No.

As an introvert, as much as I feel weird aroind people, I feel even weirder video chatting with people I’ve never met in person. In that situation, I have no idea how to read people and the expectations are way harder to try to meet. This makes meetings even worse until I meet them.

While I agree that forced in person work daily is insane, the OP is complaining about meeting people in person once after many years, which feels equally as ridiculous. IMO even for widely dispersed teams, meeting a few times a year seems ideal.

Yeah, I’ve met many people who literally have never spoken up in a meeting unless called upon… And then you meet them in person and they talk all the time.

Online dynamics are entirely different and it doesn’t work at all for some people.

But for most people it’s functional but much less so than in person. Humans were wired for in person interactions. Not just cropped compressed video of a persons face.

I’m actually shocked to find how many people agree with the OPs sentiment, but maybe there’s something about the demographics of who’s using a FOSS Reddit alternative or something. I’m not saying everyone is wrong or has something wrong with them or whatever, but I entirely agree with people finding this valuable, so maybe I can answer the OPs question here.

I’ve been working remotely long since before the pandemic. I’ve worked remotely for multiple companies and in different environments. I am extremely introverted and arguably anti social. I tend to want to hang out with many of my friends online over in person. But that doesn’t mean I think there’s no advantage at all. To be honest, when I first started remote work, I thought the in person thing was total bullshit. After a few meetings my opinions drastically changed.

I’ve pushed (with other employees, of course) to get remote employees flown in at least a few times a year at multiple companies. There are vastly different social dynamics in person than over video. Honestly, I don’t understand how people feel otherwise, especially if they’ve experienced it. I’ve worked with many remote employees over the years and asked about this, and most people have agreed with me. Many of these people are also introverted.

I think one of the big things here is people harping on the “face” thing. Humans communicate in large part through body language - it’s not just faces. There’s also a lot of communication in microexpressions that aren’t always captured by compressed, badly lit video. So much of communication just isn’t captured in video.

Secondly, in my experience, online meetings are extremely transactional. You meet at the scheduled time, you talk about the thing, then you close the meeting and move on. In person, people slowly mosy over to meetings. And after the meeting ends, they tend to hang around a bit and chat. When you’re working in an office, you tend to grab lunch with people. Or bump into them by the kitchen. There’s a TON more socializing happening in person where you actually bump into other people and talk them as people and not just cogs in the machine to get your work done.

I find in person interactions drastically change my relationships with people. Some people come off entirely different online and it’s not until meeting them in person that I really feel like I know them. And then I understand their issues and blockers or miscommunications better and feel more understanding of their experiences.

Maybe things are different if you work jobs with less interdepencies or are more solo. I’ve always worked jobs that take a lot of cooperation between multiple different people in different roles. And those relationships are just way more functional with people I’ve met and have a real relationship with. And that comes from things that just don’t happen online.

Im honestly really curious how anyone could feel differently. The other comments just seem mad at being required to and stating the same stuff happens online, but it just doesn’t. I do wonder if maybe it has to do with being younger and entering the workplace more online or something. But I’ve worked with hundreds of remote employees and never heard a single one say the in person stuff to be useless. And I’ve heard many say exactly the opposite.

To make sure millenials can’t read your password, 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓲𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮.

How would this mess with millennials? I think you mean gen z.

Problem 2 also shows they have no double checks on access to private video feeds. Mixing up what’s being requested at any step and not reverifying anywhere after that point just reveals fucking terrible security practices.

No, this does actually sound like a solution. But it’s a solution that should be scattered all throughout the process, and checked at multiple steps along the way. The fact that this wasn’t here to begin with is a bigger problem than the “client library failure” as it shows Wyze’s security practices are fucking garbage. And adding “one layer” is not enough. There should be several.

To give a bit better context, which I can only be guessing at by reading between the lines of their vague descriptions and my first hand experience with these types of systems…

Essentially your devices all have unique ids. And your account has an account/user ID. They’re essentially “random numbers” that are unique within each set, but there appear to be devices that have the same ID as a some user’s user ID.

