Schedule 1, Peak, and REPO lead a big year for small games
Indy and small budget games are where all the innovation in game mechanics is occuring. The AA/AAA industry has become a conveyor belt of ever more expensive graphics on the “omni game” mechanics.
Like, I appreciate the effort that goes into big AAA releases. I really do. I get wrapped up in the stories a lot easier when the game is nice to look at and the voice actors are really good.
But if a game isn’t fun, it isn’t fun. A lot of indie games are fun first, and that makes all the difference in the world.
Large game studios have different inherent strengths than smaller game studios, unfortuntately I think much of the gaming world has forgotten this in the excitement about the collapse of competency in and enshittification of traditional video game companies “clearing the way” for indie game companies.
I love indie games but some types of games can only be made by large predictable sort of boring game companies, I am mostly uninterested in those games but even I can recognize that they fulfill an essential role in making big production approachable, eye-catching experiences that play like interactive movies with all the production muscle that entails. Also sports games that evolve to remain relevant to the sports they represent are another big example of games best made by large boring game companies, which isn’t to say that indie sports games aren’t cool too that isn’t the point.
An indie game company can’t make Red Dead Redemption 2, they can make a narrower more focused game like Read Dead 2, but the scope of a game like that requires a huge company of artists working in parallel rather than in individual competition with one another.
A perfect example is comparing recent Zelda games to similar indie games like TUNIC, Gedonia 1 and 2, Anodyne 1 and 2 or Oceanhorn 1 and 2.
All of these games have a unique style and individuality that only comes from smaller indie studios, but none of them can compare to the breadth, muscle and expansiveness of a Nintendo open world game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/553420/TUNIC/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2566340/Gedonia_2/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/234900/Anodyne/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/877810/Anodyne_2_Return_to_Dust/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/339200/Oceanhorn_Monster_of_Uncharted_Seas/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1622710/Oceanhorn_2_Knights_of_the_Lost_Realm
Valheim, factorio, timberborn gave much more hours of fun than some expensive games like GTA 5.
Timberborn is a lot of fun, you can build some crazy worlds when you reach the end game.
Timberborn is a definite favorite of mine. Whiskerwood looks very similar. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I’m thinking I may like it more than Timberborn in the long-run due to having more interesting end-game goals to work toward.
I played whiskerwood for the first time recently. Also thought it would be similar to timberborn but it is very different. You have manage the whiskers individually to give them the right job if you want them to be efficient. I like that you can build underground and that in later game you’ll be able to use belts so I’m looking forward to discovering that system, also the steam power stuff.
Good to know. I’ve checked out some Let’s Plays of it, and the differences still look fun. I guess I better get on it.
Their current full price is slightly over $30, but Rimworld, Stellaris, and Satisfactory are in this bucket for me too.
LOL. More like “triple A” studios need to start making games that are actually fun rather than focus on quarterly peanut accounting practices while giving management bloated salaries and bonuses. Also fix up that abusive shitty ‘cram’ development cycle culture that’s entrenched in game development.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Balatro show that games can be fun without many visual frills, but contain depth beyond the standardized, uninspiring, recycled game mechanics. While if you go the length of being true to storytelling like Baldur’s Gate, Divinity OS2, rather than sloppy storywriting, people are willing to pay bigger bucks for it.
Somewhere along the way, during the mobile games boom, studios forgot about what actually made games ‘fun’. They started to go after micro-transactions to drain every last dollar in your wallet while delivering barely any substance that was ‘fun’. They deserve to die given the current trajectory. They forgot the meaning of what video games are.
Triple A can all crash and burn.
Indie games are the only original, creative, fun games left anymore.
Silksong launched at €20.
I could buy the best game of a generation at full price FOUR TIMES, or Forspoken once. Tough choice
Wow, who knew.
That guy’s an expert in the obvious.
To recoup lost revenue on declining sales, major publishers will be raising the base price for games to $90, with extended ‘complete’ editions retailing $145.
Says, major CEO “gamers need to stop alienating themselves and pay up. When sales increase the prices will
go downstop increasing (as much… maybe).”Beatings will resume until morale improves.
even if game is really good i wouldnt pay that much for it ever. and i look very dimly at those who do for ruining things for rest of us.
