Users: “Stop spending so much on development. Smaller teams, shorter cycles, more games. Stop making everything an all-or-nothing gamble.”
NEXON Games boardroom: “I think it’s trying to communicate!”
Indy games are art. Find an artist(s), pay them a living wage, and let them do their art largely undisturbed, guided by a vision of what the game should be, so they keep working towards the same goal. Let them learn from their mistakes and make their next game better. That leads to Baldur’s Gate 3.
CEO of an AAAAAAA+ game developer/publisher: “No games are a product. The most important thing is that the line goes up, so we check what the user feedback is and listen to the loudest crowd that wants the same old shit, only to complain that they always get the same old shit. Also, hire cheap, treat people terribly and get everyone out of the industry as quickly as possible, and none of that art nonsense - I mean, how am I going to sell that to the shareholders, they just want an estimate of how many skins we will sell in 2025 so they will agree to my pay rise?”
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Shows photo with deep cleavage.
The user feedback has spoken
Development costs don’t have to rise. l would gladly play games with pixel graphics or even ps2/3 graphics. Art direction >>> Graphical fidelity.
Right. The two games I play the most are Minecraft and Factorio. Both not amazing graphically but they’re fun.
In the universe with 20-30% of actual inflation development costs will always rise even for indie because devs have to eat something and live somewhere. Not to mention software licensing and equipment
The industry only knows either full blown AAA photo realism or WOW-esque cartoon shit.
How about you get talented people to make the games they want to make, like they did before it became a big business, back when gaming was actually exciting?
The good old days were also exploitative and gross. You just didn’t know it yet.
There were scrope-creep / endless-crunch horror stories back in the ZX Spectrum era.
You assume too much. Those were problems brought on by the intrusion of big business after gaming became more profitable than movies, and precursors to the current blight. I’m talking about when gaming was almost entirely run by hobbyists doing it on their own time and dime.
Indie games have never been better, there’s no problem here that doesn’t solve itself if people just stop buying bad AAA titles
The problem with indie gaming is that it’s nearly impossible to actually find the few good games within the massive crush of shovelware. Even besides that, this thread is specifically about a large publisher.
nearly impossible to actually find the few good games within the massive crush of shovelware
So exactly like gaming in the 90s and 00s? You can’t have it both ways
Well that’s just completely the opposite of my experience. Blizzard Entertainment, for example, was reliably putting out hit after hit after hit for many years. AAA studios used to actually hire talented people, and allow them to make the games they wanted to make, which resulted in fantastic products.
Indie games are currently in problems starting early this year, https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/03/game-pass-woes-for-indie-devs-as-microsoft-epic-funding-reportedly-drying-up
This committee based development method has to end.
“we may not know how much money we can make by developing a certain game, but we can get a feeling as to what kind of game will make users happy. That’s why we test games even in the middle of development and collect feedback.”
That sounds a lot like using data collection to design games. And hey, it’s hard to create art. Art can fail even at its best.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”
And the world would have been better for it .
