Riiiight… it’s the users of the product that is forcing the producers to work under toxic conditions, and totally not their money-grubbing capitalist bosses.
I remember a few games which didn’t require such sacrifices from developers.
Some even commercial. Like NWN, with people making their own campaigns without, you know, any effort spent by the developers of the game itself.
Of course when the business model is milking players and making it problematic (either technically or by paradigm) to satisfy interest with community-made modifications, then all the load is on the devs or else the game becomes irrelevant. Well, guess whose fault that is.
I don’t want a fucking endless game I want a finished game for the price I pay at release that doesn’t require $3000 gpu to render the most obnoxiously detailed graphics of a game that has the fucking depth of mine sweeper.
The other day I saw a Developer that was sad people don’t like the new Fable commercial. I was interested so I watched it and it’s some Mulan/Captain Marvel cookie cutter plot where the entire commercial is some dude singing the praises for a random woman (presumably the playable character), and then an evil smoky hand holding an evil wizard staff appears on screen for like 2 seconds. For all we know that female MC could be literally Hitler, we were told absolutely nothing about the game, setting, or characters except that the narrator is a retired hero. They have no depth or motivations.
Hopefully it was just a damn awful trailer and not the death of the series.
I had to go watch it. You’re not wrong, it tells you absolutely nothing about the game. Everything looked per-rendered. It reminded me a lot of the Beyond Good and Evil 2 trailer from 2017… where it could just as easily be a CGI movie than a video game.
The dude was talking about the antagonist and not the playable character. That’s why the playable character says “She’s back” at the end. Also it was just a teaser trailer to remind us that the game still exist and to show some gameplay. It was definitely not a commercial to sell the game to us. The development is probably no where near finished.
There was zero gameplay in the trailer, except for maybe a walking animation, but I admit I missed the nuance of them describing the antagonist while a bunch of scenes of not-that-person flashed inbetween dialogue.
Storywriting needs to come before all other aspects of a narrative driven RPG like the Fable titles. The development being ongoing is no excuse for that. The only time I can think of that story changes to an ongoing development resulted in a decent product was FFX and maybe the movie Emperor’s New Groove but at the same time it’s hard not to feel like we were robbed of the story it could have been.
Oh yes it does. We can absolutely judge what we have seen so far. For some reason a narrative of this type is trending: main character is great because they’re great and awesome and everything they do is perfect, and the bad guy person is bad because they just are, and we can’t see this for ourselves so we need to be told?
We see it in movies, TV Shows, and Videogames, and people are rightly getting really sick of it.
There used to be an unspoken contract with game developers and gamers:
“I’ll release a finished game that you will never need to talk to me again if you don’t want to, and you can play it on any offline computer that meets the minimum specs. You will pay $X one-time for this and expect $0 spent on this game ever again”
“I may release an expansion pack for this game at some point in the future. It will usually cost 10% to 30% of what you paid for the original game. You are NOT required to buy this. If you like the original game the way it is, keep playing it that way. If you are a new player, you will have to buy the base game and then the expansion pack to play expansion pack content”
“I may, in the future, release a stand-alone sequel to the game. This game will have the same themes as the original, but I will increase the quality of the graphics/length of story/sound. You will NOT be required to buy the original game or the expansion packs to play this game. You will pay full price for this finished game”
Somewhere that evolved into shipping unfinished games, subscription based games, battlepasses, endless DLC, loot boxes, and forced online connections for single player games.
The game studios broke the contract. If they want endless money, that comes with endless work.
The contract was broken as soon as devs and publishers started pushing the digital download lies, because if you buy the game digitally they wont have to pay for shipping, boxes, manuals, cds, storage, etc etc etc, so the games will cost less and the devs/pubs will still manage to make more money on it than they ever would have otherwise!
and now we have 70-80 dollar charges for the standard, base version of games, with triple digits for the super mega special elite deluxe ultra edition. And you don’t even get to own the fucking game, cause sony and ubisoft have both shown zero issue with going into your account and removing things you’ve bought.
You highlight another point in the unspoken contract:
“After you buy the game, you can play it for as long as you own it with $0 additional dollars spent. At any point in the future you’re welcome to sell your copy of the game for whatever someone will pay you for it. That new buyer will be able to play the game forever paying $0 additional dollars.”
Which is what digital downloads was actually all about.
Killing the second hand market in the belief and hope that those people buying the used copy for 5 bucks, will come to the dev/pub directly and spend the 60 bucks on it brand new.
That’s why I’m really glad to see Hooded Horse and Greg Styczeń have this mindset, and that they’re actually speaking out against the GaaS mentality. They’re going back to the unspoken contract and saying the current status quo is stupid.
The headline is poorly chosen. They aren’t saying that studios should be earning endless money without work. They’re saying the GaaS model to try and earn endless money is putting devs on a treadmill, and that this shouldn’t be the case.
I hope to see more like this going forward. I don’t think gamers nor developers are a fan of GaaS trying to stay constantly relevant.
Because it is a much safer investment to send out a 50% costed demo to see if you can break into the market then trickle out updates to make up the rest of the cost
If your demo doesn’t land then you’ve saved half the cost of a full project that would fail anyway
While I agree with this for bigger game companies the problem is people apply the attitude of deserving infinite content to smaller games as well even if they don’t participate in all the things you talked about. For example with Manor Lord the only thing from what was listed that might apply is it being unfinished since it’s in early access. And while that does come with an expectation of more content the speed people expect it at is wrong especially since this game is basically being made by one person.