I just got Vintage Story last week for $24, and that’s gonna last me literally until either the world ends, the Dev team disbands for some reason, or I die.
It’s still in early access, but there’s already TONS in the game that you may not even see depending on your world spawn.
I’ve been eyeing Vintage Story for a while. What are you liking most about it?
I’ve kinda been going at it at my own pace. I started a survival world, but I’m actually using creative to learn how to build and how the different mechanics work. I just started messing with windmills yesterday, but I think I may be getting a little ahead of myself.
Too many big studios/publishers just keep releasing the same shit over and over and over. They don’t innovate, they don’t take risks; they don’t exist to make good games, they exist to make shareholders money.
Good games aren’t just about graphics, they are about game play. Game play involves mechanics like collecting, exploration, story, strategy, challenging bosses, and world building/crafting. A good game will do 2-3 of these things really well regardless of what the graphics look like.
smaller games that are fun have a better chance of getting bought on a whim, who knew!
Consoles are the rich man’s platform these days. If you have a bit of technical know-how, it’s not hard to find a cheap old PC and get some games running on it.
Weren’t they always?
When I grew up, the surgeon’s kid had an Xbox, the software engineer’s kid had a PS, and everyone else pirated PC games or got them from the bargain bin.
I got the whole Blitzkrieg Anthology for the equivalent of 5 EUR
I think the idea was consoles were the cheap upfront alternative to gaming and you paid a premium for games… Now it’s reduced to ease of use and it just works.
Steam sales. That’s where I’m at.
Epic Game Store also gives away some AAA freebies.
People who haven’t gotten raises to keep up with cost of living are buying cheaper indie games that are fun and supported instead of 80 AAA games that are abandoned because they didn’t make all of the money.
Gee, shocker.
I just splurged and bought Moonlighter for like 2.99 so yeah checks out i guess.
Because a lot of indie games don’t come to consoles (or at least Xbox — I see a lot of Steam/PlayStation releases or Steam/Switch releases).
I see a ton of cool indie games I’d love to play, but I can’t because they require Windows. I don’t think a game should be able to be called indie if it requires you to use Windows (or macOS, what I use), exclusively. Like if you’re “independent” of Windows (macOS or Linux) or “independent” of Apple (Windows or Linux), they should be making their game available to you. That means, of course, supporting all three platforms. Linux and macOS are both based on UNIX (if you go back far enough). Switch and Mac use the same CPU architecture (ARM64). Linux has the best handheld support. And Windows has the biggest install base. So it’s really worth it to support all four of those. And then Xbox and PlayStation use the same architecture as PC gaming, x86-64 with a GPU. So it’s really all connected and, unless one platform is sponsoring the game somehow (at which point, it isn’t indie), no platform’s players should be left out. JMO
“Indie” doesn’t refer to independence from a platform, it’s supposed to mean independently published (in other artistic industries, this has become slightly muddled as “indie” is more of an aesthetic these days). The fact that these games are directly supported on one platform over others is a symptom of being indie more than anything, as a large publisher would require support on multiple platforms to ensure maximum market penetration.
Also, proton is incredible these days, so windows lock in isn’t as much of a thing anymore.
Are you really demanding that the studios with the lowest budgets should use their budget to support multiple platforms?
Linux support has never been better! Proton is amazing, to the point the Steam people are suggesting developers to just develop for windows.
Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ I have found 1 indie game so far which was not working
Most indie games work fine on Linux, thanks to Proton. MacOS is just an exceptionally poor platform for gaming.
If you have an x86 cpu Mac, install Linux, use steam/proton and you can play pretty much any indie Windows game out there. Or you can just install Windows. If you have an Apple cpu Mac, there are still tools out there you can use to play the game.
You can’t fault Indie devs who have a day job for not wanting to spend time supporting a ton of different platforms (AAA, is a different story)
You’re only about 10 years too late for anyone to give a single crap about native linux
Proton’s a little more recent than that. I still remember the bad old days of Steam on Linux from 2013-2017 where Proton didn’t exist yet, and running the Windows version of Steam through WINE was a PITA. Heck, Proton didn’t really start to get good until about 2021.