When the app wants to query for video feeds it’s going to ask the server “hey, get me the feed for devices A, B, and C. And my user ID is X”. The server should receive this, check if that user has access to those devices. But that server is just the first external facing step. It then likely delegates the request through multiple internal services which go look up the feed for those device IDs and return them.

The problem that happened is somewhere in there, they had an “oopsie” and they passed along “get me device X, X, X for user ID X”. And for whatever reason, all the remaining steps were like “yup, device X for user X, here you go”. At MULTIPLE points along that chain, they should be rechecking this and saying “woah, user X only has access to devices A, B, and C, not X. Access denied.”

The fact that they checked this ZERO times, and now adding “a layer” of verification is a huge issue imo. This should never have been running in production without multiple steps in the chain validating this. Otherwise, they’re prone to both bugs and hacks.

But no, they clearly weren’t verified to view the events. Their description implies that somewhere in the chain they scrambled what was being requested and there were no further verifications after that point. Which is a massive issue.

It doesn’t even need to go that far. If some cache mixes up user ids and device ids, those user ids should go to request a video feed and the serving authority should be like “woah, YOU don’t have access to that device/user”. Even when you fucking mix these things up, there should be multiple places in the chain where this gets checked and denied. This is a systemic/architectural issue and not “one little oopsie in a library”. That oopsie simply exposed the problem.

I don’t care if I was affected or how widespread this is. This just shows Wyze can’t be trusted with anything remotely “private”. This is a massive security failing.

Can’t find the other comment you made about this anymore, but this is an advertising company that’s helping devs advertise their games, so yeah, it’s not going to talk about advertising non existent apps for market analysis. Instead it talks about twisting games to advertise them with exaggeration and weird hooks to try to convince people to download them… Which is another shitty advertising practice in mobile gaming (yeah, there are a lot of them, shocker) and not really pertinent to the topic/OP.

I also find it funny you left the highlight showing you probably searched exactly for something that proved your point, but it’s listed “exaggeration” in the heading which is entirely different.

These are all examples of exaggerated and misleading ads. Hell, the heading you linked to is literally called “exaggerated ads”. That’s not “this game does not exist at all” ads, it’s “this isn’t how the game actually plays” ads. The examples this article gives are the like weird “Omg he got me pregnant” ads that then link to a match 3 game and the like. These are a different thing than things like the OP linked which are entirely irrelevant and link to random unrelated games.

The article is from and advertising company that is selling customers who have an existing game who want to improve ad conversions and then lists techniques for doing so. They do not explain the outcome the OP is asking about. Not would they outline the strategy I’m talking about since what in referring to is a process by which you would test new game ideas. That’s not something the company you linked to would be involved in.

There are many many many types of advertising campaigns in mobile gaming. And they serve different purposes. The stuff your outlining is different than the OPs question and my response. They exist in the same market and one existing doesn’t mean the other doesn’t.

The same half dozen vertical slices or renders have existed for years so why have exactly 0 been realised as games?

Already covered above. They likely prototyped it and it didn’t monetize well or something so they axed it.

Because they aren’t games they are bait and switch adverts.

Or they’re neither, and they’re just trying to gauge the market. But sure, you can believe whatever you want.

There’s no market research campaigns and you’ve provided no fucking evidence for your claims at all.

You haven’t either. You’re just assuming a) the worst and b) something that makes objectively less sense - if your whole premise is they’re advertising something fake, how would this even work as bait and switch if people see that’s not what the ad links to?

Your thesis is bunk and I think so are your claims to be a dev too.

And your thesis is “I feel like it’s bait and switch, so it is” and you have no claims of credibility. Nothing I say will prove to you that I’ve worked for some of the largest corporations in the US, so I can’t change your mind.

Why does any dev in the mobile need to deal with companies like this??

