I hate dollars per hour to determine how something is good value. I could sit and watch a 3-4 hour movie but if it’s a genre I dislike then I’ll probably not feel I got value out of it. Likewise if I buy a 70 quid game but it’s 15-20 hours and it’s got a great story, impressive visuals and solid mechanics then I’ll have got my money’s worth but if something is 70 quid and it’s filled with things that feel like a checklist to do then I’ll end up regretting the price that I paid.
It also means that companies that would release a tight and cohesive 15-hour game will instead release a jumbled sloppy episodic 150-hour mess to pad their pockets.
It would mean worse games coming out that cost more money
Joking aside, length of a game is a terrible metric for price. I always consider how much time I spend playing a game compared to the price for the ROI. But a lot of games just add filler content that is copy and paste missions.
Interesting. I wonder how they’d feel if the hardware and software they all used to make these games were charged the same way? Or how about the cars/public transit and roads they take to get to work?
well yup and thats what they want the games to be. a service. multiplayer diablo2 was much like an mmo but no servers needed. You could run the server and play with your friends or even open it up but everyone needed to have a copy of the game. so it has been done and they want to do it more and more.
While I’m super into self hosting instances, that usually defeats the point of MMOs. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that the publishers of MMOs often defeat the point of their game after long enough anyhow.
All that has generally pushed me towards round based games where the only advantages are my own personal skill.
Some dungeon crawlers I enjoyed: Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Torchlight 1 & 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Legend of Grimrock, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth
Neverwinter Nights has 20+ years of custom content, runs on almost anything, is still getting graphical & engine updates and has modules & persistent world servers that cover both of those genres & more.
Not exactly a minor indie game by any means, but bloons td6 is the game I’ve player the most on mobile by some distance. It’s £6 with no microtransactions and a shit load of content. If you like TD games this is a home run.
Yeah, CrossCode is absolutely amazing. I didn’t hear about it until recently. I’m so glad I didn’t completely miss out on it. It’s like my number 1 favourite game now and I almost missed it.
I like to make sure I bring it up anytime people ask about good games they may not have heard of.
Welcome to the CC simps, because you're certainly not the only one who does that. It's generally a no brainer considering that they also still offer a demo to just try it out. Of course that doesn't tell you much about the great story and characters, but I think the fluidity of the movement and combat system definitely can convince people over already.
This list is utterly fantastic, but if you haven’t given Dave The Diver a chance you definitely should. It’s by far my favorite release from this year, and the devs seem to have even more content planned.
Ignore the pre-release hype (I mean hype before anyone gets to try the game, early access hype is good). If the game is hyped after people get to play it, then I find it’s safer to trust, though personal preferences can still make it miss the mark.
I’d like to add Ardor to the list. It’s a free turn based deck building game where you face off against hexagon creatures on a hexagon board. It’s pretty polished for an actual free to play game.
I would. But I didn’t play a lot of their games. Bastion is kind of unique. Story is pretty linear but its structure is quite a novelty. There’s an awesome narrator that is telling the story, but he reacts to everything you do and has a snarky sense of humor. Game is well designed action RPG with a good variety of weapons and in my eyes very little replay value. Still worth the asking price though.
Yea, I wouldn’t give them any money, though. The actual creators got fucked and any purchases of the game go to the people that fucked them. Great game, but I’d sail the seas for it.
A few of those games form my core of things I’ll go back to every so often, though my list isn’t all Indies. I’d probably throw CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and KSP in there too though, off the top of my head. Surprised to see foxhole in there but I suppose it’s in a relatively decent state at the moment and it’s somehow claimed 1400 hours from me on steam now.
Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.
Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it… a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.
Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It’ll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
Coming from a franchise who rakes in mountains of cash from GTA Online… The problem with pricing per hour is that there’s no measure of quality. You can create a junk game that took 200 million to develop and has hundreds of hours of gameplay. I also thought the point about movies was a good one. An excellent movie with big actors and a gigantic budget is usually priced the same
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