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.
Looks like he left turtle Rock 3 years before evolve, so maybe there’s actually hope that he was part of what made l4d great, rather than whoever’s at turtle Rock since l4d wrapped
A bit of advice: you need to install SMAPI first (Stardew Modding API) first. Also, Nexus mods is where most people get their mods. The one in question is called “Stardew Valley Expanded”
Probably, but since I don’t own and have never touched a Steam Deck, but the question was directed at me, I could only honestly answer with my unawareness.
Seems weird as fuck to get downvoted for not knowing about a thing I don’t have experience with, but hey.
We as humans can take steps to lessen our impact on the planet. We cannot stop climate change. The planet by design will always change climates. It has changed without humans influence and it will continue after we are gone.
Yep that’s absolutely not what people are talking about when they say ‘climate change’ in this context, they mean anthropogenic climate change, and you know it. Your bad faith response shows you have no interest in an honest discussion.
Don’t be pedantic. Anyone with half a brain knows that when someone brings up “climate change” they’re referring to “human-made climate change” — and it’s completely uncontroversial that the changes we’ve made since the industrial revolution have greatly outweighed the changes of the Earth’s natural climate cycles.
All I ask is in what way are LLMs progress. Ability to generate a lot of slop is pretty much only thing LLMs are good for. Even that is not really cheap, especially factoring the environmental costs.
or a silly, halfwit race to build out the infrastructure (because they’re smoking their own product) that could crash the economy.
You’re only seeing the upsides - make nifty pictures, ai music, whatever - because the entire shitshow is a free or exceptionally underpriced preview of what’s to come. while everyone from google to grok to your mom fails to find a way to actually profit off of it all when they have to figure the costs of the water, power, training data, lawsuits and other shit into the actual equation it blows up.
These aren’t my ideas - please, take a break from your preconceptions and read:
Where is the idea that LLMs will ever to curing diseases coming from? What is the possible mechanism? LLMs generate text from probability distributions. There is no reason to trust their output because they don’t have built-in concept of true or false. When one cannot judge the quality of the output, how can one reliably use it as a tool for any purpose, let alone scientific research?
LLMs are actually spectacular for indexing large amounts of text data and pulling out the answer to a query. Combine that with natural language processing and it is literally what we all thought Ask Jeeves was back in the day. If you ever spent time sifting through stack overflow pages or parsing discussion threads, that is what it is good at. And many models actually provide ways to get a readout of the “thought process” and links to pages that support the answer which drastically reduces the impact of hallucinations.
And many of those don’t necessarily require significant power usage… relative to what is already running in data centers.
The problem is that people use it and decide it is “like magic” and then insist on using it for EVERYTHING. And you go from “Write me a simple function to interface with this specific API” to “Write me an application to do my taxes and then file them for me”
Of course, there is also the issue of where training data comes from. Which is why so much of the “generative AI” stuff is so disgusting because it is just stealing copyrighted data left and right. Rather than the search engine style LLMs that mostly just ignore the proverbial README_FBI.txt file.
And the “this is magic” is on both sides. The evangelists are demonstrably morons. But the rabid anti-AI/“AI” crowd are just as bad with “it gave you a wrong answer, it is worthless”. Think of it less like a magic box and more like asking a question on a message board. You are gonna get a LOT of FUD and it is on you to do additional searches to corroborate when it actually matters.
Like a lot of things AI/“AI”, they are REALLY good at replacing intern/junior level employees (and all the consequences of that…) and are a way to speed through grunt work. And, much like farming a task out to that junior level employee, you need to actually supervise it and check the results. Whether that is making sure it actually does what you want it to do or making sure they didn’t steal copyrighted work.
Have you ever programmed an interpreter for interactive fiction / MUDs, before all this AI crap? It’s a great example of the power that even super tiny models can accomplish. NLP interfaces are a useful thing for people.
Also consider that Firefox or Electron apps require more RAM and CPU and waste more energy than small language models. A Gemma slm can translate things into English using less energy than it requires to open a modern browser. And I know that because I’m literally watching the resources get used.
I am not implying that transformers-based models have to be huge to be useful. I am only talking about LLMs. I am questioning the purported goal of LLMs, i.e., to replace all humans in as many creative fields as possible, in the context of it’s cost, both environmental and social.
I can guarantee you that there will not be a point in time at which everybody on the planet just decides to stop using AI out of the goodness of their hearts.
If someone said this in 1970 it would be just as true as you saying it today. Would you have used generative AI tools for video game development back then?
This really depends on what you consider “progress”. Some forms of AI are neat pieces of tech, there’s no denying that. However, all I’ve really seen them do in an industrial sense is shrink workforces to save a buck via automation, and produce a noticably worse product.
That quality is sure to improve, but what won’t change is the fact that real humans with skill and talent are out of a job because of a fancy piece of software. I personally don’t think of that as progress, but that’s just me.
Typographers saw the same thing with personal computing in the latter half of the 90s. Almost over night, everyone starting printing their own documentation and comic sans became their canary in the coal mine. It was progress but progress is rarely good for everyone. There’s always a give and a take.
As another user said, typographers still exist. And, until now, computers weren’t really a threat to their job security. They were just a new set of tools they had to adapt to. But, if I was running a business and had little regard for ethics, why would I hire a typographer when I could just ask an AI to generate a new font for my billboard, and have it done in 30 seconds for free?
I get the argument that AI is a tool that lowers the barrier of entry to certain fields, which is absolutely true. If I wanted to be a graphic designer today, I could do it with AI. But, when I went to sell my logo to the small company down the street, I’d have to come to terms with the fact that the owner of that business also happened to become a graphic designer that very morning, and all of a sudden my career is over before it started.
That’s like saying that colonies on Mars are the future. In the future colonies on Mars will be the direction things are going, (assuming we don’t global warm ourselves to death first) but we’re not there yet. AI have yet to prove themselves.
Probably invaluable if you’re intent on pumping out slop.
Video games are an art. If you outsource your art to shitty robots…what service is it that you’re providing? What are you doing that I can’t do my fucking self.
all parts of videogames are art. sound, visuals, level design, code. you could make the argument that someone who enjoys some of those things but not all of them could more easily get a thing out the door if they could automate one part of it.
Why should a single developer of a game not be allowed to offload making textures for a gravel road or some other brain-numbing task onto AI, and use the time saved to make the main features of the game better?
Personally I agree. The problem is then you have to declare it and the way that steam currently handles that declaration is literally the worst possible implementation of the idea, - all games just get dumped into the same category of “uses AI”. I would actually prefer them to just take the tag away, then keep it in its current dysfunctional state.
It’s just a tag that says that AI was used in some aspect of making the game, but there’s no breakdown of how the AI was used, did it author code or did it design background elements that no one will really see, because there’s a huge difference there, and the distinction is important.
Way I see it AI should be allowed to be used on grunt work that stays in the background. Stuff nobody would notice but that would still take up time, so the dev can focus on making the stuff in the foreground better. Indie dev teams can be small, sometimes just one person, and the quality stands to increase if they can offload dumb, time-consuming tasks elsewhere.
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