I didn’t say I “needed” to. And my job did require it at the time. The circumstances of my employment are kind of out of the scope of this discussion and it’s pretty much entirely irrelevant. I was just stating where I got my information from.

you can just self publish and that’s what people do daily.

Sure. You can. People do. Mobile it’s way less successful though. And I didn’t say anything about what an indie devs options are. You’re reading something very different out of what I’m saying and I don’t know what it is or where you’re getting it from.

Lots of self published games and apps exist and more are available every day.

Exactly. That’s part of what’s going on here.

I am concerned with the larping you’re doing here.

Larping? What am I role playing? And we’re on the internet, so this definitely isn’t “live action” by any means. I don’t understand what you think is going on here.

Why are you trying to scare people ?

Me stating what goes on inside the industry is not “trying” to do anything. I’m just explaining what I’ve seen in it. Whether they choose to be “scared” or not is their own perogative. Would you say I’m trying to scare people if I said many people have died in Gaza in the past few months? It’s just stating what’s happening.

Yeah, I don’t feel foolish at all. I’ve explained this in other comments.

In summary:

I’m not claiming literally every instance is exactly what I’m describing, but it is a very common pattern.

Many of these ads are slight variations to test which performs better.

Many of the “which performs better” are run against long standing ads they’ve had to learn about how to advertise. They may never intend to release the games being advertised. They may know the ad does well, but they built a prototype game and it didn’t monetize, so they’ll never finish it or already killed it. But that doesn’t stop them from running the same ad but with a different visual theme to see which visual theme is more popular right now.

Some of these ads are not run by dev studios but by advertisers or publishers.

Markets are not static - interest in themes, visual styles, and game genres are all extremely “seasonal” and keep changing. They do not “know their market extremely well” because interest keeps shifting. Companies will constantly run ads just to gauge what genres they should be thinking about and to track trends over time. IE, they may run the same exact strategy game ad for many years straight to determine the long term stability of strategy games. Without caring about the specific game idea in the ad itself.

I don’t feel foolish, nor do I think it’s “clever”. I just know from first hand experience that this is how the market works.

There’s a psychological phenomenon around this but I forget the name for it. But yes, there’s evidence that seeing someone play poorly, and thinking “oh that’s easy I could do that” actually does motivate you to want to do it. Like a weird “prove I’m better” self ego stroke sort of thing. And these ads very much are intentionally playing into that.

What’s even funnier: there are many of these now that are fake. IE, a bunch of you tubers / tiktokers have done videos where they play games to see if they’re real. Then some company goes to make a fake ad, so they take the you tubers video and just put their ad video there instead. So then there are ads with them saying “woah this game is real!” but it’s a fake video of a fake ad. It’s turtles all the way down.

Yeah, I think you’re totally right. I didn’t mean that it started in 2010s, more that it was basically the norm by then and it’s a giant cesspool now. But looking back, my wording wasn’t super clear on that distinction. I do think it was around in the 2000s, but its gotten much worse with time.

I’m also super frustrated as a gamer, but to your point, thank god the indie scene is running strong.

Sounds like you’ve got the right mindset and sounds like you have your head on your shoulders. Best of luck!

You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.

It definitely is. I think it’s really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it’s gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to “suppress”. It’s hard to tell how much stuff you’re really up against in those stores because it’s so hard to even see a portion of it. There’s just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.

Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don’t want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don’t think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there’s less stuff to compete with there.

Yeah, I hate that this is the state of mobile gaming. And it’s seeped into other game spaces as well. I find it really sad and pathetic, but once big money crept in, it feels like that’s all most games are. It’s basically just pushed me harder towards indie games, and luckily that’s easier to find and discover these days.

Thank you!

As I mentioned in other comments, I’m a software dev that’s worked with companies that were doing this, that were talking to other mobile game companies that were doing this. I hate to say “trust me bro” but, this stuff isn’t something they’re like happy to publicly advertise so it’s not like it’s written up somewhere, AFAIK.