So game companies have several ways to increase the ROI for their products: decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As it is hard for single-player titles to signficiantly icnrease the number of players, Novak believes that publishers will continue to charge more for their games. The new $70 base price already seems too much for many customers, so companies try to come up with tricky monetization methods, including various deluxe editions priced at $100 or even higher.
Absolute imbeciles. We’re living in an era where customers have less and less purchasing power, where people can - and should - make more precise decisions when buying products, with wide availability of other options that aren’t AAAA titles, so what are execs thinking of? Charge more, obviously.
It is unrealistic to invest 150 millions in a game and expect a profit because you’re disconnected from your customer base. And you have the bare minimum of self awareness to consider that investing less and expecting less growth is an option, but choose instead to ignore it and push ahead with infinite growth. The development schedule of your average AAAA title is already almost as long as a console generation, there’s nothing that can be done if suits are staring at this wall and choosing to bash their head against it, rather than try alternative options.
It’s the golden age of indie games. I’ve got dozens of games on my steam library made by a team of between 1 and 12 people that I bought for $20 or less. Those guys are doing great, and doing great work. I rarely ever even give a second glance to big AAA releases anymore, with a couple specific exceptions.
Slay the Spire is currently $8 USD on sale and is one of my most played games of all time. Deck building roguelike.
Caves of Qud is the single greatest modern classic roguelike that I’ve ever played and is also in my top 5 of most played games of all time. $20 USD. If you understand what the string of words “modern classic roguelike” means and that intrigues you then you’re in for a treat and a half.
Dead Cells speaks for itself on its store page and is technically out of price range for this at $25 when not on sale, but it’s worth the extra five bucks. It’s also worth the additional $25 for all the DLCs, after you’ve sunk 200 hours into the base game already.
Cult of the Lamb - ditto above about the price tag, you actually largely can’t go wrong with most things published by Devolver Digital. I own a significant percentage of their lineup and haven’t been disappointed. Devolver isn’t the dev company, but they take a lot of indie teams for publishing and I like them a lot. They’re good folks that sell good games.
Risk of Rain 2 - is also $25 but worth the squeeze. I’ll try to keep everything else in the price range.
Rift Wizard - $14.99, and the very similar but slightly superior Rift Wizard 2 at $17.99 are fun little strategy-heavy games about playing what amounts to wizard chess. The store page videos will describe this game better than I’m able to. It’s actually quite a good little game for people that enjoy games that require you to become ludicrously overpowered to survive.
Balatro - $14.99, the significant buzz around this game is entirely warranted, cursed poker will consume the next four months of your life. You have been warned.
Path of Achra - $9.99 A self described “broken build sandbox” that is, and very much looks like, a game made by one dude in his spare time. Don’t let the art fool you, I love it to pieces. Another game for people that enjoy games that require you to get super overpowered to survive.
Tiny Rogues - $9.99 I only recently got into this one. Great game, great replay value, check out videos to see if it’s for you.
Outside of the roguelike genre there are also a couple good ones that I’ll name, though I do admit this list will probably be shorter:
Siralim Ultimate - $19.99 is one of the grindiest monster collector games I’ve ever played but if you enjoy grinding that sort of game, you can build teams that would dunk your competitive Uber Pokémon team into the shadow realm. It has a ridiculous number of creatures with a ridiculous number of absurd abilities and you’ll find yourself farming this game on and off for like six years. Or I did anyway, I’ve been following the evolution of the game since Siralim 2 in 2016. You can also play any of them on your phone, which I actually find to be the superior experience for the most part because it’s a good game to play in 10-minute bursts over long periods of time. If you’re going to get any of them go straight to Ultimate, don’t bother with the others, it’s the same game significantly evolved over time.
Exanima - $14.99 Top down physics based melee combat RPG. Check the store page videos and youtube to figure out if this interests you. It very much did interest me, and after several years of dev silence the game is now being actively updated again, which is very exciting.
Ultrakill - $25 currently (I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t do this anymore…) Buy it on sale if you’re a fan of fast paced FPS games, say new Doom for example. Don’t read, just buy. Trust me on this one. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, I promise.
Hollow Knight - $14.99 The greatest metroidvania of our age and spawned more knockoffs than the genre namesakes did. Pls give silksong.
Sunless Sea - $18.99 This is a very slow and very story driven game about being a sailor in hell. Familiarity with the general setting of Fallen London is very beneficial but is not required. This game is slow. But if you can vibe with it, it will deliver one of the most deeply touching RPG stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. This game is truly a treasure that won’t be appreciated by most people. But even so I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t at least mention it for you to look at.
I have to stop myself here because I could go on about this all night and still not be done. Gaming is my main hobby and indie games are the main games I play. Name me a genre you enjoy and I’ll scroll around for recommendations if none of the above catch your eye.
After reviewing this list I have neglected to mention Shadows of Forbidden Gods, a Civ like where you play as Cthulhu, and more importantly I forgot to talk about Deep Rock Galactic and will be hurling myself into lava as penance at my nearest convenience.
“We’re literally stuck in a system where funding decides what gets made, everything that’s successful tightens the noose, and everything that’s unsuccessful is used as proof that we shouldn’t make more like it,” Ismail noted.
“So if you think things are bad now, wait until you see what’s coming, because as things get forced under larger & larger money-umbrellas for not being able to compete with Genshin/DFO/League /Roblox/etc., they’ll have to care more about promising money with whatever they do make.”
