Really unfortunate. There was such missed potential in Awesomenauts, imo. Despite them being an indie team I really think they could have taken the game so far. They had the passion but just made too many mistakes along the way.
We played Awesomenauts quite a while. It was a super fun 2D Moba with unique chars/skills. At some point we got so much lag/server issues where we had to drop it because it wasnt fun anymore.
Super sad that this “small” studios (mimimi and daedalic also) have to close. They are like the last bastion of devs who still have passion for games, not these three companies espacially but these “small/indie studios”.
I hope the employees gonna find a new place where they get paid better and still can follow their passion.
Hell yeah. Never played AC before as well–picked this one up on launch day and have been having an absolute blast. It’s FromSoft, so it kicks your teeth in a little bit, but once you get the hang of the combat system and make sense of the info on your screen it’s a ton of fun. If you like the dark souls style of combat (heavy emphasis on dodge-and-punish, demands near-perfect execution), you’ll like AC.
It’s a compromise between the classic AC games that were a bit more mech-y and a Soulslike (note that even the classic games were very fast-paced, we’re not talking about Mechwarrior here). Some people call it “Sekirobot” because it’s moved away from a few of the mech-y aspects and is more about high-speed soulslike combat but with a rocket-pack, guns, and homing-missiles.
I haven’t played the series since AC2, and I was pretty young so I don’t recall how tough the aiming was, but no I wouldn’t say the way they implement it in this one makes it too easy at all.
If you are set on using the old method, there’s a way to turn it on relatively early in the game. I tried it for a few minutes, and it made the already somewhat difficult game impossible (for me). Your mileage may vary.
That said, the game is an absolute blast to play, I’m enjoying it so much. Even just the movement feels so goddamn good. From Software has done it again. And it’s not too “souls-y” at all imo. The only real From Soft staple I’ve noticed so far is amazingly well designed (and often tough as nails) boss fights.
It’s a wholly different style of play at close range. There’s no way to “get behind” an enemy AC as they turn on a dime and so do you. At long and mid range, it feels similar. It’s really not comparable to older games as you don’t feel like you’re in a giant robot most of the time- movement is prioritized for better and worse. I still like it but had to reconcile with that early on.
Yes. Things they changed from classic AC that I like: The assault-flight mode, the cooldown-based weapons, mouse and keyboard controls, some difficult and interesting bosses. The fact that you don’t have to pay for failed missions. Removing stunlocking.
Things I don’t like: fast rotation, loss of radar, general sameyness of the ACs compared to the more extreme oldschool designs. Sometimes it feels like the only important decision is “twogun or sword”.
Things I’m not sure about because they’re obviously “Sekirobot” but the old AC approach had some flaws: the new energy model, the boost-dodges, the new stun model.
Things about oldschool AC I’m disappointed still haven’t been replaced: The fact that buy/sell/install hasn’t been unified into a single screen instead of jumping back and forth between 3 screens. The fact that you don’t automatically start skating by default - why do you ever want to walk in modern Armored Core?
It’s a good compromise between Souls and AC, but there are definitely things I miss about the early games.
Yeah i see some defense of the studios in the comments but Devolver hasn’t released something I’ve heard of since the first Good Neighbor outside of potion craft and I only know that one because an off-handed recommendation from a friend l. Not to say I’m some penultimate opinion on games, but if your stuff doesn’t make waves I’m assuming you won’t get money.
Like, everyone wants a Stardew Valley, but only 1/10000000 indie games will receive that kind of love and only 1/100000 indie games would even deserve it. Some are legitimately awesome and present unique gameplay you can’t find anywhere else, and the rest, is shit. It’s poorly designed or implemented, it’s dated, or it’s another super generic RPG Maker level of game and those were NOT going to sell well anyway.
I dont know what the alternative is, but what it is now is shit.
Devolver has their hands on a ton of indie games. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Loop Hero, Deaths Door, Trek to Yomi, or Cult of the Lamb. Out of the Indie studios, they seem like the most likely to be able to push pass this.
Part of this article just feels like the capitalistic notion that profits should only increase and anything but that is failing:
"Expectations for Devolver this financial year were $115 million to $120 million, and they’ve had to go back to $90 million. The majority of that is the delay of big releases into 2024. I think those are decision for the right reasons, although investors won’t like it in the short term.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscription model WAS actually hurting smaller developers. I remember hearing people hypothesizing that would be the case for a long time.
If you have Gamepass or PlayStation Plus Ultra, you can play almost any small publisher game for free. With that set up, there’s a very large incentive to only play the games on the subscription service, instead of buying a full priced game to try out.
The problem is that once a small game is on the service, a large number of potential sales are going to be cannibalized by people playing on the subscription service instead of buying the game.
This leads to a scenario where your game needs to be on the subscription service and you have less sales because of it. This means that Microsoft and Sony have a large amount of power over the small publishers’ vitality, since a lot of money now needs to come from deals with them.
As Microsoft starts tightening its purse strings trying to make Gamepass profitable, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more small publishers suffering as a result.
Honestly, I would hope for that as well; but it seems very similar to the enshittification of Amazon (Wired link, archive link):
Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing more than 45 percent of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees.
Basically the notion is once a storefront has captured the bulk of potential customers, they are able to extort their suppliers however they want, since it’s the only way the suppliers can reasonably reach the customers.
Hopefully in this case, the publishers can explore other sales avenues; but it all depends on the reach of the subscription service.
The ways those two businesses function are dramatically different. Microsoft has a near monopoly of the operating system that powers gaming PCs, and they couldn't turn their store into the Amazon of PC gaming, not for lack of trying, because Steam already offers customers what they want in a far better way and any attempt to close off their operating system is met with market resistance. There's also the fact that the games market is so broad and diverse that Game Pass and Microsoft's stores are nowhere close to being the one-stop shop that an Amazon or a Walmart have historically been, and it's why they're nowhere close to capturing "the bulk of potential customers". They've got about 25-30M subscribers last I checked, which is substantial, but it doesn't even come close to the 100M+ monthly active users on Steam, let alone the wider games market. (Steam is easy to cite, because they make more of their data public, but obviously there are substantial pieces of the market on PlayStation and elsewhere.)
What developers and publishers get from Game Pass and PS+ is a lump sum that devs/pubs project will make up for the potential of lost sales, and if it doesn't, that the word of mouth from offering the game with those services will make up for it in sales outside of those subscription services. If the offer is too low, they don't take the deal. So the subscription service is either a subsidy or marketing or both, but that's only if the figure they're offered is high enough. Saying that Devolver or TinyBuild benefited from that boon in ramping up subscription offerings is one thing; in fact, it may have ripple effects that help them out long-term, as people are more familiar with their brands through subscription services now than they would have been otherwise. But if they're truly "suffering" from those deals being less generous, that's just going back to the old investing adage of "When the tide goes out, you can always tell who was skinny dipping", or to put it another way, they weren't adequately gauging their risk alongside a good deal that was never going to last forever. Judging by the article, Devolver will likely be just fine and TinyBuild is more of a question mark. I honestly had no idea TinyBuild was publicly traded. Both are making sensible long-term bets, at least for the most part...in TinyBuild's case, I hope they didn't invest too much into the likes of RawMen. Both companies were contrasted against Team17, who kept more consistently conservative projections.
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