Yeah, the silver lining of the whole gaming industry fallout is that the indie game scene has never been better. I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t had a good top-down zeldalike in a long time, echoes of wisdom notwithstanding even though the formula is pretty altered. Someone pointed me in the direction of Master Key and it was an incredibly satisfying time. Almost like it would have fit in perfectly between LoZ 1 and Link’s Awakening.
You can’t build a game studio without funding, and that is where the problem lies…
Publishers have become very risk-averse ever since Embracer went downhill. They basically only invest in <literally the same game as some previously successful title>…
It isn’t that easy to go indie though, unless you do gamedev as a hobby and have another source of income.
I am working at what was a small studio (about 10 persons) when I joined, and has meanwhile grown to more than 50 employees.
I am a coder, and therefore don’t have direct insight into our finances, so please take everything below with a grain of salt. It is also intentionally vague because I don’t want to violate any NDAs.
Over the years we have started two indie projects, that both were completed and released, but both in the end had a publisher funding a part of the development. So, while they were indie initially, the released products cannot be called indie any more… The reason why we went for publisher contracts for those two projects were manyfold, but an important part was simply that we needed a way to cover our running costs. We are doing gamedev as a day-job, after all, so it needs to pay for our rent, food, etc… (Other important reason for going with a publisher were marketing, customer support,… All the things that we as developers have no experience in.)
Now that we have grown to medium studio size, we are hoping that we can at some point fund an indie project by making enough profit with other, publisher-funded projects. We have several projects running in parallel anyhow, and if 3 of them would yield enough money to pay a 4th project that would be fully our own, we would definitely go for it.
However, the market situation is tough, and we currently cannot afford to do that. Almost all profit we make goes into developing prototypes that we need in order to have a realistic chance to get the next publisher-funded project…
Two years ago it was a lot easier to get publisher contracts. Back then we were quite optimistic about being able to fund a fully independent project, but then the market changed, getting new publisher-funded projects has become a lot more difficult, and right now doing an indie project is (for us) not financially possible…
So, what we are doing now is that we are taking our game ideas and presenting them to publishers. The prottypes I mentioned? Most of them are for our own ideas. Having something the people at the publisher can play goes a long way in convincing them that a game-idea is fun. That’s not indie, but it is as close as we can get to making the games we want to make. While the last year has been tough, with publishers being very, very, very cautious about new ideas, the situation seems to slowly change, and we might eventually get funding for one of our own ideas. Maybe. If we are lucky.
There are also going to be lots of talent who permanently leave the industry because there are no longer any stable decent paying jobs at larger studios.
Veilgaurd was a perfectly good game. It’s not a 10/10, but despite some flaws, I’ve had a great time playing it. Too bad some business suit says it’s not “successful” enough to warrant a follow-up.
I’d like to see how they measured success. Was it to break even? Well from what point? Including the time that it was supposed to be a live service game? Through the committees and executives shutting down ideas? It was in the top 10 for games on Steam that week and had generally favorable reviews. If that didn’t match their plan, that’s on them.
Ordered merch from Bioware mid-November for an xmas present. It arrived Jan 4th; they shipped the wrong product.
Contacted them 3 seprate times through their ‘contact us’ page and got ignored for 3 weeks. It wasn’t until I filed a chargeback with my cc that they finally emailed me (4 days after submission).
I had asked for my money back in my various emails; but they didn’t respond to that at all and just shipped me a new package.
Still haven’t gotten that, so no idea if they actually shipped the right item this time. It’s not listed on their site anymore; so they likely don’t have inventory to ship.
We’ll see what’s in the box whenever it gets here.
Hey wow, look what happens when we don’t buy their games and loudly organize to tell others not to buy their games over this bullshit!
There’s still nothing Sony puts out that I really think is all that good, but hopefully this serves as another message to the industry to stop with this dumb bullshit. Funny how Sony has been getting a lot of those kinda messages recently.
I recommend waiting until they revert the restrictions on countries that can’t have PSN. That’s the indicator on how serious they actually are about making PSN optional. So far the restrictions are in place so fuck em.
games are famously terrible at boycotts. if people didn’t buy spidey2 the most probable reason is that the reviews are full of thumb downs saying it runs like shit even on the best hardware.
I think the real world implementation of “Kingdoms of Elyria” is Kingdoms Reborn. A multiplayer 4X/city-builder hybrid (although it works just fine in single player too).
If there’s one thing that Sony’s transition from a quality electronics company to a copyright-heavy media-driven pro-DMCA-lobbying company back in then 00s has taught me it’s to “Never, ever trust Sony”.
To be fair Sony may have produced quality electronics but their tactics have always been anti consumer.
They always insist on proprietary everything and try to get first mover advantage for each new iteration of tech and then lock the market down. The problem is they hold out for so long with their proprietary formats that it makes their products unattractive. Case in point their memory cards.
Requiring a psn account is just another anti consumer control tactic by the company.
Having dealt with Sony for years as a engineer their non consumer hardware is a true pain. Trying to interface with some of their ccd image sensors was some of the most PITA integration i’ve ever dealt with.
Hey, what’s this skull and crossbones flag doing here? Oh right. That’s my pirate flag that I fly high as I sail the seas…for no reason…no reason at all. Yep. Mods, it’s just a flag that’s being flown for no reason at all. Certainly not one that needs mod intervention…
Personally, I don’t even like piracy as a form of protest. It means you’re spending time on their game when you could be spending time and money on a game that respects your values. Plus, if you like the game, you’re still spreading positive word of mouth. I don’t need to play Horizon when there’s so much else out there.
Seconded. I feel similarly with some bad audiobooks. I’ve considered seeding them, but then that’s more listeners who might like it and give them money. So I settled for leaving bad reviews and washing my hands of it
For context, it’s somewhat common here in Latin America to name markets after the owner’s name; doubly so in smaller cities. (The city where this happened has 9k inhabitants)
It’s also common to name supermarkets “Super [something]”, to highlight that it sells general goods instead of just produce.
With that out of the way: seriously? Nintendo going after a mum-and-dad market in a small city in North America??? This only highlights that the current trademark and intellectual property laws across the world are toilet paper - they aren’t there to defend “healthy competition” or crap like that, but to ensure megacorps get their way. Screw this shit and screw Nintendo - might as well rename their company to Ninjigoku/任地獄, bloody hell.
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Aktywne