Newer, cheaper competitors like the FPGBC are finally muscling in on the Analogue Pocket’s market, so I guess they’ve decided to double down on being the ‘premium option’.
The return on indie games (if there even is a return) is already vanishingly small for 99% of releases - printing and distributing physical copies would just be pouring even more money down the drain.
Wow - Take Two shuttering this studio AND Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) just a month after they announced they’re buying Gearbox for almost half a billion. Absolutely catastrophic mismanagement. What a shitshow.
I’m really not a fan of the trend for really long video essays, especially since it’s almost always padding and repeating similar points.
Anything up to 25 mins is usually fine, but 35+ is in the realm of ‘I’ll add it to Watch Later but never bother watching it’ and over an hour I’m just going to keep scrolling
I don’t think we need an article to figure out the answer: Slay the Spire was a megahit and it’s a copycat industry.
I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way either; there’re always plenty of devs finding interesting new angles on the current hot genre and creating genuinely interesting new games in the process, but also a huge number of devs that end up just chasing the trend and releasing something uninspired/derivative.