Basically, he is saying nothing can beat free-to-play games like Genshin and Roblox, which are earning tons through micro transactions. As for the quote in title, the second part says if you fail it will also lead to fewer games funded in genre.
He also says:
So I don’t know what the answer is & I’ve been looking for it as if my career depends on it because it kinda does. What I do know is that to get better, it’ll either take a full collapse of the industry, or “shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less”
In other words, as a gamer (specially if you don’t play those free-to-play games), there is nothing you can do.
I also find it funny he talks about risk, litterally, if Genshin Impact wasnt a success, Mihoyo would have went under. Blaming another company who was willing to take the risk of bellying up is a dumb stance to have just because you wanted to play it safe.
I get his general frustration with the F2P and making bank on microtransactions, but I think the Larian story somewhat contradicts that even though the road to BG2 was long and difficult. They've slowly been refining the work since the 90s and you can see this reflected in the reviews their games got. Sure, BG3 with that scale was still a risk, but it's built on so much knowledge they've built from the Divinity series that at least some of that seems mitigated.
That’s too bad. No doubt I appreciate it Steam for what it is, even knowing that I don’t actually own any of the software I buy from them. That being said, I try to support GOG where/when I can.
Is there any “easy” way to get GOG games running on a Steam Deck? It’s been awhile since I last tried to look into it, but back then it seemed like a lot of steps and a lot of places to potentially mess up the process. I believe I kind of got something working at one point, but I’d honestly have to go back and double check.
I’ll give that a try. I don’t game much, so that launcher was not necessarily on my radar. Is that something you always have to switch over to desktop mode in order to use it?
I switch over to desktop to install new games, but that isn’t strictly necessary - you could run Heroic in game mode and install from there.
Once a game is installed through Heroic it will automatically add a shortcut (I.e. Non-Steam game) to Steam. For the shortcut to be visible, however, the Steam client needs to be restarted. This is why I switch to desktop for all my installing needs then reboot in to game mode. When playing, I never need to leave game mode.
Download Heroic Launcher from the Discover app in Desktop mode and add it as a non-Steam game. You can log into your GOG account there. In a best-case scenario, which is more often than not, you just hit download, and you can play the game on Steam Deck.
But sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Steam will often bundle dependencies with your download, like DirectX versions or Visual Studio runtimes. To get these working, you’ll need to run “winetricks”, which can be done on a game-by-game basis from within Heroic, and then install the dependencies you need. To find out which dependencies you need, if you had trouble launching the game in the first place, you can check SteamDB and see what other “depots” the game has. This resolves the problem about 99% of the time, if there’s a problem at all. In one case, Phantom Fury, I was unable to get the same compatibility with the GOG version that I was with the Steam version, and I don’t know why. Also, at this point in time, I don’t think you can rely on cloud saves working, and you might need to rely on a solution like SyncThing, but it looks like cloud saves working reliably via Heroic is imminent, if it isn’t already since the last time I checked.
Gracias. I will give that a try. Still sounds a bit complicated, but for sure that sounds better than opening up a terminal and copy/pasting commands, some of which I’m not super knowledgeable about.
It is for sure more complicated, but you have to weigh that against actually owning the thing you buy. Also, I forgot a step in setting up Heroic launcher. You need to also go to the Wine Manager section and download the latest stable version of Wine-GE. It’s pretty straight-forward, but you’ll need a version of Wine to play Windows games.
I would agree, but XIV (the MMO) moved so far off the norm that I don’t really count it with the others. It managed to handle things pretty well, and was stomachable even if the combat mechanics aren’t often what draw people in.
Any other sources for this? Not for the job cutting, but for GoG’s business model going downhill? Haven’t big layoffs happened every few years since the start of GoG?
Not to diss his train of thoughts because it is hard to get money to fund risky projects. What he said is entirely base on the premise that vest majority of games are funded by publisher money, kickstarter or not that’s the reality for the longest time.
BUT, the part he is missing is that pitching is very important, the so called “risky” business is a economical/statistical analysis as of late. And you CAN get funding if you propose something that are sound and reasonable. Like today I was surprised that Immortals of Aveum has no microtransactions, even though the gear/resource interface hinted that at one point that’s probably considered. So EA, new IP, new engine tech, high spec req everyone spit at, can you come up with a even better counter argument to Rami? The game launched, after checking discord and discussions, consoles seems to run fine and smooth. I meet the 1440p/60fps requirement on PC so I took the plunge bought it this morning. Guess what, it delivered, I only tweaked 2 things, changing boarderless to full screen and disable vsync. Game is running very smooth on 60fps locked even at the big open field scene a youtuber tested yesterday that dips into 40+fps I have no issue at all running at exactly same location he did. (I did change the sensitivity settings on my mouse/in game so I don’t feel too dizzy cause there is no mouse smoothing, if your dpi set too high it’s actually hard to play. )
Will they be financially successful? I don’t know, it’s a big gamble for them and EA. But as far as Rami’s argument concerned, there is no problem getting funded and stick to your guns as long as you can prove to those doing the internal tests. Believe me, EA game with Denuvo, from dev I didn’t heard of, I did my homeworks and then decided to support them and took my risk. This is where I vote with my wallet. It works right after install and I haven’t run into bug/crash yet, and I hope this game is successful.
edit: is it fun? I also can’t be quite sure yet cause I just got out of tutorial area. But the mechanic is sound, KBM might be a bit odd on how they set the default bindings but you can change those, I did plan to give controller a try later.
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