They continued to work on the game years after its bad reception. They could have stopped and ignored it. But they worked on it and gave lot of free updates that changed the game dramatically. Other companies would ask money in form of DLC in example. The launch was a disaster and they deserved the hate. But the “redemption” is a different issue and they earned the good will.
I know your question is likely rhetorical, but for the same reason. They improved on it enough to drown out the bad press and turn people’s opinions.
I think that both games are good games, and they’re both fun. They had to meet unrealistic release expectations both internally and externally so had a terrible experience at launch. There’s clearly more money in fixing the product and improving public opinion though, so they did.
I think people often forget that many games are the product of a really significant amount of people working for a significant amount of time, and that both the company paying them and the people working would like money to go in instead of out.
Selling entertainment/art is sometimes self contradicting.
Demons Roots is probably the best RPG Maker game I’ve played that was actually playable as an RPG. (So, not counting things like To The Moon which other people have already mentioned.)
I wasn’t a fan of most of the sexual content in Demons Roots, but taking the whole thing as basically a giant love letter to fucked up doujinshi stories – i.e. to unpolished indie writing with wild genre bending plot twists in addition to the hentai stuff – I can accept it for what it is. The game has that RPGMaker wabi-sabi; it’s not especially well-crafted software… but the combat was OK (unlike a lot of indie RPGs), the music was good – a mix of original and mostly well chosen asset packs (I still listen to some of it occasionally!), and, without getting into spoilers, it did a couple of very memorable things…
That dominoes shit makes no sense to me. I’ve tried to look up the rules multiple times online and then I go into the game and try to make a legal move and the game won’t let me.
Pretty confident “Look Outside” is an RPG maker game. I cannot recommend it enough. It is an immaculately written game, and oozes passion and personality.
Because instead of the usual triple a studio promising the moon for sales then delivering a pebble and not giving a shit, it was a guy who got caught up in the hype and handled it badly, and then him and his small studio worked their asses off to make the game justify the price charged. I know it’s hard to drop the cynicism living in the modern world has instilled in us, but I genuinely think it was a collosal fuckup and not malicious, and they ACTUALLY put the time and effort in to deliver the promises they could and a fuckload more atuff that wasn’t. In a day and age of companies lying on purpose for profit and not giving a shit, it’s a breath of fresh air.
That I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but the mythology of redemption through free update is part of being a beta tester for LNF, that’s pragmatism on HG’s part shift their burden to the fans, not a colossal fuck-up as you claimed.
and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
Except it doesn’t. It’s been nominated for Stream’s Labour of Love award six times in the past ten years, and never won it. In fact it’s never won any Steam Awards. It won Best Ongoing at the Game Awards twice, out of a decade of being ongoing, and it won a similar award from PC Gamer once.
Well that is what lot of devs do, after scamming and getting the quick money and stop working on it. But they kept working for years, still ongoing 10 years after launch. Even with the hate they got and after they got exposed.
Because, as this article that you keep linking says, they already made bank with the broken product in the first place. They could have just taken the money and closed the studio, or at least rebranding and going for the same trick again and again, as so many other actually do. They did not do that, they chose to do the opposite, which was an incredibly bold decision at the time.
You also keep linking another article showing how they made so much money recently, like in 2022, but you forget that this is now, with hindsight. In 2016 just after release, it was more dangerous for them to keep working on a game nobody trusted anymore.
And for the record, I bought NMS in 2022, and liked it okay-ish. It’s far from the best game ever, but arguing like you do that “they only added stuff they said would be in the game in the first place” is clearly fallacious.
Fair enough, I will address that. It’s a commendable act…in the game industry, but at the same time, it is the professionalism expected in another industry, which is why I brought up the building analogy in my original post.
To The Moon (XP) is pretty good. The Legend of the Philosopher Stone (RM2K3) is a personal fave although its incomplete and cancelled Final Fantasy Endless Nova (RM2K) is only a FF in name and is also really good.
Then there’s the ones everyone’s talked about; Ara Fell (originally), In and so on
I agree, and a big part of that is that everything they’ve added over the years just feels bolted-on.
I tried to give it a shot a little while back and tried to do one of the things that was initially promised you could do, be a trader. Pretty standard space game fare. Only to find out it’s a pretty pointless and broken experience because the way you do interstellar trade in that game is by putting goods in your pockets and walking through portals that exist in every single space station. You never even get in your ship lol.
The game still just feels like a tech demonstration of a bunch of disparate systems that fail to integrate with eachother in any meaningful way. They’ve made the puddle much wider over the years but their outright refusal to make it any deeper is absolutely nuts.
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