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Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Ri

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.

logicOnly 6y ago
This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.
- apatters 6y ago
  Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too. It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.
- gota 6y ago
  Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good. Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you. I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore. What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Change = risk If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.
  - shuntress 6y ago
    To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's that have been milked.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one. When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal. Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
- trevyn 6y ago
  The “Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets bought” trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90’s.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why? oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that. or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    > why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.
- Osiris 6y ago
  The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game. Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release. Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game. Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time. I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.
  - shagie 6y ago
    The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up). This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment. It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."
    - mrguyorama 6y ago
      No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales. This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.
vorpalhex 6y ago
Open source gaming is an option too - Cataclysm DDA as a thriving example, Nethack, so on.
pc86 6y ago
Stellaris might be one of my favorite games in recent memory (granted, I don't play that much).
epicide 6y ago
You make a good point to bring up indie development (WoW excluded), but I think looking at the storefronts is also important. For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals, privacy concerns, and plenty more. That's not to say that every game on a store has these issues. However, I think the lesson from mobile app stores is: don't discount the impact that a storefront can have on what's allowed to succeed. Stores can exert their control with more than just removals. Indies can't escape this. Even if they wanted to sell their game independently, not being on one of the big stores hurts visibility. Not all of them get the luxury to be able to expect their users to follow them to their own site/store/etc. Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers. Again, if the big conglomerates get what they want, this won't always be the case.
- Angostura 6y ago
  > Right now, Steam is still the leader I wonder how they compare to Apple.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross profit.
    - tubularhells 6y ago
      From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple will surely blame developers for performance problems with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store. It eats into profits for Indies.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market share. But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers. Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while; their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.
- kleiba 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However, they did develop Doom 2016...
  - kingtobbe 6y ago
    Wolfenstein was made by Machinegames. Though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two studios during production.
  - andoriyu 6y ago
    2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP? New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them. As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3). side note: I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation) John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.
metalliqaz 6y ago
I've been playing a lot of great retro-inspired shooters from the new 3D Realms and New Blood. Plenty of great indie stuff on PC.
tootie 6y ago
My kids love Nintendo and Minecraft, but they also love Untitled Goose Game, Factorio and Frog Detective. Indie games are probably more available now than ever.
intended 6y ago
The absence of civ6 is lamentable, but then we do only have so much time to find to pursue hobbies like work and careers.
djsumdog 6y ago
There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog. I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.
- lapetitejort 6y ago
  Focus Home Interactive publishes some great AA games. I'm very glad publishers like them continue to exist.
- msikora 6y ago
  I'm loving Annapurna Interactive, games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Outer Wilds have been amazing. 'What Remains of Edith Finch' feels like a (shorter) AAA title, no compromise in production values whatsoever.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Devolver is astounding, they really keep snapping up indie projects that do exceptionally well - don't forget Reigns in that list it's definitely on the lighter end but it's very well put together.
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Same, Devolver is phenomenal. Enter the Gungeon and Fall Guys are both smash hits too
wwright 6y ago
WoW Classic is Activision, isn't it?
- xevrem 6y ago
  correct, Activision-Blizzard
randito 6y ago
Don't forget Factorio -- aka if Software Development were a computer game with tech debt, copy/paste and literal bugs.
- ubercode5 6y ago
  And satisfactory, that's my newest obsession.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  And stardew valley
racl101 6y ago
> Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. Brilliantly put.
ManBlanket 6y ago
There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people. There will always be more games released every year by middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games. As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal sized heads.
balls187 6y ago
Deadcells ?
aplummer 6y ago
We seem to have near identical taste so can I add: - they are billions - Kerbal space program - faster than light To your awesome indie games list
- szundi 6y ago
  Kerbal is so awesome, it brought me back some authentic gaming experience
LMYahooTFY 6y ago
I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic: It's a garbage money grab. The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game. There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero development costs.
- hn_acc_2 6y ago
  That's not fair... 1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in the form of an original database backup (from an old employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in the current WOW engine. 2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard has not made major changes since the majority of the player base requested as such...
  - LMYahooTFY 6y ago
