Another notch on the side of “Video gaming is in a bubble.”
We got
- a depressed economy where AAA companies are charging record high prices
- on systems nobody can afford because the price of processing is through the roof
- and an indie scene that’s about to nosedive into a sea of slop that will make it much harder to find the good stuff made by real people
Indie dying noooooo please it was the one hope I had for gamingI don’t think it will die, but I do think it will pose a challenge to less established devs that cant differentiate themselves as readily as studios with proven track records
It’s a strong position for a company to do what Nintendo did back in the day and basically guarantee the quality of all games they publish. Except in this case that just means guaranteeing real fucking humans made the game and its assets.
Nintendo is like Disney in that they’re always behind trend, which in bad times is a saving grace because they’re not doing the newest shittiest thing.
They are also like Disney is that they have their own shitty thing they always do, and it’s IP law bullshit
Speaking of Nintendo, they’ve really let the quality of their games go downhill in the last decade.
Gotta maximize that shareholder value.
The last decade? No way. Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Tears of the Kingdom, New Horizons, Mario Kart 8, DK Tropical Freeze, Splatoon 2 and 3, Smash Ultimate, Pokopia, Mario Wonder, Mario Maker 2, Metroid Dread, Pokemon Sun and Moon.
It’s just been several years since they’ve delivered on a flagship. They gotta get out fresh Mario or Zelda, and an Animal Crossing wouldnt hurt either (But y’all sleepin on Pokopia)
Oh I’ll play pokopia
when I can pirate it
Also Forgotten Land is the best Kirby game I’ve ever played.
I mean holy shit have you heard Two Planets Approach the Roche Limit? It’s a straight up masterpiece of prog rock opera… in a babby pink blob game… how…
Played that fight, but was too enthralles by how utteely dope that fight was to truly hear it. Playing it standalone now and it’s a banger. I dig the Battle of Blizzard Bridge, nice little Jazz Fusion piece perfect for a boss-rush: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIl1rmHwgoM , and Abandoned Beach, which is much more in the typical vein of a Kirby song with the the poppy, bubbly feel, but with some nice little Bossa Nova chord progressions https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UIPEZ0YPtWE Forgotten Land was solid for sure, and the best modern Kirby I’ve played, but Adventure will always hold a special place in my heart
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Also, the switch online store is a sea of mobile-shovelware ports.
Trying to explain to liberals how the mechanization of labour lowers the rate of profit and does not ‘raise value’. Especially when they think it’ll somehow raise the value of the labour inputs into non-LLM slopgames and yet wouldn’t also raise the price of these games somehow (also how anyone’s going to afford games when we have massive unemployment, but the questions keep spiralling from there).
note that the amount of games with 500+ reviews has barely changed in comparison
12k in 2022 was already too much tbh
Steam is even worse and valves official response has basically been boohooing about the fact that they’re the arbiters of the entire industry that they totally didn’t monopolized.
Meanwhile Epic is saying that having voluntary AI disclosure tags is anti-AI racism. It’s bleak.
Steam makes $100 for every slop game uploaded to it that gets zero sales lol.
Yes, but they’ve been getting pounded with malware that’s packaged as games. I think in the near future they’ll either increase the prices or pivot to some other method.
increase the prices
that’ll be expensive for an indie dev, but no matter how high you raise it, it’ll still be a bargain for your malware distributor.
AI has made it much faster to make a shitty landing page (now it only takes 2 hours when it used to take maybe 6)
This sucks, but also itch is rampant with bot traffic. You basically have to put up a “pay what you want” paywall to have any sort of realistic idea of your download activity. I made that mistake with my first media player release and was blown away by the thousands of obviously fake downloads I got within the first few hours.
Almost fell for the malware comments first time I used itch. Good that it exists I guess but in many respects it’s pretty shit.
[game.delete]Yeah that’s not surprising given the general state of things
