lexyeevee

eevee

@lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
maxkriegervg
@maxkriegervg
maxkriegervg
@maxkriegervg

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.

sakiamu
@sakiamu

Some people are working on *building* stuff for this

Indiepocalypse exists as on attempt at infrastructure for giving Indies more visibility in the sea of games

Also various game devs on cohost like:

lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

something here about

  • how culture operates on recognition, how people want to talk about things that their peers will chime in on because otherwise there won't be any conversation and they're doing some awkward combination of free advertising slash shouting into the void (maybe this is just a worse way of saying "video games are a lifestyle industry")

  • incidentally, a very similar force is what led everyone to centralize on a few big "everyone" websites

  • this leaks out in places that everyone takes for granted but that sound ludicrous on paper, like "oh too bad that X game was released the same weekend as Y game, everyone's playing Y so now X will be forgotten even though it's pretty good". excuse me what? the game is still for sale a week later and you can play it then, right? but of course that's not how this works

  • the immense invisible pressure on me as 1 fuckin little fox seeking to eventually release her 1 magnum opus game and somehow being responsible for navigating this invisible wavefront which could make an order of magnitude difference in how well i am compensated for the years of effort it represents

  • totk doesn't make me think about how all games are going to be totk now. it makes me think nintendo have lowkey fucked themselves because what the hell are they going to do for the next zelda? where do you go from here? a very small group of human beings somewhere has to answer that question

  • i've been thinking recently about how downright magical pokémon gold/silver felt back in the day, and how very little has ever felt that same way. and i realized it's not just childhood wonder and nostalgia — red/blue were jank-ass technical marvels running on a ti-83, but they captured imagination in a very unique way, and then gold/silver doubled them. just doubled everything. monochrome to full color. almost twice as many critters. map is twice as big. day and night cycle. now they have genders sure why not. everything they could think to throw in, they threw in.

    and nothing is ever going to make that kind of leap ever again, because big game publishers will never put out something like red/blue ever again. the games with the big advertising bucks are now polished until they are a perfect featureless sphere. even scarlet/violet's transition to an open world is somewhat dampened by how they were dabbling with it in sword/shield and already released the entire arceus game based around the same idea. it's cool but it's not fucking amazing. very few things are fucking amazing now. and it's not even cool enough for a lot of people

  • i've been saying this on and off for like a decade but maybe it's just me: better graphics tend to make games worse, as games. every so often i try a quad-A game and i go "wow look at all the details in this room" and then i discover that they are just greebles. i can't inspect or pick up anything that doesn't have a glowing outline. the game immediately sucks all joy out of itself, immediately trains me to regard the lush world they built as though it were greyboxes covered in post-it notes. all the world design is static, soulless distractions. it soaks the experience in a unique kind of emptiness.

    (one of the things i loved about breath of the wild is that everything is relevant to you. i mean you can snag the fucking ambient insects right out of the air and make useful items out of them)

  • anyway i don't know what there is to do here. video games have become a social activity even if they're solo experiences, right? i mean my highest aspiration is for people to talk about my video game and how it exists. (thank you btw.) i guess it would be nice if people played rando indie games more and just talked about what they got out of them. you know, bond with your friends over their feelings about something, not just over having both played the same thing.

    i tried to start a "monday night itch" thing once, intending to pick a game off itch completely at random, buy it for at least $10, play it, leave a nice constructive comment, and talk about it in depth elsewhere. i did this 1 time (and got basically someone's first game!) before adhd took over and i don't know if more than one or two other people ever gave it a try. still think it's a good idea though

anyway i don't really know where all that stuff is going but it could be cool for someone to write a post about

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in reply to @maxkriegervg's post:

MOKKA
@MOKKA

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.

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maxkriegervg
@maxkriegervg

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

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MOKKA
@MOKKA

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.

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nullpat
@nullpat

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.

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Queso2469
@Queso2469

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.

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wtexvisionary
@wtexvisionary

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.

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wtexvisionary
@wtexvisionary

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.

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schir
@schir

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.

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in reply to @sakiamu's post:

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

secrets
@secrets

tbh when I think about it the two games I always come back to are some maniac's decades-long passion project that'll probably still be in development until they die, and while that's obviously not a sustainable model for most indies... maybe it should be?

I don't know how much can be said about indie gaming from looking at what the AAAs are doing. The latter are entirely oriented around a blockbuster-style hype cycle and new iterations with bigger numbers every year and mysteriously going bankrupt and firing everyone the instant there might be some revenue coming in and just nothing going on there is useful for a small-time creator trying to make a sustainable income off a fanbase that's unlikely to ever exceed the tens of thousands. Yes when there's a big hype campaign for the Latest Nintendo Thing that can sound like the only thing anyone's ever playing but... everyone actually developing those games sounds absolutely fucking miserable, and for every seasonal meme freakout about the Latest Nintendo Thing there's some old nerd forum out there still quietly playing the same horrible old nerd game with each other that they've been at since 1995. I think there's lots of room in the indie space to replicate what Pokemon (or Starsector or DF or Kerbal Space Program or No Man's Sky or so on) did; a compelling but mechanically simple core with room to elaborate on it more or less indefinitely in whatever direction the devs choose, released while it's still cooking and updated with new features regularly.

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