    Fair points, but do you have a source? I'm skeptical that previous versions of the game were discarded. In terms of audience demographics, I've experienced nostalgia, but frankly I think the president had a point when he made his infamous comment. But I haven't seen any data to support any claims, beyond the existence of private servers.
- teawrecks 6y ago
  If you think wow classic had "practically zero development cost", you don't know what you're talking about.
  - LMYahooTFY 6y ago
    Care to elaborate? How many lines of code do you think were written for the release of WoW classic compared to the original release?
harimau777 6y ago
Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.
- aqme28 6y ago
  Maybe not "indie," but you don't have to look to the big 4 publishers for the best FPS and open-world action games these days. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 came out of CDProject Red. My favorite FPS of the last few years (Hunt: Showdown) came out of Crytek.
  - MikusR 6y ago
    Cdproject costs some 4 billion more than Microsoft paid for Zenimax.
- cheschire 6y ago
  It doesn't take many to saturate those markets though. If you're looking for a good indie shooter, look at Diabotical[0]. It's more Quake than Quake Champions was, or even Rocket Arena for that matter. There's plenty of pro-level gameplay on Zoot's stream[1] as well. 0: https://www.diabotical.com/ https://www.diabotical.com/ 1: https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 6y ago
  Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord is a much more ambitious and polished game.
  - Bayart 6y ago
    TaleWorlds were pretty lucky to stumble upon a community that could keep their game running for over a decade.
shakezula 6y ago
Stellaris wins hands down for me in most time played. Honestly such a good game.
iaw 6y ago
Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Papers Please, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spelunky 2 All fantastic games better than most major studio titles.
ionwake 6y ago
Is it possible to play dwarf fortress on mobile yet ?
- cyberpunk 6y ago
  Yes, see dfremote — iOS only though I think but works nicely with an iPad Pro and the pencil (provided you have a machine capable of running docker somewhere)
BadassFractal 6y ago
Excellent taste in colony survival titles!
krzyk 6y ago
Give Factorio a try
13415 6y ago
Well, not everybody has the same tastes. I mostly don't like the aesthetics of indie games, especially not the "indie feel" or any kind of pixelated or animation-style graphics. I will not play anything that reeks of "design". Instead, I prefer realistic-looking graphics, with moving trees and clouds. I've more often than not spent too much money on new AAA just to look at the graphics and barely play. Unfortunately, games with AAA-graphics with a good story and great original gameplay (no sequels!) seem to get rarer, and the disappearance of independent top-notch game studios could be a reason for that.
- Galaxity 6y ago
  Realistic graphics are no more AAA than well done "indie feel" graphics. Realistic-looking games can just as much "reek of design" as you put it. Many of those indie games have AAA-graphics with good story and original gameplay.
throwaway13337 6y ago
This is absolutely right. The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it. The games you listed were some of the breakout successes of indie games but there are a ton of fun, interesting indie games out there that are dying from lack of revenue. There seems to be an overall issue now where the quality of the good produced and the benefit to the consumer is divorced from the value extracted by the producer. For instance, you can make a mobile game company that aggressively monetizes re-hashed bubble-poppers or match three games. With that, you focus not on innovation of pleasing the customer but on making the most money per customer so that you can feed it back into your marketing. The most exploitative game wins. This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play. With most consumer markets, we find similar stories of customer exploitation being a better play than simply making a great product. This is not as much the case in B2B. How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well. Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.
- johnnyanmac 6y ago
  How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well. consumer choice is working as intended. They are fine playing "free" games supported by the 1%, and many nowadays won't pay >5-10 dollars for a game unless it's from a very established IP. Even without the mobile market, The story isn't much different. You either throw yourself out there in a sea of indie games, or you find a publisher to pitch and give your IP rights to in exchange for stability. The latter is just harder to do nowadays
  - komali2 6y ago
    If we're willing to regulate gambling (which we are, because we do regulate it), then I don't think we can simply wave our hands at mobile games and say "bah, consumer choice. They play the games, don't they?"
    - dplavery92 6y ago
      For what it's worth, the "Free to Play" sector that dominates a lot of market share isn't just the gambling-lite, pay-to-win mobile sector anymore. We're talking about major titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, DOTA2, Rocket League, Hearthstone, and Valorant, which have millions of concurrent players, dominate streaming services, and often have high-production e-sports events. Even the latest title in the Call of Duty franchise offers a Free to Play Battleground mode.
Der_Einzige 6y ago
For anyone into games like this, I also highly recommend Cataclysm: DDA
three_seagrass 6y ago
Not to mention the biggest gaming phenomenon at the moment is Among Us, which was made by one developer and one artist.
dragontamer 6y ago
River City Girls (WayForward), Factorio, Two Point Hospital, FTL. Plenty of games out there, no reason to keep buying the same 3d-action RPG formula from the AAA-studios unless that's a thing you like.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
Europa Universalis 4 is way better than Stellaris, friend.
- munk-a 6y ago
  It's interesting - they're very different. The historical setting and investment into events to try and keep things on a historical path add a lot to the game IMO by allowing a mostly balanced but asymmetrical game - France can usually ROFLstomp everyone but an overly aggressive France can easily be ROFLstomped themselves. That said, I think EU4 still falls on its face in the late game with mechanics like Absolutism absolutely pulling the breaks off the train and making Ulm WCs possible - in fact EU4 is sorta confusing for that reason, there are essentially two (maybe three if you want to count the reformation+counter reformation) games there and a portion of that playthrough may be more or less appealing to individual players. Stellaris definitely has some distinct phases but without trying to railroad players the mechanics flow from one phase to the next in a much smoother manner.
alasdair_ 6y ago
Isn't WoW Classic published by ActivisionBlizzard?
failuser 6y ago
I wonder what Lucas Pope is up to. There have been no press since Return of the Obra Dinn.
jugg1es 6y ago
You should try Factorio!
bhewes 6y ago
Ha, in Demolition Man every restaurant became a Pizza Hut after the corporate wars.
branko_d 6y ago
> My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. I had a similar experience with Cosmoteer. And the darn thing is not even released yet! :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

