Setsune (GameDev)

@SetsuneDev

VR and GB Game Development!

She/Her
setsune.itch.io/

Working on Cuddle Kobold! for VR platforms. Posts may contain NSFW content.

Games on Itch.io

setsune.itch.io/

Bluesky

setsunedev.bsky.social/

Fediverse

mastodon.gamedev.place/@Setsune

Setsune (GameDev)@SetsuneDev6/15/2023, 4:58 PM

〽ax krieger's cool spot @maxkriegervg

〽ax krieger's cool spot @maxkriegervg6/15/2023, 3:44 PM

this headline's been making the rounds and i've noticed wrt people's responses to it... (state of the industry thoughts)

seeing a lot of "i want shorter games by less people made with less money and worse graphics and i'm NOT joking!" in response to this from the same people talking about how totk is going to revolutionize gaming forever and the cognitive dissonance here is real

shifting video game culture to actually foster a healthy market for smaller games is something that needs more than lip service. we need to create spaces and communities around it. we need curation.

video games, whether they realize it or not, are a lifestyle industry.

the seductive power of a giant three-ring-circus game dropping/sucking everyone in at the same time is too powerful for most people to resist, which isn't a moral indictment as much as it is a recognition that the industry is just giving people what they've proven they want, but know that air is limited and the oxygen is thinner and thinner as these AAAA experiences consolidate into multi-year commitments for both devs and players.

we need more than just a moral stance on smaller games. we need infrastructure - cultural, logistical, financial.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @maxkriegervg's post:

〽ax krieger's cool spot @maxkriegervg6/15/2023, 3:44 PM

anyway, stan aqualounge

Eric @MOKKA6/15/2023, 3:57 PM

I don't think it's only player habits and the game industry, but also the fact that games media is so SEO focused these days that it's highly unlikely that anything but the largest games get coverage.

Either way, I totally agree with your point, I just want to emphasize that the current state of the internet at large doesn't make changing this stuff any easier.

〽ax krieger's cool spot @maxkriegervg6/15/2023, 4:05 PM

oh yeah, 100% true; i was hesitant to mention anything abt the games journalism end of this because this year has demonstrated that any earnest desire to showcase smaller games amongst writers and editors falls on deaf ears as bloodbath layoffs have wracked just about every publication. they're doing their damnedest and the money ppl have concluded that they have 0 interest and just want AI-generated AAAA game guides instead

Eric @MOKKA6/15/2023, 4:15 PM

Oh sure! I don't want to blame Journalists here either (well, most of them anyway), because they have not a lot of sway in regards to what they can cover anyway.
I sometimes wish for folks in games media to take more risks in that regard, but I haven't managed to even get a job in over five years, so it's easy for me to say, since I don't have to consider potential consequences.

Things are fucked up on a structural level and they won't get fixed by just running another series of small games columns that eventually get canned, because it's easier to just write another SEO filled piece about whatever is currently the hot shit.

A Jeb With No Name @namelessWrench6/15/2023, 4:01 PM

Reminds me of "I miss turn based games", and when I offer up a list, "no, not like that"

v @v216/15/2023, 4:06 PM

i do like the way that the TOTK devs felt no shame about reusing much of BOTW, tho

philosophy major (derogatory (reclamative))@nullpat6/15/2023, 7:59 PM

I feel like nintendo actually addresses the frustration behind the meme about wanting "shorter games with worse graphics made by people who get paid more to work less" even though it kind of contradicts that specific phrasing of it

like TOTK built heavily on BOTW but still took 6 years to make and still costs $70 and probably won't get any major discounts for a long time, and the next big switch game won't come out for a while, so you can play it like you played games when you were a kid and didn't get many. whereas any other platform it'd be about two weeks before the next huge game came out and everyone started talking about that, and then in six months it would be on sale for $15.

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso24696/15/2023, 4:22 PM

I also think that a lot of good games that aren't horrifying mega investments also take that much time. You can run a much smaller team for 4-6 years on a lot less money and get experiences that couldn't be done in less time. Games are a slow medium to create. I don't think it's purely a market issue that players want products that reward their time investment in playing them. And I don't think it's unhealthy for games to cater to that want. I certainly don't think massive AAAA drops are good for the industry but I also don't think saying "games take 4-6 years" is indicative in itself of anything being wrong. There's a ton of healthy indie work happening at those time scales too. It might not be your section of indie dev. There's plenty of people that want faster experiences, and tons of reasons you don't want to or can't work at those timescales. In a lot of ways I am much happier to see games with long dev cycles instead of the AAA of 10 years ago where everyone was working on absurd <24 month dev cycles and putting out a bunch of samey bland modern military shooters.

Adrian @wtexvisionary6/15/2023, 5:24 PM

Ideally, there would be room for games with both timescales, but that's part of the issue here. I've noticed the bar for indies getting so high that it seems like the ones we are seeing are closer to AA. It doesn't help that it's almost always riskier for an indie to take 4–6 years on a game than a mega-studio working on a sequel to a mega-IP*.

That's what really concerns me here. I am happy for any studio able to give us $70 games that are worth every cent, but I don't want there to be only $70 games that are getting coverage.

*=there's a lot more discussion we should probably be having about how over-magnification on established IPs is contributing to this.

Adrian @wtexvisionary6/15/2023, 5:10 PM

Much agreed. I do believe such long and intensive cycles for gamedev will just make it more insular than it already is. And I think with the way things are going, it's only going to get harder for small games to be seen.

I am hoping that some of the rising stars like Wholesome Games, GLITCH, and Guerilla Collective can continue to reserve a space and not be tempted to up the goalpost like a lot of the indie space.

〽ax krieger's cool spot @maxkriegervg6/15/2023, 5:14 PM

wholesome games i totally trust to make the right decisions, GLITCH and Guerilla Collective are already getting big pub money so we'll see i guess

Schir @schir6/16/2023, 8:05 AM

I do want to see smaller games made by fewer people that take less time to make, and I'll look through the RPG Maker pile every so often and it does seem like there's a lot of interesting work there, but it's hard to find in the first place because there's not a whole lot of infrastructure for writing about it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem there. To build the audience to read about what's new in the RPG Maker scene, there needs to already be a lot of coverage of the RPG Maker scene, which won't get covered because there's not a large enough audience that knows where to find it.

But for the larger projects that there is writing infrastructure supporting the coverage of, yeah those absolutely take around 5 years to make now. It's been that way since the latter part of the PS3 generation and the last two or three console generations have been dead for the first few years while the megagames slowly grind their way through production.