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As a gamer, I can say we are a fickle bunch. We’re no different that pop-song listeners at this point. We love it when it’s a hit, and we’ll play it out until w

As a gamer, I can say we are a fickle bunch. We’re no different that pop-song listeners at this point. We love it when it’s a hit, and we’ll play it out until we can’t stand it anymore and never look back. If you make an indie game or a big budget one, you are vulnerable to this fickle crowd. You are better off hyping the living hell out of a game and cashing in the initial few months than you are to build a modest game with a community that will stick around. It was never really like this, I’m not sure what happened. I really don’t know where it all went wrong. It’s a hits driven industry at this point.

oneepic 5y ago
I'm going to go ahead and guess platforms like social media/twitch/etc encourage us to keep looking at the next thing instead of looking at what we have. Meaning the previews look great but they dont translate into lasting experiences.
gjhh244 5y ago
Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.
- kiawe_fire 5y ago
  Funny enough, those niche strategy games are, IMO, a great example of middle ground that I think is missing in the industry. We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people. What about something in between? Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look. And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things. This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Games has been a hit driven industry really since it started. Having a longer tail is really a very recent trend. That’s why everyone wants an evergreen GaaS setup. Get a steady annual income and you can float about burning money. You might not even need another hit for decades.
michaelt 5y ago
I'm a non-gamer, but my impression is the opposite. We programmers expect all our tools and libraries to be not only free, but open source too, and then will bitch if they have bugs. Gamers, though? AAA games release with loads of bugs, clunky DRM/anti-cheat rootkits, often have cheat problems anyway, hundred-gigabyte downloads, online services going down on christmas day, online voice chat full of race hate? They'll pre-order before a single review has come out, at a cost of $70. These are some of the least fussy customers in the world.
- oneepic 5y ago
  It really depends on where these players live. A significant number of them read Reddit and Steam reviews, watch YouTube gaming channels, hate Activision/EA/Blizzard/etc big companies and swear against buying their games... but there's tons of buyers outside of the Internet who don't listen to all that. Lots of people just buy games from companies they know. Moreover, lots of these people are parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles who know nothing except the company name, and know the names of stuff their kids are talking about... and they go buy those games for Christmas. The latter buyers are often disconnected from the real players of those games.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  We’re a little different in software because we are apart of the ecosystem. We get to ‘add value’ to open source for our employers. All the more reason to give back for sure. But imagine the gaming industry, where millions of consumers have no ability to establish equity (not even in the form of a career). You won’t be able to add anything back to Call of Duty, other than you playing it (as if it were Facebook, and you were just a profile). That’s all they have, and they pay for it. We on the other hand, can use the open source thing, or roll our own, or pick another thing that’s freer. That’s why we don’t pay 70 bucks.
  - kiawe_fire 5y ago
    Some of this exists in open source projects, where you'll see non-coders or novice coders demand that their most wanted bug be fixed, and they'll storm around the Github issues harassing people for not prioritizing their needs over the project as a whole. But in general, yes, there is an heir of entitlement in the gaming space right now. The most harmful, IMO, is the knee-jerk visual shaming of every game. We can criticize the devs and publishers for focusing on graphics over fun, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem. When every game trailer or demo is immediately torn apart for "not looking amazing enough", and every non-critical visual bug of a player model's hair clipping into her face is turned into a meme, it shouldn't be a surprise that the focus is on screenshot worthy visuals first, and gameplay can be "fixed later". It is a hits driven industry, but the stakes for making that hit are high, and often times the things you need to do to get buzz before release is mutually exclusive with the things it takes to keep the player base after release. There's also the reactive demands to "just give me this game mode" or "just nerf this weapon" without realizing how much work goes into implementing things in a balanced and fun way. If you've never sat down with a game idea and coded a demo with stick figures before, then you've probably never had that moment where you realize the idea you had in your head just doesn't work when implemented. Or, conversely, how you can then tweak a couple variables and make it unexpectedly fun in ways you never would have thought of otherwise. That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.

oneepic 5y ago

I'm going to go ahead and guess platforms like social media/twitch/etc encourage us to keep looking at the next thing instead of looking at what we have. Meaning the previews look great but they dont translate into lasting experiences.

gjhh244 5y ago

Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.

kiawe_fire 5y ago
Funny enough, those niche strategy games are, IMO, a great example of middle ground that I think is missing in the industry. We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people. What about something in between? Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look. And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things. This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Games has been a hit driven industry really since it started. Having a longer tail is really a very recent trend. That’s why everyone wants an evergreen GaaS setup. Get a steady annual income and you can float about burning money. You might not even need another hit for decades.

michaelt 5y ago

I'm a non-gamer, but my impression is the opposite. We programmers expect all our tools and libraries to be not only free, but open source too, and then will bitch if they have bugs. Gamers, though? AAA games release with loads of bugs, clunky DRM/anti-cheat rootkits, often have cheat problems anyway, hundred-gigabyte downloads, online services going down on christmas day, online voice chat full of race hate? They'll pre-order before a single review has come out, at a cost of $70. These are some of the least fussy customers in the world.

oneepic 5y ago
It really depends on where these players live. A significant number of them read Reddit and Steam reviews, watch YouTube gaming channels, hate Activision/EA/Blizzard/etc big companies and swear against buying their games... but there's tons of buyers outside of the Internet who don't listen to all that. Lots of people just buy games from companies they know. Moreover, lots of these people are parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles who know nothing except the company name, and know the names of stuff their kids are talking about... and they go buy those games for Christmas. The latter buyers are often disconnected from the real players of those games.
crate_barre 5y ago
We’re a little different in software because we are apart of the ecosystem. We get to ‘add value’ to open source for our employers. All the more reason to give back for sure. But imagine the gaming industry, where millions of consumers have no ability to establish equity (not even in the form of a career). You won’t be able to add anything back to Call of Duty, other than you playing it (as if it were Facebook, and you were just a profile). That’s all they have, and they pay for it. We on the other hand, can use the open source thing, or roll our own, or pick another thing that’s freer. That’s why we don’t pay 70 bucks.
- kiawe_fire 5y ago
  Some of this exists in open source projects, where you'll see non-coders or novice coders demand that their most wanted bug be fixed, and they'll storm around the Github issues harassing people for not prioritizing their needs over the project as a whole. But in general, yes, there is an heir of entitlement in the gaming space right now. The most harmful, IMO, is the knee-jerk visual shaming of every game. We can criticize the devs and publishers for focusing on graphics over fun, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem. When every game trailer or demo is immediately torn apart for "not looking amazing enough", and every non-critical visual bug of a player model's hair clipping into her face is turned into a meme, it shouldn't be a surprise that the focus is on screenshot worthy visuals first, and gameplay can be "fixed later". It is a hits driven industry, but the stakes for making that hit are high, and often times the things you need to do to get buzz before release is mutually exclusive with the things it takes to keep the player base after release. There's also the reactive demands to "just give me this game mode" or "just nerf this weapon" without realizing how much work goes into implementing things in a balanced and fun way. If you've never sat down with a game idea and coded a demo with stick figures before, then you've probably never had that moment where you realize the idea you had in your head just doesn't work when implemented. Or, conversely, how you can then tweak a couple variables and make it unexpectedly fun in ways you never would have thought of otherwise. That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.