I think too many people have tricked themselves/each other into thinking long games are bad because they are long. No, it’s because 95% of the time (moreso today than in the past), a high hour-to-complete time signals a game with 10 hours or content stretched out to an absurd extreme, often in support of MTX/live service type features available ay launch.
An 80 hour game can be good if it has 80 hours of actual content. A 25 hour game can be bad if it’s still just 3-4 hours of real game stretched out to 25-30.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🤨
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.
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
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.
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