It also helps if the game is genuinely fun or interesting to play. I can tell you I’m having a hell of a lot more fun watching people play this than recent Pokemon games, and it’s making me consider dropping some money to buy the game.
Consumers are stupid. They seldom want something new, more often than not they want something familiar with a few slights twists. Movie studio’s don’t do reboots because they’re lazy, they do it because people keep fucking going to see them.
A handful of people online complain every year about how “Sports Game Franchise '23 is just SGF '22 with some new player skins” and yet it still sells like hotcakes. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn’t you do that, there’s no financial incentive to spend more money on development.
I starting playing MMO’s with the Ultima Online beta, and was in a number of other betas over the years. Vanguard, The Chronicles of Spellborn, etc. The number of beta players who kept shouting “it needs race X from WoW” and “why aren’t there any druids like in WoW” was deafening. For decades, people talked about the next “WoW killer”, which meant “a game close enough to WoW for people to migrate but maybe with slightly better graphics”.
Do you know where the money gets spent when you come up with original ideas? Into the trash can. It’s literally paying people to write down ideas on paper or in code, iterating, and then throwing them out, over and over again.
AAA titles also spend a truckload on voice acting and mocap. You don’t need to mocap a round sheep monster. Sure, you could be incredibly stupid and pay Alan Tudyk to voice act the sheep, or pay Vin Diesal millions to say “I am Groot” 300 different ways, but no one should be ashamed for not doing so.
“consumers are stupid”. So I guess you and everyone else is stupid? Calling people who like things you don’t like stupid means you have the mind of a toddler and probably act like one.
But you’re right. People don’t want new things. It’s why movies like Oppenheimer bombed and only made almost a billion. It’s why “Everything, everywhere all at once” bombed and nobody watched it nor talks about it ever.
People like things that they like. Crazy.
Yeah a lot of people grew up with superheroes, so they watch their favorite franchises. Less so now since we can see some decline with people getting sick of it all.
People like sports, so they buy sports games. EA has a strangle on licensing rights for the players. People want to play as their favorite players. Fucking wild right? If a competitor came in, had the license rights and made a decent game, guess what, people would probably buy it.
I started off in MUDs. When WoW was new, the class synergy and the contexts in which they worked was new, exciting and fun. Yeah people wanted to see that outside of WoW because back then it was new.
You sound like a grognard loser who likes the smell of their own farts and tries to establish their milquetoast opinion as fact
Inb4 “you’re a marvel watcher” I don’t watch them because I’m not interested in superheros.
Inb4 “FIFA slave” nope don’t care about sports ball.
Your reply is going to be some nonsense about how you’re right because you’re just…right! Don’t bother, I won’t read it.
If you look at their site, it honestly looks like they just took their EXISTING game from a few years back (Craftopia) and cheaply re-skinned it for PalWorld.
So the cost posted might only be for the re-skinning cost too, making it even cheaper.
I saw this game, like, 5 minutes ago and I can already say it looks bloody awful. It’s like they put all the buzzwords in a hat and decided to make a game from them.
I can see bits of Fotnite, Zelda, Pokemon, and every Minecraft clone under the sun. Not a single new thing brought to the table.
Combining things that haven’t been combined before is the quintessential creative act. Because as you said, there is nothing new under the sun. But there are new ways of combining those things.
You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:
Fortnite
Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.
Zelda
If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.
Pokemon
Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.
Minecraft
It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.
So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.
Factorio was inspired by Minecraft mods BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft, but yeah, few games have done what Factorio has, and those that have tried never quite reached it’s level. Sure, there are games that feature automation with complex recipes (Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez), but only Factorio actually managed to pull off a sense of exponential scale.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Minecraft mods, but I wouldn’t have called the ideas established before Factorio came along. As for Satisfactory et al, they were inspired by Factorio itself, so obviously don’t count.
Look at how little hype it had until day one of release, no one was talking positively about it
Look at people complimenting it now, talking about how it fills a niche for adults wanting to play Pokémon when it is nothing like Pokémon and that niche is already filled
Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn’t know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.
Cheap to make games when you just copy every other game’s ideas and arts
Putting these different ideas together is the novelty and isn’t cheap or easy to do.
Any design with a wheel in it is unoriginal, I guess.
It also helps if the game is genuinely fun or interesting to play. I can tell you I’m having a hell of a lot more fun watching people play this than recent Pokemon games, and it’s making me consider dropping some money to buy the game.
Ok you do it then.
I think you have no idea how long it takes to make a game. Even the simplest game will take months. Most survival games take years.
You confused cheap with profitable.
Consumers are stupid. They seldom want something new, more often than not they want something familiar with a few slights twists. Movie studio’s don’t do reboots because they’re lazy, they do it because people keep fucking going to see them.
A handful of people online complain every year about how “Sports Game Franchise '23 is just SGF '22 with some new player skins” and yet it still sells like hotcakes. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn’t you do that, there’s no financial incentive to spend more money on development.
