of you if you've ever released a game publicly at all.

so, please, charge what you're worth. if you think your game is worth $5, charge $5. maybe even charge $7. charge $30 if you want! a bunch of games have done that and sold just fine. just please don't feed this ridiculous devaluing of creative work.

i agree with all of this but also if you think your game is worth $5 charge $20. if you think it's worth $10, charge $20. if you think its worth $15, charge $20.

you can always reduce the price. you can always put your game on sale.

there is never* a reason to charge less than $20 for a game

the planes didn;t actually do ansything to the towers they planted bombs in them the day before and just did the plane thing cause it looked cool & scary

a large portion of those in the towers actually had skydiving equipment but chose to not use it and accept their death because it meant they'd get their name written on a monument

the pennsylvania plane only crashed because the pilot tried to do a loop-de-loop

kobold who bites you for 0 damage (which still causes you to activate your i-frames)

between britpop and brat i've been consuming a lot of SOPHIE eulogy content lately and it's affecting me more than i thought it would.

it's not a stretch to say that even outside of this period i think about SOPHIE at least once a day and have done for years now. often it is because i am listening to a song she produced, but just as frequently it is because i am shoving a distorted snare drum sound into a reverb with a very small room size and then distorting it more and smothering it with OTT to make it sound like smacking a steel pipe against the floor of a cathedral as recorded by a broken robot from the future.

i do this because SOPHIE did it first, because i want to capture even a fraction of the joy and energy she put into songs like HARD and ponyboy and faceshopping. i'm not alone in this, just as often as i think about SOPHIE because i am ripping her off, i think of SOPHIE because i am listening to someone rip her off, whether it's umru or leroy or dylan brady or death's dynamic shroud or any of the shallow watered down copycats that creep into the top 40.

when i think about SOPHIE's death i just think: why couldn't we just have this one. so many of us die every year, as tiktok commenters are happy to remind anyone brave enough to be visibly trans. SOPHIE's death is impossible to be mad about because it wasn't for any reason. you can't turn it into a rallying cry. she wasn't a martyr. it was an accident. of course, nobody dies for a reason.

i think about this because we live in a time absolutely bereft of visionaries. as much as i love brat, its greatest flaw is that it is a painfully backwards-looking album. as i listened to it i kept a log of all the spire presets i recognized. the future somehow still sounds like it did in 2004. but SOPHIE's future was different: when she produced for charli she made it sound like nothing else on earth.

i started writing this before the new SOPHIE song came out and i'm still thinking about it. i don't know how i feel about it. it's not blowing me away. it sounds like her, but it sounds like her at her most conventional, like when she produced for vince staples and basside. it's a far cry from her deranged final single. but also it's a reminder that in the time she's been gone, everyone has raided her bag of tricks. if she'd stayed around i have no doubt that she would have stayed light-years ahead of the competition, but instead we get a version of her frozen in 2021, before tiktok was awash in 30 second tutorials on how to make the fizzy pop sounds from lemonade and "SOPHIE snares" and those little rubbery synth fills she loved to do.

it's also a reminder, though, that there was more to SOPHIE than just reckless sonic experimentalism. i think often of this quote from A.G. cook's sophie eulogy:

Sophie was and always will be a wedding DJ. There were cute photos of her DJing weddings as a pre-teen, and one of the most joyous DJ sets we did together was for her sister’s wedding. It’s funny to think of us striking a balance between our own tracks and the ethereal ‘mainstream’ selections that are considered acceptable at weddings, but Sophie loved to win over crowds, to make people dance, and she had a vast knowledge of music from different eras which she could deftly weave into her own world. Amongst her USBs were some backup folders simply labelled 70s, 80s, 90s that I remember falling back on for various nights and afterparties when things needed to get a little matrimonious.

and that's what really made her special. she was not just at the cutting edge of sound design and song structure, she was also, unlike so many others in a similar lane, a party person. she made something that you've never heard before sound irresistibly danceable. a fascinating exercise is to compare her early work with that of her contemporaries: a thorough comparison of "BIPP" and untold's "stop what you're doing" (a song i also like) will reveal immediately that this is what set her apart from other sonic experimentalists. in a culture obsessed with individualism and "self-expression" and the idea of making art only for yourself, she made music for us, which is not mutually incompatible with making music for herself. after all, she was, and always will be, one of us.