Games as a service kind of ruined the indie game space Honestly. Not even in the way of like "predatory business practices spreading" . Indies are largely still free of those. But the expectations of people playing games have moved in a really weird direction, I think.
Once an indie gets to a certain level of notoriety, I see a lot of people looking at it when it's no longer receiving updates and declare it as "abandoned". "The devs took the bag and ran", "They stopped caring about this project", and so on. And I dunno, it hurts me a little bit to see that; players expect a game to have a neverending stream of new content.
Minecraft isn't exactly an indie but I think it's an excellent example of a game that should be finished by now but is still receiving updates. A ton of them are just single-feature additions that really don't do a whole lot other than giving Microsoft excuses to promote Minecraft more. More power to the devs, tbh, I love it for them, but I also feel like you could just leave it as is and let the modding community have their way with it
Adding this to the main post also:
Finishing a painting doesn't mean the painting is dead. Completing production of a movie doesn't mean the movie is dead. Why are games pronounced dead the moment we stop adding more content to them? I can still enjoy a painting that the artist hasn't touched with a paintbrush since the 14th century. I can still play a videogame whose devs haven't worked on it since 1995.
This is more of a rant than anything else sorry I have worms in my brain maybe
THIS POST IS NOT DEAD see I'm making an update with more new content. Treat this as a free DLC.
Just for the record I don't mind when devs continue working on a successful project when they want. More power to them! Delta V is way past its 1.0 release and I'm still making ship concepts for it happily. I just wish that it wasn't the expectation that a game has to keep receiving updates way past its full release. It's weird. Not everything has to be Fortnite, it's fine for a game to be done. Or to be a one-time experience. Or be 5 minutes long! Games deserve the luxury of being diverse in length and purpose, in their approach to things. Like any other art form, they deserve appreciation no matter whether they're under active production
Also to slap on some unrelated DLC content:
I love how modern game engines enabled artists to make games easier. Games of all types and sizes and levels of polish. I love how it's fine to have spaghetti code sometimes. In the grand scheme of things, if it works it works. Don't stress out too much. Make games. You don't always have to make them the right way if the wrong way gets the job done in a fraction of the time it would take to learn the right way. But do learn the right way later, it's gonna make the next project better.
