there are still plenty of people making decent (and sometimes amazing) games with almost no budget
We got more games and better games when there was less money being made in the industry.
Submitted 3 days ago by alonsohmtz@feddit.uk to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
dis_da_mor@anarchist.nexus 3 days ago
idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah I feel like this is the golden age of gaming. There are so many good games. A lot of them are just indie.
mr_manager@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sure studio/publisher consolidation is trashing AAA development but I’d argue that the opposite is true of the indie scene - more and better games than ever.
CptEnder@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah this. I hardly touch AAA titles anymore besides some Nintendo and Rockstar. But I’ve put in hundreds of hours in indie games, AA simulators, and some big studios’ smaller projects like Square Enix’s HD2D titles.
AlexLost@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Inbred CEO bros got involved. They’ve turned the entire market into vulture capitalism. It’s going to end poorly but they’ll get very rich along the way. We need to find a way to make money meaningless or we are all just going to keep going down this road of endlessly chasing more. More! MORE!!!
Serinus@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Here’s a free one for you.
Discard pretty much anything learned from or after World of Warcraft. That game warped the genre for decades, largely for the worse.
Go back to MUDs. Iterate from there.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
What modern MUDs are there I can play now?
Serinus@lemmy.world 3 days ago
People still play this one. mud.arctic.org
Though I didn’t mean it has to necessarily be text-based. More that that ancestral path was more interesting than the WoW one. This is what EverQuest was born from.
One of the bigger differences is that not everything was questing. You just explored, and part of your motivation to level up was the ability to explore places that were previously inaccessible.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 3 days ago
How many NES games are actually good?
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
NES games were actually quite expensive. Games were at their cheapest around PS1-X360. Which I would also argue were the best times for games.
draco_aeneus@mander.xyz 3 days ago
I think you forgot how many absolutely trash games were being made.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 3 days ago
Cartridge games yeah, I was alive and buying 60-80 dollar N64 games. I agree with your peak era opinion.
I think 360/PS3 middle of their lifespan was the beginning of the decline, but that was gradual.
angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com 2 days ago
As a 2001 born, most of the ones that get brought up as good games, are. Really I think the NES is when console games got advanced enough to “age well.”
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 days ago
It’s always interesting to hear from younger people playing games much older than themselves and what their impressions of them are without the cultural context of the time or sometimes even an understanding of hardware limitations. In my case that’s usually just hearing from youtubers, but your opinion seems the prevalent one from what I can tell, which is nice to hear.
Strider@lemmy.world 3 days ago
A lot, especially compared to the Atari games which caused the US vg crash. So the seal of quality and limit on amount of games allowed to be published actually meant something.
I get what you’re saying but this question is the wrong one.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 3 days ago
I don’t agree. Out of 1370 games maybe 80 are good.
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Compared to what? You don’t hear of nearly as many people trying to run PS1 roms…
derAbsender@piefed.social 2 days ago
Almost like the profit incentive is bullshit ..
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I wouldn’t say it’s quite as simple as that. It wasn’t always a linear downward trend. First couple of generations of video games were pretty terrible from a game development perspective. No disrespect to the developers or anything. Of course, they were amazing programs that took a lot of clever engineering to work, but still not very good games.
The really good games started coming out somewhere in the late '90s, I think? Then reached the peak in either 2000s or 2010s. From there, it’s been pretty much a downward trend. Most games in 2026 are so basic and shallow mechanically. AAA games are essentially semi-interactive tech demos.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
The really good games started coming out somewhere in the late '90s, I think?
Many people have 1998 as the year when the most “best games of all time” came out, though 2001 and 2003 were also unbelievably stacked with all-time bangers.
Now that said, it heavily depends on the platform. For PC gaming, the peak might have been the early 90s, when we were seeing stuff like Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity 2000, Doom, Civilization, etc.
BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 2 days ago
2003 was so stacked that even madden was good enough to win goty
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
Well lately I’ve been playing Hades 2 and it’s absolutely amazing. Just stay away from AAA unless the reviews are phenomenal. Focus on AA publishers like Devolver and Annapurna.
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Same with hollywood too.
When you’re trying to just make a predictable amount of money over a set amount of time, you have very precise formulas for what kind of product you can publish to get that number. You can publish a clone of Call of Duty every year and make a very predictable amount of profit on the license, but if you take the chance on an “experimental” game with unproven mechanics or other things that haven’t been market-tested, it has a much higher chance of deviating from that predictable profit curve, or flopping entirely.
When you have more than a hundred people working in a company, you absolutely have to secure regular profit levels to sustain the company, and this turns most creative works into slop-grinding and number-crunching.
With movies it’s the same, you can push out a hot video-game license movie with all the same standard jokes and action scenes and big-name stars or the same kind of action movie formula with the same explosions and same bad guys and so on, and you will make a predictable amount of money for your costs.
Even if the finished product is utterly mid and unoriginal, enough people can be pulled in with marketing and manufactured hype to guarantee a certain amount of return.
These studios also tend to gobble up rights for smaller licenses and either throws those licenses in the shredder despite being successful, or sits on them for decades to avoid having to compete with them, but also do not want to invest in those titles, because again, they simply have already done the math and know that such titles won’t hit those target profits the same way a new fifa or battlefield game will make.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
Almost all the games that make up the golden era of gaming came from (at the time) indie garage devs. They only became AAA studios because of either their success with the games they made or because they sold themselves to companies like EA.
EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Private equity it’s a virus that kills everything it touches
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Really? Who would have thought…
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 1 day ago
We made higher quality software too.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 days ago
sota. RS3 became somewhat slop but still stable, because they TH, and various in-game boosting. now that they are getting rid of most of it, people are pissed, cant have both ways, all because osrs fans complained.
pokemon is another one, is basically slop now ever since swsh, they know people will just spend 60-100 each game so they arnt going to do anything to improve it, game freak said they will do this, apparently they have a stranglehold on IP, so another company cant make the mainline pokemon games.
reddig33@lemmy.world 3 days ago
ET for the 2600 would like a word.
OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world 3 days ago
No because…nah coz ya see…
dam…
TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Better games is subjective but I can’t imagine less games are released annually now than before
jeffw@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There are fewer studio-made games, which I imagine is what OP meant. Crazy how simpler games were easier to produce, right?
axh@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Easier to produce is also relative…
<Old man mode>Back in my days, to simply draw a 3d cube on the screen, you had to calculate the position of each corner, calculate normal for each cube face to find which faces should be visible, and fill the area between corners with pixels for each visible face. You did all of this in a memory buffer, so at the end you would swap buffers to show the complete cube on the screen… With current tools, you could make a simple FPS game with a similar amount of effort. The problem is, nobody would care about that FPS game, because it’s also easier to recognise low effort garbage nowadays</Old… Nach, I’m still a grumpy old man>
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 days ago
EA saw no profit in CNC, so they trashed the whole franchise.