Anyone got recommendations for cheap or interesting indie games this sale?
I bought Touhou Artificial Dreams In Arcadia during the October sale and it is a bit of a hidden gem for fans of the old SMT JRPG games on SNES. I also picked up Lunacid but have not got that far in it, but it seems like a strong revival of the classic Kings Field games.
Recursed, just £1.67. It is a brilliant puzzle game, completely mind bending stuff about recursion and jumping into chests inside of chests while taking another chest with you so you can jump inside it…
Wonderputt Forever - £2.20. Prettiest minigolf game, animated to excess. Less than an hour to beat unless you go for optional challenges. You may have played the original flash game a decade ago.
Definitely a great game. Recently had a pretty big update adding enemies and combat that has been fun so far but you can also just disable combat mode for a chill time building your swarms/spheres
Not on steam deck but I play it on Linux pc and ps5. One of the coolest things about it is cross save, you can save your game on pc or ps5 then continue from that same spot on the other platform.
Some things are a bit small and apart from cutscene camera angles or really zoomed in there isn’t much detail visible on the characters. I played with kb/m inputs mapped to have better utilization of deck controls. Some low fps bits here and there but generally great.
Grim Dawn is so good. If you have any interest, just go for it. I don’t even play many games like that, and I’ve put tonsss of hours into it now. Super underrated soundtrack too, imo.
The multiplayer is full of ultra skilled people who have played for years, so a steep curve. Best FPS campaign ever though, so I recommend it for that.
I have found that some games like this, sometimes I do really well if only because there is such an established way to do things well that my flailing about catches people off guard. Sometimes not following meta is a shock to expectations. I’ll win by sheer incompetence.
The game doesn’t go on sale very often because it’s very fairly priced at $35 and I’ve gotten each DLC the day of release so idk how they do bundles. It may be a long wait if you’re hoping for a deep sale as I’ve never seen it drop more than 25% below retail price.
You get a lot of the core experience from the base game+mods. So don’t feel like you need to get DLC to start because there’s a learning curve on the game anyway. The community endearingly calls your first 1000 hours in the game “the tutorial.”
I’m 1800hrs in (with probably another couple hundred making mods), Rimworld is pure crack in all the best ways possible. Hands down the best $30 I’ve ever spent on a game.
Everyone plays a bit different, personally I’d recommend playing the vanilla game for a bit and using mods to flesh things out or iron out any rough edges in how you experience the game. The modding scene for the game is absolutely phenomenal, if at any point you’re going “gee, there’s got to be a better way to do X, deal with Y, or add more Z”, there’s probably a mod that does it, for example I like designing my colony fairly early on (so I have something to build towards), but since the existing mono-color plan gets confusing pretty fast (what was wall and what was workbench, tool cabinet, light, etc), I find More Planning to be a bit of a must have. As a blanket statement, the Vanilla Expanded mods are very well done and integrate neatly into the game (that said, they aren’t necessary meant to all be run at once, so you can pick and choose what you want and go from there).
I have a pretty decent list going, but if we’re just talking a short list of personal favorites, I really love Megafauna, Frozen Snow Fox’s Bionics, and Cyber Fauna. (Oh and a shameless self-plug for my own mods)
Enh, I’m not so sure about that, one of the most unique parts of RimWorld is that the primary goal is to tell a story. Even the best stories need a bit breathing room for the action-y bits to have weigh. RimWorld is filled with stories about colonies that ran out of food in the dead of winter, lone survivor types that either bleed out or later died of infection after a freak hunting mishap, or trying to hide from the flames and wait out the raiders/ murder machines. It may be waiting, but I find that more often than not (especially in the early game), it’s either a welcome break after a hectic day or an edge-of-your-seat fight-for-survival kind of waiting.
So, I’m not sure if skyrim is right for this because it’s had a certain modding community built up, and for whatever reason, corporate execs seem to love burning down organic communities with no idea of the damage they’re doing.
However, if a game was built from day 1 to have support for paid mods, I’d probably consider making assets for mods as a side gig, as would a lot of people who work in tech or are budding game developers, because its far less of a commitment than making a full game.
The closest things that do this currently are roblox, which does everything in it’s power to prevent you from withdrawing money from it, and second life, which is near dead and only still going because of furies and perverts.
If a true platform-esque game, like Skyrim or Arma, were to come along with a shop that would let you do things like build a dungeon and charge a dollar for it, that would suddenly look attractive to a lot of people to get involved.
