I take no pleasure in diving back into the discourse hole but I really feel like I need to discuss a conflation I'm seeing again and again, because it genuinely bothers me; a consistent repetition of words like 'gamers enjoying slop' or 'shovelware' or etc.
I think a lot of this discussion so far is an unconscious combination of a bunch of concepts. Let's separate it out as best we can.
I think a lot of these terms and discussions about "gamers, they have no taste, they just want to eat from the trough like pigs" come from a combination of sentiments around three elements:
- AI art, which, to my mind, is a topic I'd describe as anti-labour. A lot of times arguments about this, I think mistakenly, drift into its capacity to create large amounts of low quality content, but bluntly; no one views dwarf fortress as a threat and they shouldn't. I don't think the ability to create large amounts of low-quality content is new, and I think the fears people are experiencing here are more about being replaced than they're about gamers at all.
- Plagiarism, which is a problem, but a very complex topic for game development. We all, of course, know that most game mechanics aren't copyrightable, so in the games space this is mostly a moral argument, with a lot of messy nuance. And in some cases, playing with taking others' work is something we consider desirable - we can say 'plagiarism is bad' while simultaneously celebrating the freedom to fuck with mickey mouse as much as we want, for example, and reproduce his films for free. I think the truth of "what kinds of mimickry are offensive" varies from person to person based a lot more on their individual feelings than we'd like to admit.
- "Lazy/Low-effort" game development - This is is kind of the reason I'm here making this post. I am here to defend low-effort games. Bluntly; I think a huge part of the magic of the Flash era of game development was the ability for people to throw something weird, satirical, funny, silly, or jokey incredibly quickly and get it in front of a huge audience. Think about the classic "you have to burn the rope". It's a game that's over in literally 20 seconds, all for the sake of a silly little song. That is a form of "low-effort" game development. How about games that use free assets, like the famous Oryx's sprite pack, or the huge number of RPGs like Rad Codex's or Astlibra that use royalty-free online music? Is that a form of lazy game development? Or a common accusation for shovelware is just reskinning other games. But a huge percentage of indie darling Kairosoft's games are modified reskins of each other. Are we okay with that because the differences in theming and the small extent of modification is "enough"?
The honest truth is that I think Shovelware is a bogeyman. It's a term we apply when we feel like a game has crossed a line of derivativeness or lack of creative vision. And it's always existed, going back to when making physical copies of games was the only option. Many of those bad, bad games have become industry legends in their own right - do you really feel that classic kusoge like Cheetahmen are a threat to the industry because they're low-effort and creatively uninteresting? I don't especially. I similarly don't think it's a sign of some recent dire portent.
What I really think this is is a mixing of dislikes. People look at something that seems low-effort or shovelwarey and feel that it strays into plagiarism, or it has the itch of anti-labour practices, and it gets all wrapped up in a mental bow - This is the bogeyman of "bad games"; the low effort content hates creativity and fun, and it is coming for you!
But it's not. I think it's completely accurate to say there's a rising wave of anti-labour practices among leadership in games right now, and that's very legitimate to be worried about. But the idea that this means finally the Gamers have betrayed us and are going to go eat at the trough of anti-culture is simply not borne out by any current reality, even ones where a game you think is skeevy sells pretty well. Frankly, the reality of being an indie developer for me is understanding that my tastes will never match up with the mainstream, and that I may never understand why people flock to even such "high effort", non-shovelware entries like year after year of call of duty. I have mixed feelings about it, but I don't think it's a sign of the death of culture any more than the other things I've brought up in this overlong post. People just like all kinds of shit.
I'll continue to be out here advocating for weird unloved games every IGF - even the "low-effort" ones, if they've got something interesting about them. I think silly jokes and one-offs and strange bashed together sets of concepts that some person like is art in the same way that if I make a shitty sketch of mickey mouse wearing a master chief helmet it's still art, even if everyone thinks it's in bad taste - and I want it to have a place in this industry. I need it to have a place in this overly expensive, gatekeepy-ass industry. It's so hard to make games. Let's at least not damn vast swathes of them accidentally in searching for words to condemn the dislikes they're adjacent to.