Submitted 6 months ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to gaming@lemmy.zip
Last week Steam and other major storefronts crashed, reports the Guardian, including Nintendo’s eShop, PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store.
When will they ever understand this mysterious formula?
Make a good fucking game, don’t pull any bullshit. Price it appropriately and people will buy it.
JUST MAKE A GOOD FUCKING PRODUCT AND STOP TRYING TO WEASEL FUCK US.
They won’t because the bullshit is profitable. Yeah, Baldur’s Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Hollow Knight: Silksong are all fantastic games and sold very well, but their numbers don’t even come close to something like Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite. The bullshit will continue as long as “gamers” keep foisting money at it.
It’s not that they don’t understand it. It’s that they literally can’t afford to adopt it.
Corporate ownership, combined with being publicly traded or privately investor funded, means that you have to increase shareholder value. Stock dividends aren’t enough. So, they use the only play that they know: scale the company up.
Problem is: you can scale art, but scaling software is very hard. Book publishers and record labels figured this out ages ago: keep adding more artists and more products. Meanwhile, AAA game studios keep stacking bodies onto existing IPs, making fewer yet bigger software products instead. Meanwhile, they keep getting bodied by small upstarts like Team Cherry, because they’re practically a garage band in comparison. If everyone just ran their game companies like Penguin Random House instead of Microsoft, they’d be in better shape.
So does every other art form, happens with books, paintings, sculptures, etc
what does “weasel fuck” mean?
The only reason you don’t have trillions of upvotes, is because the fediverse doesn’t have trillions of users.
In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less.
Where did this line come from? I see no mention of that quote in any of the links from the /. post, and it doesn't help that the quote doesn't cite a specific developer, either.
slashdot.org/…/hollow-knight-silksong-crashes-sto…
And ScreenRant article does cite some indie developers.
Capitalists hate the free market.
What are you talking about? Capitalists love the free market. It lets them do any underhanded tactic they want to crush competition and form monopolies. Capitalists have always been the ones pushing for a free market. The ‘free’ is free from regulations. That is not something good for consumers.
Definition wise thats not a “free market” its a market thats regulated in their favor. Its totally correct to say that capitalists hate free market capitalism, because they could never compete if they didnt constantly get tax payer money shoved up their asses and laws passed that prevents competitors from taking any of their marketshare.
Honestly, I would’ve paid $60 for this game and still would be happy with it at that price point. The game is incredibly good, if a bit punishing.
The fact that it was only $20 means that this game is an incredible value prospect, and will likely reach a much larger audience as a result.
TC was in a lucky position because their first game was also incredibly popular and sold well enough that budget was probably never a concern, and not all devs have that luxury, but indie games are supposed to be like this. They’re supposed to be made for the enjoyment of the artform with lower scopes and lower budgets. They aren’t supposed to compete with the AAA space.
No fucking way, on multiple fronts. I would’ve never bought it at $60+ even if everybody sucked its dick for the next six months.
Also with how “AAA” games have been over the last several years, I DO expect indie games to compete on a “fun” scale. Price is also ALWAYS related to playtime. I will never willingly buy a $20+ game that has only 3-4 hours of gameplay.
They DO compete in the “AAA” space, regardless of what you or I say… they just will have different criteria to meet than the multi-million dollar budget entries, because their cost of entry is different. They’re still in the same market, with the same cutomers, though. That means competition. It’s not indie devs’ fault that “AAA” studios CONSTANTLY drop the ball because they’re more interested in lining exec pockets than producing art.
What I notice in my experience (with a couple obvious exceptions) is that at any price, I typically get way more entertainment time per dollar with indie games. Hollow Knight is deep into pennies per hour long ago, Slay the Spire is close to free at this point, and even indie games I don’t finish end up being the cheapest form of entertainment I’ve got. That said it’s the same conversation, but an order of magnitude less “value” with big budget game releases.
Back in the arcade era, they made games arbitrarily difficult to make us spend more quarters. Hence why so many middle aged gamers are good at platformers and have a chip on their shoulders about easier modern games. So I don’t know if hours per dollar is really the conversation we should be having about games, because that’s not the value proposition for me.
The real value of games is as art. Such a variety of creative energies are poured into game development that it’s easy to end up with a whole that fails to cohere to some extent. When it does come together with not only cohesiveness but a clarity of artistic intent, that should be seen as an astonishing achievement.
The real reason I think indie games do better in terms of the flawed metric of playtime per dollar is because of the smaller teams and leaner budgeting. I think we agree here. They are not as pressured by externalities to create on a schedule, to appear valuable to shareholders by clumsily chasing buzzword trends in game design, by monetising with dark patterns and micro transactions. Too much money is toxic to artistic pursuits.
I guess my only quarrel with you is the idea that Silksong wouldn’t have been worth $60. I’m already ten hours in, just found the first main boss, and on your metric it’d already have beaten the best movie I’ve ever seen in theatres for entertainment time per dollar. It’s a flawed yardstick that still makes the game look good.
Dear devs: git gud.
In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less.
Maybe they would sell more copies if consumers didn’t feel like they are being overcharged. I understand it sucks to compete against a game like this, but it feels wrong to decide to up the price just to get more money out of the people who do want to support you.
Also getting upset at a company that doesn’t conform to the industry pricing also makes you look greedy.
Tbf, not all indie devs have the luxury of having a huge budget cushion from a previously highly successful game. People need to eat and have a roof over their heads, and $20 is pretty wild when you consider it took TC over 6 years to make the game. It’s just unrealistic to expect every game be $20 or less.
And it may be a wildly unpopular opinion, but I truly think Silksong isn’t worth more than $20-30. It’s not a massive game and the mechanics, story, and world aren’t that deep. It felt like a Hollow Knight expansion (which is what it was originally intended to be, per the devs themselves) vs a true sequel.
Atari released a similar game on the same day as Silksong (Adventure of Samsara) and it had only 12 concurrent players on Steam.
Oops 😬
I think that game is getting more coverahe because it did release on the same day as silk song. I didn’t even know Atari was working on this and now I’ve heard about it in several articles.
It very much was a ploy. No day one hype at all, but maybe there will be a larger market over time because of the coverage.
Git good
Good. Fuck those competitors. I haven’t played a Nintendo game in years that was worth $60. I think Silksong might actually be worth that amount
DaedalousIlios@pawb.social 6 months ago
Silk issue.