As soon as you started, I knew you were going to mention roblox. I wish they would release an adult version with a different aesthetic, SO BAD. I like LUA, but I will admit they’re pretty predatory with their payments.
If you want a gig like that, costume clothing, furniture, wallpaper and flooring for Sims 4. While there is somewhat of a community thing and the TOS about only having paid early access of a reasonable time, a lot of creatures don’t, and big chunks of the community will bend over backwards to defend it. So if you put out some paid stuff a lot of people will pay for it. If you don’t reales it for free after some time, big parts of the community will be mad at you, but many creators don’t follow that code and you can choose between putting up with it or just release it for free after sometime frame you are comfortable with, community stand is a month but ones again a lot of people don’t follow that and have lots of people buying their stuff.
And also if you just put out relatively good stuff, you will get a huge bonus over other people, even if you are paid only or have longer than community standard times. Because a lot of Sims 4 cc (in the Sims community moded assets are called cc while just mod/mods means gameplay mods) is really bad, with chep asset flips, theft and just really badly looking and functioning stuff and that includes quite a lot of the paid only scene. So you know the bar ain’t that high.
If you want a in game or developer official option, keep an eye on the upcoming Project Rene it’s the next sims game / sims spin off and while it is not confirmed to have paid cc and mods, there is a high likely hood of it.
The issue Valve had with this was that they weren’t willing to do the basic vetting needed to ensure a mod’s content is legitimately owned. For a full game, made from scratch in Unity, that’s not necessarily easier to verify, but the bar for entry (and to making something interesting for viewers) is high enough that a developer can be harshly penalized for breaking it. And of course, it has still happened, wherein a little Superman game is found to have been completely stolen from someone who put it out for free.
When you have a big complete game like Skyrim, and one mod only needs to do something silly like put Thomas the Tank Engine’s face onto a greathammer, it’s a low bar for entry for something some people might actually want, as opposed to shitty Unity asset flips. Still, the storefront needs to be sure that THAT developer owns Thomas’s face (they don’t) and that they put the work into applying it (they might have just pulled files from some obscure Nexus Mods entry and hoped no one noticed).
Ownership verification is tough. I seriously doubt they’re actually putting the time in.
Valve had no issue with it. They went through with the release until the huge backlash when even the most loyal communities, like /r/pcmasterrace, were suddenly all about getting rid of Gabe from the sub banner and building a new client to replace Steam (1, 2). All of Bethesda’s most recent games were getting heavily review bombed on Steam and elsewhere. These things forced Valve to backtrack.
The review bombing was the form of communication used to inform Valve of what I just described. The prime complaints were based around lack of authenticity in many of the mods that first requested payment - many mod authors saw their work stolen and reposted.
But do they need to for the copyright case? Aren’t most pages on internet, like “Here is where you can sent us a DCMA request, we will take it down after checking it”.
Then they don’t need to vet it until there is a request, still that is work not gonna lie but they don’t have to check every single upload stuff, plus they probably would have a report system or similar if the issue isn’t copyright but idk that somebody uploaded something illegal somehow.
Of course maybe I am missing something and there is some laws that require active monitoring of each uploaded stuff.
You’re not totally wrong; they could operate that way, wherein victims of theft would report what people have re-uploaded as their own. But the problem is, this puts the onus of policework entirely on mod operators, who have their own lives and livelihoods. Imagine you wrote a mod as a hobby for four years, spent some time abroad, came home, never heard about the mod workshop stuff, and then discovered that your mod blew up in popularity under someone else’s name. Plus, Valve would need to moderate and figure out who is telling the truth (lest a bad actor make a fake claim on a legitimate mod seller). That kind of situation is often unrecoverable.
You can even read stories about the wars that photographers have over this kind of thing - photos are the kind of thing people pass around like candy, even though some amazing ones take tons of expertise and effort for the photographer to take; they often struggle to get websites and magazines to pay the ad revenue they’re due for each time they’re shown. It’s much like the mod workshop would have been - a very “low friction” environment for reuploads.
These aren’t obligated paid mods. Anyone can still do free mods that rely on Nexus for downloads and stuff.
If anything, this is like FDroid / Google Play Store with FOSS apps. You’ll find dozens of paid foss apps on the play store that are free on fdroid. The play store is for donations and convenience. Auto updates without modding your phone, centralized store, etc.
I am not paying extra so that Bethesda can push the burden of fixing their 12 year old broken game that I already paid full price for onto random people.
I will be pirating paid mods and you will not change my mind.
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