Sure, I can answer both.

1.) when making a game what’s the best place to start?

Always start with core gameplay. What will the player actually be doing? The player must be an active participant in whatever is happening in the game. If players are just going to sit and watch passively, they aren't playing a game at all - they're watching a show. What makes something a game is the active participation of one or more players to drive progress and make choices. In order to figure out how the player participates, you need to think about the various things the players will be doing and how those things are fun. A good rule of thumb is to list the actions as verbs. In a game like Call of Duty, the player verbs would be running, jumping, aiming, shooting, and throwing grenades. In a game like Street Fighter, the player verbs would be punching, kicking, jumping, blocking, crouching, throwing, walking, and performing special moves. Think about the actions player will be doing in your game and how you will build that out.

2.) most have their brand/developer names, but do you need one to publish games?

You don't absolutely need to have a separate brand or name to release a game - several solo devs have gone the route of full transparency. However, having a brand name does help to establish a separation of your work from you as a human being. That kind of association is pretty much permanent because the internet never forgets. Having the game, its community, and anything you post indelibly tied to any of your other public-facing actions on the internet (including personal social media posts) can be a double-edged sword. Having an intermediary name/entity be a shield can help a lot when you need it, and going 100% public is something that can't be taken back.

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Valve is pretty notorious for being an industry unicorn doing their own thing. They're a privately held company, meaning they have no shareholders to answer to besides their own founders. They make money hand over fist because they own a major distribution platform that maintains a plurality of customers on PC, meaning that angry player feedback has significantly less effect on their bottom line. Valve is also notorious for allowing their developers to work on whatever they want to work on. In aggregate, these factors combine into a company whose devs can basically do whatever they want, without needing to be beholden to any external pressures to do this or that.

Many gamers mythologize this kind of "perfect game development environment" where the devs aren't beholden to shareholders or publishers or politics or whatever else. Well, this can also be a double-edged sword monkey's paw kind of situation as well. Such an environment also makes the devs not beholden to the players of their games either. They can choose whether they want to listen or not, and the TF2 players can choose to take their business elsewhere. The unfortunate truth is that Steam will continue to pay Valve's bills for the foreseeable future, which gives them license to ignore the TF2 players for as long as they want. Unless the players can somehow persuade enough of Valve's developers (and the right developers too - a character artist certainly isn't going to write bot detection code) to drop whatever they've chosen to work on and switch over to fixing TF2, it's probably not going to happen unless something major changes.

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Got a burning question you want answered?

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Palworld developer Pocketpair insists it has no reason to be alarmed about the hit game's dwindling player count.

As Palworld's 24-hour concurrent Steam count peaks at around 535,000 players – a fair fall from the 2.1 million simultaneous players Pocketpair secured the weekend Palworld launched – community manager "Bucky" stated in a statement on Twitter that the "Palworld has lost X per cent of its player base discourse is lazy", insisting that it was "fine" for players to take a break and play other games in between content updates.

"This emerging 'Palworld has lost X per cent of its player base' discourse is lazy, but it's probably also a good time to step in and reassure those of you capable of reading past a headline that it is fine to take breaks from games," Bucky said.

Read more

Palworld developer Pocketpair insists it has no reason to be alarmed about the hit game's dwindling player count.

As Palworld's 24-hour concurrent Steam count peaks at around 535,000 players – a fair fall from the 2.1 million simultaneous players Pocketpair secured the weekend Palworld launched – community manager "Bucky" stated in a statement on Twitter that the "Palworld has lost X per cent of its player base discourse is lazy", insisting that it was "fine" for players to take a break and play other games in between content updates.

"This emerging 'Palworld has lost X per cent of its player base' discourse is lazy, but it's probably also a good time to step in and reassure those of you capable of reading past a headline that it is fine to take breaks from games," Bucky said.

Read more