Yeah, I can be pretty frugal with game purchases and will often wait for sales, but this one I didn't even have to think about. They're going to sell a bazillion copies at this price.
I’m not saying that it’s not irresponsible to grow to the size that they have, but I don’t think people understand the staggering difference in the size of the development teams between GTA and Hollow Knight.
MobyGames lists 4,771 people in the credits for GTA V and just 85 for Hollow Knight. Honestly most of those on Hollow Knight are translators and testers, people who weren’t working the full length of development time.
As a reminder, 99.9% of the cost of a game is number of staff * salary * time.
ITT: Folks comparing labor hours without cost of those hours.
Folks, coders who understand how game engines work and can make graphically intense well running games are 3.5-4 times more expensive per hour.
I really can’t believe I have to spell this out for everyone. Do you really think naughty dog or Rockstar aren’t hiring folks at 200k+ to work on these games for thousands of hours only still to fuck out up after 6 years of development?
I’m not saying 3d is better, it’s clearly too expensive for everyone to push these boundaries and different tools for different games; but this is just the economic reality.
But graphically intense is a supply side decision not a demand side one, most of the big hit indie games including 3D ones are either overtly styalized or doing a kind of pseudorealism that looks clean without having to model the refraction index of individual rain drops.
Silksong is using a 2D hand-animated style, which is not cheap to make, not because of coders but because it requires way more work from artists than other art styles.
Who asked for these games to look photo real, I used to like GTA back in the San Andreas and Vice City days. I hated the look of GTA 5 and didn’t even finish it, the older games had cartoon graphics and lots of charm, these new ones suck
Everyone who isn’t being pedantic and ignoring the vast majority and economic data and sales that led us to giant graphically intensive open worlds rpg and action games.
You don’t like that shit, good for you. But pretending the demand isn’t there is head in sand dumb.
I designed this penis slicer using the absolutely best components, and years of German engineering. I’m charging $1000, which is a steal if you think about the cost of the labor and parts.
Blah blah blah I’m going to ignore the economic reality of the largest entertainment industry on the planet cause hur hurt graphics for dummies. Prototypical dumb nerd shit.
I've heard of it vaguely just because I played a bit of limbus company (and liked the characters more than the gameplay tbh). How's lobotomy compared to limbus? Is the gameplay similar at all?
Yeah lcb’s gameplay isn’t the best… the story is it’s charm
As for l corp’s gameplay, it is VERY different. It’s a rogue-like management simulator that expects you to reset and rewind your progress throughout the game in order to complete it… you have to manage the abnormalities you pick, and they each have their own requirements for keeping them content (some more complicated than others. The higher the tier, the more complicated the abnormalities usually get, although that ain’t always rhe case). You can look up gameplay compilations on YouTube;; each run is always different lol
The story, similar to lcb’s, is great too and very character-driven… to the point where it directly affects your gameplay (and graphics in some instances).
It honestly bugged me that people think there’s like a ceiling price for 2d even though it require artist to animate frame by frame, but 3d it’s unlimited even though you could tweak everything far more easily.
That’s capitalism for you: first you say that the price doesn’t depend on the production expenses and can be as big as the seller wants, and now you try to explain the price with “production expenses”. No. It is a 2d platformer. 20 bucks is already a very high price.
first you say that the price doesn’t depend on the production expenses and can be as big as the seller wants
Huh? When did i even claim that?
Edit: also even if i said that, which i didn’t, let’s not pretend selling a 2d metroidvania at $30 or even $40 is as same as AAA studio justifying selling their game at $80. It’s like a different issue altogether because one is actively firing people and exploit cheap worker and giving their CEO a fat bonus while claiming inflation, the other is people pretend a dimension of their artwork is the limiting factor.
My beliefs are that all software, with no exceptions should be free and non economic, set this aside for a bit:
I still see absolutely no reason for why one art style would have more value then any other art style.
A game can be anything we can conceive. The best games i played where not about the gameplay but the stories they tell, the vibes they set, the feelings they make me feel.
Thomas was alone and limbo are technically speaking not very complex but the value those games hold is infinitely more then a modern urbisoft title.
One is expensive produced soulless junk i wouldn’t even want to install ending with an abstract value of 0 to me, the others are experiences i cherish that i cannot buy for 20 bucks anywhere else therefor far exceeding the abstract value that 20 bucks is. Its worth way more, its factually sold for way less.
But i repeat, all software should be free, art and experiences should be shared freely and the people who make them deserve the means to flourish by getting acces to the many natural resources that are being wasted on capitalism.
Nintendo: Yes, you can shove that Mario in your socialistic arses; now give us those “the means to flourish by getting acces to the many natural resources”! All of them! Now!
Nitendo already has access because they have money and connections, if they would want to build something new, lets say a themepark or just a big event on public property there is not much stopping them, they can just do that with faster signed permission then you would receive a rejection email.
Nitendo also isnt indie game at all, just because they happen to make 2d platforms doesn’t mean they represent the default Businessmodel for all 2d platformers.
As a consequence of Nintendo already having more then a reasonable share, it also becomes morally correct to use their products and services without payment. The costs of All their games, hardware, regardless of 2d style should be 0 to consumers who almost all have less then they should have.
2D is not even less work than 3D imo if you’re comparing “good looking” 3D and 2D work. Modern techniques have all but rendered them as merely separate art styles.
Yeah, It really depend on how detail you want it to be, both is hard, but somehow people will pay one more than the other.
So the smart thing to do here is have a 2d metroidvania with 3d artstyle, and suddenly the price ceiling is removed lol (bloodstained is $40 on release)
A lot of 2d games are done in 3d engines these days anyway, because it gives “free” parallax, depth buffering and masking, hardware accelerated compositing etc.
So it’s all the work of hand-drawing animation frames with all the complexity of rigging and mapping in 3d.
Enter the Gungeon and the Shovel Knight series are two examples that come to mind.
There is a price for every D. You go to the store and buy a D for like 15 bucks, so reselling it for more than 20 is criminal. You get one D for free with a game engine, then you buy another D, that’s why the top price for two D is 20 bucks. You would think a game with 3 D will be capped at 40, but then you need to add some A to it, so it’s OK if a game with 3 D and 3 A costs 80 bucks at retail, A aren’t free.
It’s not about hours. It’s the cost of those hours. Despite tons of helpers, performant 3d is hard as fuck. And with that comes expensive coders. In extreme cases you’re talking about 3.5:1.
I don’t think anyone would have complained if it was $30-$40. They could have sold well at $60 with some people complaining about it and others defending them for the choice.
I had a friend try to get me into it (and Limbus Company). Limbus Company i gave a shot because it was free. It being a Gacha though i just couldn’t get into. Anything that tries to keep my attention with FOMO i never end up sticking with for too long.
Lobotomy looked interesting though, i did pick it up on sale but have yet to touch it. I don’t know much about it though.
Imo limbus doesn’t even have true FOMO, walpurgis IDs come back every 2-3 months and everything else can be purchased at ur own pace (although, I do understand u, since the mechanics of thr shard shop does encourage u to play a bit during the season if u want the seasonal egos and IDs)
To understand lobotomy best you’d need to look at gameplay videos + the trailers, you play as a manager who has to control their facility and ensure that ur employees keep the abnormalities content (with the help of an AI named Angela lol). The story’s pretty cool, and it has different endings like a VN too (the true ending is a pain to get tho, the games a major time sink? Investment? Smth like that)
bin.pol.social
Gorące