I starting playing MMO’s with the Ultima Online beta, and was in a number of other betas over the years. Vanguard, The Chronicles of Spellborn, etc. The number of beta players who kept shouting “it needs race X from WoW” and “why aren’t there any druids like in WoW” was deafening. For decades, people talked about the next “WoW killer”, which meant “a game close enough to WoW for people to migrate but maybe with slightly better graphics”.
6 mil is very cheap, and this game was obviously a money based on popular game tropes and memes
That’s not a point though, valid or otherwise.
Do you know where the money gets spent when you come up with original ideas? Into the trash can. It’s literally paying people to write down ideas on paper or in code, iterating, and then throwing them out, over and over again.
AAA titles also spend a truckload on voice acting and mocap. You don’t need to mocap a round sheep monster. Sure, you could be incredibly stupid and pay Alan Tudyk to voice act the sheep, or pay Vin Diesal millions to say “I am Groot” 300 different ways, but no one should be ashamed for not doing so.
God thats boring
Jesus Christ, I can smell your fedora from here.
“consumers are stupid”. So I guess you and everyone else is stupid? Calling people who like things you don’t like stupid means you have the mind of a toddler and probably act like one.
But you’re right. People don’t want new things. It’s why movies like Oppenheimer bombed and only made almost a billion. It’s why “Everything, everywhere all at once” bombed and nobody watched it nor talks about it ever.
People like things that they like. Crazy.
Yeah a lot of people grew up with superheroes, so they watch their favorite franchises. Less so now since we can see some decline with people getting sick of it all.
People like sports, so they buy sports games. EA has a strangle on licensing rights for the players. People want to play as their favorite players. Fucking wild right? If a competitor came in, had the license rights and made a decent game, guess what, people would probably buy it.
I started off in MUDs. When WoW was new, the class synergy and the contexts in which they worked was new, exciting and fun. Yeah people wanted to see that outside of WoW because back then it was new.
You sound like a grognard loser who likes the smell of their own farts and tries to establish their milquetoast opinion as fact
Inb4 “you’re a marvel watcher” I don’t watch them because I’m not interested in superheros. Inb4 “FIFA slave” nope don’t care about sports ball.
Your reply is going to be some nonsense about how you’re right because you’re just…right! Don’t bother, I won’t read it.
If you look at their site, it honestly looks like they just took their EXISTING game from a few years back (Craftopia) and cheaply re-skinned it for PalWorld.
So the cost posted might only be for the re-skinning cost too, making it even cheaper.
I saw this game, like, 5 minutes ago and I can already say it looks bloody awful. It’s like they put all the buzzwords in a hat and decided to make a game from them.
I can see bits of Fotnite, Zelda, Pokemon, and every Minecraft clone under the sun. Not a single new thing brought to the table.
Combining things that haven’t been combined before is the quintessential creative act. Because as you said, there is nothing new under the sun. But there are new ways of combining those things.
You see Fortnite? Because you have to make buildings piece by piece. It’s closer to most survival games.
And uh, yeah you see Pokemon in it. The creatures were obviously designed in that aesthetic.
Minecraft, really? Do you know of any other games? You can’t alter the terrain. It’s not block-based. Again, more similar to Ark, Rust, etc.
Some of the creatures were just straight up copied and bashed together from several Pokémon 3D models. That’s not designed, that’s theft.
Are you aware that Pokemon pretty much “stole” the creatures from Dragon Quest - an RPG from 1986?
Holy shit that’s so bad, they don’t have a leg to stand on here.
They haven’t sued, so they aren’t even trying to stand at this point.
It was when they announced the keychain Pokémon that I realized they aren’t exactly a bastion of originality.
Thank you for this! Truly fascinating!
Which and which did they mash up? What unique Pokemon parts did they take?
You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:
Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.
If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.
Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.
It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.
So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.
Are there any games from the last 10 years or so that aren’t just combining already established ideas?
Factorio, maybe?
Factorio was inspired by Minecraft mods BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft, but yeah, few games have done what Factorio has, and those that have tried never quite reached it’s level. Sure, there are games that feature automation with complex recipes (Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez), but only Factorio actually managed to pull off a sense of exponential scale.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Minecraft mods, but I wouldn’t have called the ideas established before Factorio came along. As for Satisfactory et al, they were inspired by Factorio itself, so obviously don’t count.
Personally I’m really enjoying it. As are my kids. It’s also bloody stunning.
This is one of the dumbest takes I’ve seen about the game.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. - Ecclesiastes 1:9
Yeah everything about the game says it’s awful but they seem to have an unlimited advertising budget to put it all over twitch and YouTube
Not about it being new, it just looks like something “an idea guy” would have
You seem to not understand that people can stream games because they enjoy it and not because they’re getting paid by the devs
Look at the game, it’s clearly not that
Look at how little hype it had until day one of release, no one was talking positively about it
Look at people complimenting it now, talking about how it fills a niche for adults wanting to play Pokémon when it is nothing like Pokémon and that niche is already filled
Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn’t know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.
Don’t forget Apex Legends either. It dropped with 0 marketing or even an announcement and picked up players fast.