logicOnly 6y ago

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.

apatters 6y ago
Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too. It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.
gota 6y ago
Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good. Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one
gabereiser 6y ago
Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you. I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore. What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Change = risk If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.
- shuntress 6y ago
  To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's that have been milked.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one. When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal. Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
trevyn 6y ago
The “Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets bought” trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90’s.
leetcrew 6y ago
if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why? oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that. or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  > why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.
Osiris 6y ago
The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game. Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release. Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game. Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time. I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.
- shagie 6y ago
  The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up). This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment. It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales. This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.

vorpalhex 6y ago

Open source gaming is an option too - Cataclysm DDA as a thriving example, Nethack, so on.

pc86 6y ago

Stellaris might be one of my favorite games in recent memory (granted, I don't play that much).

epicide 6y ago

You make a good point to bring up indie development (WoW excluded), but I think looking at the storefronts is also important. For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals, privacy concerns, and plenty more. That's not to say that every game on a store has these issues. However, I think the lesson from mobile app stores is: don't discount the impact that a storefront can have on what's allowed to succeed. Stores can exert their control with more than just removals. Indies can't escape this. Even if they wanted to sell their game independently, not being on one of the big stores hurts visibility. Not all of them get the luxury to be able to expect their users to follow them to their own site/store/etc. Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers. Again, if the big conglomerates get what they want, this won't always be the case.

Angostura 6y ago
> Right now, Steam is still the leader I wonder how they compare to Apple.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ineedasername 6y ago
  Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross profit.
  - tubularhells 6y ago
    From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple will surely blame developers for performance problems with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store. It eats into profits for Indies.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market share. But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers. Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while; their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.

kleiba 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However, they did develop Doom 2016...
- kingtobbe 6y ago
  Wolfenstein was made by Machinegames. Though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two studios during production.
- andoriyu 6y ago
  2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP? New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them. As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3). side note: I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation) John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.

metalliqaz 6y ago

I've been playing a lot of great retro-inspired shooters from the new 3D Realms and New Blood. Plenty of great indie stuff on PC.

