there is a lesson in this, never trust corporations or you will get ruined by them eventually. Either we learn to survive without them or just silently go into the night.
Really feels like we’re seeing the return of 90s/00s era “Christian parents against obscene media” bullshit. Except this time they don’t get laughed at and ignored, they are in control.
Whether its this or social media algorithms forcing people to censor simple words like “kill” and “fuck”, culture is being completely sanitised by the corporate world and to some extent with government backing (depending on country).
Depictions and even mentions of violence, sex, drugs, and the use of swear words are being targeted. It’s completely regressive.
We have to remove the Christians from power and refuse to give them moral authority over us, formally or otherwise. We can’t let them oppress us any longer
The absolute low of this for me is that I’ve noticed people censoring the word ‘porn’. You’re obscuring the word that describes the already censored thing, why censor the word itself? It’s not even a swear word (which to me don’t make much sense in censoring in the first place)
Off topic: As someone who just got a verbal reprimand at work for “language” due to having an outburst of irritation where an explosive expletive was used (which is a common enough occurrence in the hangar where I work), I’m seriously about to start auto censoring everything in the most gen Alpha way possible just to annoy the others.
I once swore infront a bunch of other adults in a non-work, but professional setting and someone stopped me to point it out. I paused, looked around for any kids and when I didn’t see any, pointed out it was fine. They were on the conservative side, but I’m not bending at the knee for that shit.
When I run a social media site, it will be a rule to use uncensored terms, and any use of asterisks or alt-words like “unalive” will result in a warning or suspension.
Silksong is $20. Stardew Valley is $15 (and getting yet another free update soon). There are a lot of great indie games out there that won’t break the bank and are made by creators who have a passion for what they do.
Don’t think it was ever mentioned it’d be final. Just that they’d be more focused on their other game’s development and not to expect any more until it was finished.
Anyhow - the dev has recently mentioned an update is coming.
The market is so saturated that lots of good games have a hard time even getting noticed. Just making a good game doesn't automatically mean success.
There are definitely a lot of consumers who will gladly pay $20 for Silksong because of the hype and pedigree surrounding it, but would never take a chance spending that much on a game that hasn't had that kind of hype train surrounding it. Which does make sense, without the hype train you don't know if a more obscure indie may or may not be worth the $20. But then that tells us that it's the hype train that matters here, not just whether or not the game is good.
You basically have to be a developer and marketer to have even a chance of success in the current market and even then you could be the best at both and simply not have the luck to go viral and only get a few hundred sales. So much of indie game selling is creating things that can go viral now hence the absolute proliferation of "freind slop" games because it's so easy for moments between two popular funny content creators to go viral.
This is why I keep asking people how to find good indie games which have flown under the radar because they haven’t gone viral but it genuinely feels like the people who seemingly do this regularly are either gatekeeping how they find them or are just full of shit.
There are a few good YouTube channels that regularly show great indie games I otherwise never would have heard of. One I can think of off the top of my head is splattercatgaming. He puts videos out pretty much daily I think.
Wanted to check the price on Steam and I am not sure what is going on but the New and Recommended thing below the giant banner for Silk Song had Silk Song in it but the price shown there was only $12.49 while the game’s actual store page says $19.99. 🤨
The price of one game is not a problem for the price of another game. Make better games, or learn to market them better. Silksong’s hype is nothing short of a crazy marketing success, and its price is indicative of a dev team that wants people to actually play and enjoy their game.
Also, I think it’s been made very clear that people would have been willing to spend more for it. Make a great game, and you’ll likely receive the same reception. And sure, charge $30 instead, and people will buy it if your game is good.
I think at a certain point we need to accept that this isn’t sustainable.
And by “this” I mean money flowing directly into the pockets of the rich. People would very much hedge £30 on a game if they didn’t need to budget so much of that money to pay off megacorps. And devs could easily live of £20 per sale if they didn’t need to pay part of their profits to those megacorps.
Sorry for going all Redditlemmy “grr capitalism”, but that’s the issue here and all this Silksong “drama” is just a smokescreen.
You’re 100% right, but it’s also a problem of devs underpricing themselves. They’ll work for 2 years on a game and then set its regular price at $5, which actually limits its reach (shoppers see the price and skip over it, thinking it’s low quality) and helps make a race to the bottom that’s already destroyed the mobile market.
