151–160 of 280 posts
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Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.
> Rimworld [...] came out years ago though; Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)
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Huah? I'm not upset about the economics though. I'm just describing what I see. What upsets me is the drop in meaningful/just games to play. I really like playing and making games, and seeing a valuable thing be created.... It's not happening often any more in the Steam games space. It genuinely hurts to go from GTA V, RimWorld, Stardew, CS and HL (ect) to empty, hollow games. It's okay with me if it crashes. My core…
> Have something to say! So much this. This same theme repeats itself all over the place. Humans have an amazing BS filter. We can detect ingenuity even when we don't understand it. That's why I'm not too worried about AI. With almost every aspect in life--just focus on being a real, genuine person and the rest will work itself out.
It won't, at least not in terms of money. Most people's indiosyncracies aren't conducive to making enough money to sustain oneself - that's why we have the job market, where people sell their time, and spend it doing stuff that other people actually want to pay for.
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Microsoft decided to name their consoles that way, because they didn't want their console to be one number behind the PlayStation.
So instead they chose three numbers behind the PlayStation, and 359 numbers behind its predecessor? Not sure I follow that reasoning. Not to mention they could just jump to the same number as PlayStation used, just like MS also skipped Windows 9. That said all the jokes at the time likely helped make it clear to everyone that the Xbox One was the new model. And Series S/X is just two letters, nobody seems too confuse…
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> Rimworld [...] came out years ago though; Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)
2013* It spent a long time in Early Access and was already a beloved game by the time 1.0 released.
When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. The whole indie market thing was hot. But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games. It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where w…
It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.…
When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. The whole indie market thing was hot. But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games. It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where w…
For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money. Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game. However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is…
However you can look at the same logic from a different perspective: If you're playing an AAA game, you're playing a game made for everyone - and therefore for no one. This is why some people (including me) aren't fans of AAA games.
Imagine the world (future) where material costs of most things are insignificant and majority of the cost of your food will be paying the designers of this food. Would you want to eat the same, bland (can't be too spicy, can't have particular ingredients-allergens, has to be safe for children…) stuff everyone else eats? Or would you develop a taste for something more niche?
Due to high budgets, the companies also don't want to take risks, that's why indie games are innovative (and that's why indie games fail more often?).
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"Creative" and "Un-creative" don't have to mean "Good" and "Bad". "Creative" makes me think someone who is working on story, art assets, gameplay mechanics, etc. Engine work can be good but it is not creative from the player's perspective. Maybe from the programming-for-the-sake-of-programming perspective it is.
I don't think it is good and bad; I just also think that creating things is creative. Writing a video game story or drawing its assets aren't the only type of creativity, and in this case it sounds like the creative workload on the technical person was fairly extreme.
The amount of negativity and criticism in the comments here is sad. Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy. We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.
I don't consider the comments helpful as well, but quite contrastively, because of the over optimism. Lots of the comments contribute the failure to quite a few reasons, and emphasize on the effect of the reasons. But the real thing is this actually can imply that the failure can be narrow down to "a few simple obvious fixes". To me it make me feel good since "a bad title" can be a very simple excuse to think that "w…
The amount of negativity and criticism in the comments here is sad. Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy. We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.
I mean, even if the developers did everything right, that's no guarantee for success; there's a ton of competition, and a lot of indie hits are more by chance than design.
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I disagree. There are still "true" indie games out there. Just the masses of games produced that call themselves "indie games" are not. Often it seems to be used as an excuse for an unpolished, boring and in the end shitty game. You are right that it became a marketing game. It was a hype and everyone started to call its product an indie game. The solution however is not more marketing. It will automatically solve it…
> Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits. If there's 5 indie games that fit that description, people can easily enjoy, & more importantly, remember them. What happens when 20, 30, 50 games fit that description? There's no way no good games fall through the cracks. The amount of games developed in a year increases while people's retention rem…
I think there is a general saturation problem. I won't have the time to play 20, 30 or even 50 games a year. I don't need more games but better ones (in general.. there are of course great games).