tootie 6y ago

My kids love Nintendo and Minecraft, but they also love Untitled Goose Game, Factorio and Frog Detective. Indie games are probably more available now than ever.

intended 6y ago

The absence of civ6 is lamentable, but then we do only have so much time to find to pursue hobbies like work and careers.

djsumdog 6y ago

There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog. I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.

lapetitejort 6y ago
Focus Home Interactive publishes some great AA games. I'm very glad publishers like them continue to exist.
msikora 6y ago
I'm loving Annapurna Interactive, games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Outer Wilds have been amazing. 'What Remains of Edith Finch' feels like a (shorter) AAA title, no compromise in production values whatsoever.
munk-a 6y ago
Devolver is astounding, they really keep snapping up indie projects that do exceptionally well - don't forget Reigns in that list it's definitely on the lighter end but it's very well put together.
jyrkesh 6y ago
Same, Devolver is phenomenal. Enter the Gungeon and Fall Guys are both smash hits too

wwright 6y ago

WoW Classic is Activision, isn't it?

xevrem 6y ago
correct, Activision-Blizzard

randito 6y ago

Don't forget Factorio -- aka if Software Development were a computer game with tech debt, copy/paste and literal bugs.

ubercode5 6y ago
And satisfactory, that's my newest obsession.
fendy3002 6y ago
And stardew valley

racl101 6y ago

> Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. Brilliantly put.

ManBlanket 6y ago

There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people. There will always be more games released every year by middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games. As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal sized heads.

balls187 6y ago

Deadcells ?

aplummer 6y ago

We seem to have near identical taste so can I add: - they are billions - Kerbal space program - faster than light To your awesome indie games list

szundi 6y ago
Kerbal is so awesome, it brought me back some authentic gaming experience

LMYahooTFY 6y ago

I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic: It's a garbage money grab. The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game. There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero development costs.

hn_acc_2 6y ago
That's not fair... 1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in the form of an original database backup (from an old employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in the current WOW engine. 2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard has not made major changes since the majority of the player base requested as such...
- LMYahooTFY 6y ago
  Fair points, but do you have a source? I'm skeptical that previous versions of the game were discarded. In terms of audience demographics, I've experienced nostalgia, but frankly I think the president had a point when he made his infamous comment. But I haven't seen any data to support any claims, beyond the existence of private servers.
teawrecks 6y ago
If you think wow classic had "practically zero development cost", you don't know what you're talking about.
- LMYahooTFY 6y ago
  Care to elaborate? How many lines of code do you think were written for the release of WoW classic compared to the original release?

harimau777 6y ago

Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.

aqme28 6y ago
Maybe not "indie," but you don't have to look to the big 4 publishers for the best FPS and open-world action games these days. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 came out of CDProject Red. My favorite FPS of the last few years (Hunt: Showdown) came out of Crytek.
- MikusR 6y ago
  Cdproject costs some 4 billion more than Microsoft paid for Zenimax.
cheschire 6y ago
It doesn't take many to saturate those markets though. If you're looking for a good indie shooter, look at Diabotical[0]. It's more Quake than Quake Champions was, or even Rocket Arena for that matter. There's plenty of pro-level gameplay on Zoot's stream[1] as well. 0: https://www.diabotical.com/ https://www.diabotical.com/ 1: https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot
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int_19h 6y ago
Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord is a much more ambitious and polished game.
- Bayart 6y ago
  TaleWorlds were pretty lucky to stumble upon a community that could keep their game running for over a decade.

shakezula 6y ago

Stellaris wins hands down for me in most time played. Honestly such a good game.

iaw 6y ago

Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Papers Please, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spelunky 2 All fantastic games better than most major studio titles.

ionwake 6y ago

Is it possible to play dwarf fortress on mobile yet ?

cyberpunk 6y ago
Yes, see dfremote — iOS only though I think but works nicely with an iPad Pro and the pencil (provided you have a machine capable of running docker somewhere)

BadassFractal 6y ago

Excellent taste in colony survival titles!

krzyk 6y ago

Give Factorio a try

13415 6y ago

Well, not everybody has the same tastes. I mostly don't like the aesthetics of indie games, especially not the "indie feel" or any kind of pixelated or animation-style graphics. I will not play anything that reeks of "design". Instead, I prefer realistic-looking graphics, with moving trees and clouds. I've more often than not spent too much money on new AAA just to look at the graphics and barely play. Unfortunately, games with AAA-graphics with a good story and great original gameplay (no sequels!) seem to get rarer, and the disappearance of independent top-notch game studios could be a reason for that.

