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Comic: https://www.deathbulge.com/comics/441
Alt text: Yeah yeah, there's always exceptions, I mean look no further than the game in the 2nd panel, not the most thrilling gameplay, is it?
I will happily pay full price for an indie or solo dev/small team game even if I end up not loving it. I will always wait for a sale for the big AAA games.
The games I always remember/return to the most are the ones that had an amazing storyline.
That doesn't require a huge budget. But it does require the developer to love the game too.
So many companies are run from an excel spreadsheet. No true leadership or vision.
I don't even have time for all the great indies.
Like seriously, that's a real problem. I had to remove Deltarune from my wishlist. DELTARUNE.
Yeah, indie and AA-gaming are doing fine, its the AAA that is suffering. And I think they deserve it for sure: predatory practices, lack of innovation, everything looking and feeling the same... Indie and AA-games are the ones I look forward to.
Watching Paradox Interactive transition from AA into a AAA studio has been painful. They fill a niche that nobody else is really paying attention to, but they've become so entrenched that the games are really starting to feel like reskins of each other, and while I wouldn't call their DLC strategy predatory, they feel just a hair below that point.
"Historical strategy simulator" is a pretty tough genre to attack as an indie dev, though.
Me, watching at the pages upon pages of games I haven't even touched yet in my collection... Even if half of them are complete duds, and half of what's left is kind of meh, I've got enough to be entertained forever even if all gaming studios vanish overnight.
There's definitely amazing indie games, but there's also hundreds of shitty and terrible indie games for every decent one.
And thats the natural way of the world. Without shitty artists there would be no good artists, because every good artist was once a shitty artist.
That's why the Indie side is a full ecosystem.
Shitty games die and fertilize the ground so that all the good ones can grow.
If a AAA game dies, it takes another 6 years for investors and executives to gain the balls to maybe risk spending the money to make another game, so it fertilizes nothing, just sits and rots on sand.
I can respect a shitty indie game that has passion. You can tell a lot of people are ALMOST there on itch.io sometimes. And its just so close. Or just something that doesnt click with you. But thats ok.
I don't think the intended message is that all indie games are great. The message is that if you're frustrated with AAA-games and haven't considered indie games, you should.
There are all these people who think it's only a video game if it involves big fightymen killing things. That's hyperbole (they could be big sportsmen doing sports), but not by much.
These are the people who view graphics as the be-and-end-all of a game's quality. There are more kinds of games than anyone could count, but you wouldn't know it by asking those people.
Unfortunately a large percentage of the population (subconsciously) believe that if a product isn't marketed to them, they shouldn't touch it.
To put it more accurately, they don't look. They don't seek. They wait for it to get served to them via an algorithmic feed.
I think this is a core issue with all of civilization, right now.
We will mock this, but we all use Product X in industry Y, which is the more well-known brand of that industry. We donβt know that if we explore Z Niche Store, we can find excellent replacements for Product X that can take a little more effort to use and appreciate but are valued more for it.
You can fill in that mad lib in several ways; itβs very much down to which industries you pay close attention to.
How much difference does it make for your life?
What's the fraction of your time you spend in it?
How long do you have to work to earn the money to pay for it?
As I see it, those are the kind of question which dictate how much time one should spend in trying to figure out the best option for something.
Trying to figure out the best cost/quality option in, say, soap or discardable plates for a party, is seldom worth it versus spending time figuring out, say, what's the best house or car to buy or even just a good sofa for you living room or mattress for your bed.
And yeah, plenty of people won't spend anywhere as much time researching even a purchase they're going to spend the next 30 years paying for (the house), which IMHO is pretty sad - if something will cost you tens of thousands of hours of your life to pay for (by working to earn the money to pay for it), spending many hours of your time in making totally sure you're getting the right one is the wisest way of going about it.
So, it's totally logical for casual gamers to invest in their game purchasing decisions the same time and care as they do for, say, their soap purchases, and it's logical for people who spend many hours a week playing games to care a lot more about finding the best games for what's probably their main form of entertainment.
And there's also those, who will throw a hissyfit if they're forced to play something without modern AAA graphics, don't want to play "woke" games, etc.
Played Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora recently, and it struck me almost immediately:
This is, without a hint of doubt, a Ubisoft game. The setting may change, the characters are swapped, but it is always the same gameplay. Like if they figured something that works with Assassin's Creed and decided to never change it, ever.
Whatever Ubisoft action RPG you start, you always play Assassin's Creed with extra decorations. Again. And again. And again. Zero creative vision, just new textures on top of the same mechanics.
I mean⦠if you only have a console (or even worse: only a Smartphone) I get why it looks like that to people. Some people apparently don't even have a PC or laptop anymore.
I'm genuinely upset at how miserable the mobile scene is compared to the rest.
I've got a phone that's orders of magnitude above a TurboGrafx or a Game Gear, but 95% of the games are GACHA crap or so ad bloated as to be unplayable.
Cozy Pixel Dating Exposition Building Pastel Farming Dog Quirky Fishing Rogue-lite Crafter
Ultrakill, Deltarune and Celeste are my favorite video games, all indie I think.
It's a logical outcome. The big studios are risk-averse. Why bother with something that hasn't been already 'proven', and also if they think something has gone "out of fashion", then similarly don't risk revisiting something that will make them look dated.
The pleasant creative outcomes stem from people who want to do it for the sake of doing it rather than constrained by predicted business results. It's by no means a guarantee of quality, a lot of Indie stuff sucks, but certainly being overly business minded inhibits anything 'different' coming out.
Same thing for movies, music, etc. The people that piss and moan about their media being terrible are the ones that can't be bothered to lift a finger to seek out something better. They only bother with media that falls into their lap, and that's petty much all determined by studios that care more about profits than quality.
Exactly. It's like when people complained that rock and roll died again at the end of the 90's. Sure, if you don't seek out better music and just take what's handed to you by MTV and the radio (or what Spotify shows on its Home screen these days), then music is terrible now. If you go digging, you can find all kinds of amazing stuff. Same goes for gaming. Good studios get too big or bought out and ruined by people who only care about money, but if you dig around you can find all kinds of good stuff.
The stuff that "lands in your lap" was actually shoved there by a multi-million dollar marketing budget. That almost certainly means the product itself is meant for mass consumption and may not be that compelling or interesting. If you're willing to spend the time and effort to look around and play some bad games along the way, you'll find the good ones.
So true! If you ignore big corpo and their slop, we actually live in a golden age of gaming.
I'm having more fun with Supplice than any AAA shooter since... idk, 2016 at least.