And while that does come with an expectation of more content the speed people expect it at is wrong especially since this game is basically being made by one person.
I appreciate the solo developer, and that they are doing most everything else right, but he opened this can of worms because he sold early access. He could have chosen to wait until the game was finished to release it, but I imagine wanted the money up front from early access to help finance the development.
If you release unfinished, you open yourself up to your customers wanting it finished, and also wanting a say in how it gets developed. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a right to sell via early access, but he brought this on himself.
Sorry, but I for one am not going to accept these companies blaming everything on gamers. I’m not into bootlicking. Gamers are annoying af for sure, but I’m not blaming systemic industry problems on gamers. That’s complete horseshit.
Who are “these companies”? Game publishers and developers certainly aren’t a monolith. To me, this publisher’s complaint seems like an implicit critique of how big publishers have trained gamers to have expectations that are unrealistic for all but the most high-profile games.
There are a lot of articles like this one lately saying Gamers don’t appreciate the products we’re given and that we complain too much. Those companies. All of them. Manor Lords is still Early Access on steam. If the developer can’t be bothered to develop his unfinished game while taking our money then that’s on him, not us.
We’re living in a “either 1 star or 5 stars” world. There’s no in between, and I fully understand that it can be frustrating and put immense pressure onto developers.
I don’t know the company behind this game, but I’m not giving them the 1 star review just because I assume every tiny company is bad as well as all the big companies.
What if there’s a boss that tries to protect his employees and sees the issue in extreme expectations?
Not saying it definitely is that way, but why assume the worst first?
Early access games are marketed as such, and it shouldn’t come with a suprise that it’s an unfinished game. Some do it better, some worse, but an early access title shouldn’t be treated with expectations that reflect a finished product.
I’m not a fan of most early access titles myself though, at least not early in development. I don’t want to help develop it, so I wait for an almost finished product.
From where I sit, good and critically acclaimed games are plentiful and if you can make a game then it’s easy to make a good one: just don’t be a greedy idiot and make the game you want to play.
If the developer doesn’t want to be badgered about finishing his game then he shouldn’t be selling it unfinished, it comes with the territory. The problem is they went and complained.
Neither are gamers. They aren’t a monolith either. This article smacks of the "millennials kill billion dollar industry " nonsense. There’s definitely mitigating factors on both sides as far as the expectations during such transactions. When I pay for something that is promised to be complete I have an expectation in my mind that it will be completed. If it’s an early access beta, I spent the money to support that product and developer.
However a lot of developers big and small have engendered this reaction because they fall victim to the hype train. They market the game. People are interested. People’s interest begins to wain because the game is taking too long (cyber punk), or the company doesn’t want to lose the hype wave so they release even though the game isn’t finished (no mans sky, and cyber punk honestly), and this is what we get. On the other hand, we see the backlash that happens when games get canceled by larger studios. And we see smaller studios constantly miss their launch windows or expected release dates with little to no contact with the fan base or the public (Team Cherry/silksong).
It doesn’t matter if you’re an indie developer or a triple A studio, what most gamers want is a complete game at launch, or (in the case of an alpha/beta release) updates.
A vocal minority is being shitty here and the article is acting as if gamers are just getting together to hold developers big and small’s feet to the coals or something.
If workers only made unfinished parts and products and complained that consumers don’t appreciate it enough, then that would be a serious problem. This dev is complaining that people badger him on how to improve and finish his game while still selling it as Early Access on Steam.
A lot of gamers use the term “devs” colloquially when a lot of the blame for many of the evils of modern gaming should actually go to management and publishers.
and they get offended if you tell them to go play a different game, then.
Cause some of these idiots out there, I swear to god, act like the game they are currently playing is the only game in the world, until the next new hotness that catches their attention comes out, then that will be the only game in the world.
I was speaking of the gaming industry as a whole. I know very little about this developer. Perhaps they’re one of the good ones swept up in unfortunate-ness.
Game Publishers: Release unfinished game that gets horrid backlash until they work overtime to patch it to a slightly more playable hell, get caught in an update loop, game inadvertantly becomes live service.
Thank you for all the free updates ConcernedApe. I hope you’re enjoying your time with your millions and if/when you release the Haunted Chocolatier I’ll get that too. You’re great and your game is great.
I swore off early access after Phoenix Point. It sucks to already be bored with a game before it has the major kinks worked out.
Dead Cells is kind of a counterpoint, though. I’m not sure if I got it as “early access” per se, but since I bought it, they made some major balance changes that completely changed the meta, and those changes got me playing way more enthusiastically than I was before.
I don’t want the devs to kill themselves for a game, obviously. I don’t think anyone does. People just want content updates for a property they love. In an industry that lays off people after they ship a game or starts work immediately on the franchise yearly $70 sequel, I just want a game developer that does better than that. That’s why the whole world waited patiently for the follow up to the GOTY of 2022 with Shadow of the Erdtree. Elden Ring didn’t get a ton of free content updates in that time, they didn’t make it a live service or offer mtx, and they didn’t pump out their massive expansion in an unreasonable time frame. They built an incredible game and incredible world, and then they continued development on the game they had poured their hearts into for years and spent the time they needed to create the expansion the game deserved, and at a reasonable price.
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