Galaxity 6y ago
Realistic graphics are no more AAA than well done "indie feel" graphics. Realistic-looking games can just as much "reek of design" as you put it. Many of those indie games have AAA-graphics with good story and original gameplay.

throwaway13337 6y ago

This is absolutely right. The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it. The games you listed were some of the breakout successes of indie games but there are a ton of fun, interesting indie games out there that are dying from lack of revenue. There seems to be an overall issue now where the quality of the good produced and the benefit to the consumer is divorced from the value extracted by the producer. For instance, you can make a mobile game company that aggressively monetizes re-hashed bubble-poppers or match three games. With that, you focus not on innovation of pleasing the customer but on making the most money per customer so that you can feed it back into your marketing. The most exploitative game wins. This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play. With most consumer markets, we find similar stories of customer exploitation being a better play than simply making a great product. This is not as much the case in B2B. How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well. Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.

johnnyanmac 6y ago
How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well. consumer choice is working as intended. They are fine playing "free" games supported by the 1%, and many nowadays won't pay >5-10 dollars for a game unless it's from a very established IP. Even without the mobile market, The story isn't much different. You either throw yourself out there in a sea of indie games, or you find a publisher to pitch and give your IP rights to in exchange for stability. The latter is just harder to do nowadays
- komali2 6y ago
  If we're willing to regulate gambling (which we are, because we do regulate it), then I don't think we can simply wave our hands at mobile games and say "bah, consumer choice. They play the games, don't they?"
  - dplavery92 6y ago
    For what it's worth, the "Free to Play" sector that dominates a lot of market share isn't just the gambling-lite, pay-to-win mobile sector anymore. We're talking about major titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, DOTA2, Rocket League, Hearthstone, and Valorant, which have millions of concurrent players, dominate streaming services, and often have high-production e-sports events. Even the latest title in the Call of Duty franchise offers a Free to Play Battleground mode.

Der_Einzige 6y ago

For anyone into games like this, I also highly recommend Cataclysm: DDA

three_seagrass 6y ago

Not to mention the biggest gaming phenomenon at the moment is Among Us, which was made by one developer and one artist.

dragontamer 6y ago

River City Girls (WayForward), Factorio, Two Point Hospital, FTL. Plenty of games out there, no reason to keep buying the same 3d-action RPG formula from the AAA-studios unless that's a thing you like.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

Europa Universalis 4 is way better than Stellaris, friend.

munk-a 6y ago
It's interesting - they're very different. The historical setting and investment into events to try and keep things on a historical path add a lot to the game IMO by allowing a mostly balanced but asymmetrical game - France can usually ROFLstomp everyone but an overly aggressive France can easily be ROFLstomped themselves. That said, I think EU4 still falls on its face in the late game with mechanics like Absolutism absolutely pulling the breaks off the train and making Ulm WCs possible - in fact EU4 is sorta confusing for that reason, there are essentially two (maybe three if you want to count the reformation+counter reformation) games there and a portion of that playthrough may be more or less appealing to individual players. Stellaris definitely has some distinct phases but without trying to railroad players the mechanics flow from one phase to the next in a much smoother manner.

alasdair_ 6y ago

Isn't WoW Classic published by ActivisionBlizzard?

failuser 6y ago

I wonder what Lucas Pope is up to. There have been no press since Return of the Obra Dinn.

jugg1es 6y ago

You should try Factorio!

bhewes 6y ago

Ha, in Demolition Man every restaurant became a Pizza Hut after the corporate wars.

branko_d 6y ago

> My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. I had a similar experience with Cosmoteer. And the darn thing is not even released yet! :)

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