Silksong isn’t going to upend the market, some of the quotes are silly, and it’s not underpriced since they were going to sell millions upon millions of copies anyway. But the wider discussion of pricing is important since lots of developers don’t seem to understand the larger picture.
I think you got the most level-headed take here. It really is about capitalism and the fact that gaming is now a mature market, which means it is now sufficiently saturated in the stink of capitalism and megacorps, just like other media industries. In a world where we weren’t all being squeezed from every direction, games would probably cost less and Silksong’s price wouldn’t seem like an outlier.
I did enjoy it but I only maybe put 10 hours into it or so. I think it tried to be more than L4D with all the perks/cards or whatever but IMO people just want a simple replayable zombie survival game you can spontaneously jump in and out of with some friends
I just generally need more games I can just quickly play. Why do I have to spend 30+ minutes just to play anything? I love Rocket League for the ability to quickly do a few games with the friends while we consider what to play.
Even as someone who generally enjoys games adapted with similar rules, I HATE videogames with cards or a board as their main logical center. It’s a VIDEO GAME, not a table top… FFS, at least hide it behind a minimally intrusive UI… That’s the fucking point in having a computer and interface involved: it doesn’t have to be reduced to a small set of human-parseable rules presented as text.
I didn’t enjoy it at all, but you’re right about what people wanted. L4D is so simple in its core concept and streamlined in its gameplay, but it still has a ton of depth. That’s what people want.
It had the worst gunplay ive felt in a long time and the atmosphere of the game was destroyed by all the rainbow coloured glow effects and animations. That game was so full of really weird design choices.
The utter lack of polish and adding in too many mechanics while not tightening up the core gameplay. They also did not have a versus mode where you could control the zombies while the survivors made their way through the map, which was in my opinion one of the most fun versus modes in any game.
That video is completely out of date. I watched a sampling of the bugs they were showing, and none of them appear for me, even when playing with bots.
I remember it being shared on release, and its focus on things like physics within maps was a very specific thing - after Half-Life 2 many games gave up on physics especially in online, because it was more likely to lead to glitchy and unexpected behavior than emergent gameplay.
There’s so much in that video you’d have to pick out what matters to make your case, but to take melee reactions: B4B didn’t want the shove to be so powerful or delay the horde much, so it made sense zombies wouldn’t fall to the ground from one shove; the animation length would end up locking up the difficulty.
Death reactions is another gameplay choice. With automatic weapons, I wasted alot of ammo in L4D2 simply because it wasn’t instantly clear an enemy was dead - they were just playing out their lengthy Oscar death. Sometimes it’s a tradeoff between showcasing the enemy design, and showcasing the weapon’s effects when dozens of other enemies are bearing down.
God I was so excited and I liked the idea of the random card difficulties, but fuck I couldn’t figure out how to get into it. Bought that shit cause I have like 5000 in L4D 1 and 2 and love them. But B4B dissappointed me so much.
I got B4B because some friends and I were really into L4D2. The cards were cool and different and I can appreciate that they tried something new. But they would regularly nerf anything that worked or was fun into the ground, which really sucked because it was a PvE game. And they changed the game so that you would start a campaign with your entire deck, and didn’t balance any of the early levels since they were designed to give a single card per level or segment or whatever they were called. I really wanted to like the game, but I just couldn’t
Exactly the same. I think them using Left 4 Dead as a selling point is what ruined it. It should have just been its own game should not have even mentioned Left 4 Dead
At least the early early days of Evolve were pretty damn fun, so unfortunate what they did with it though. The balancing between monsters and hunters was fucking terrible by season 2.
Maybe it matches with my hate of L4D’s high-level-focused Versus mode, but I couldn’t make it past two games of Evolve, while I’ve played a lot more B4B.
I wish he’d hurry up and get haunted chocolatier released. Im starting to feel like Im taking advantage of our relationship here, just getting update after update without paying him more.
Just buy it for random people on your Steam friends list if you want to do that. There are still plenty of people who don’t own it (like me) and it might finally give them the push to play it.
He made it on his own. 40 Million copies even at 10$ and with steam taking 30% is still 280,000,000$. I honestly don’t think you need to worry for ConcernedApe’s financial situation.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne