Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
The Masterplan is a true heist game. You know that fantasy of playing out a heist from Heat? This is that game. It’s top down, and you control all of the members of the crew. You pick your time to initiate the heist, you hold up people at gunpoint, you prevent them from being a hero, and you try your best to get out with the best score that you can. It’s a real bummer that this team never got to make another game.
Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There’s a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it’s now down to $1, and it’s a steal at that price.
As written, this is a tough one to answer. I’m well served in most genres bar a few, and I probably wouldn’t want to see new entries from the people who made the old ones. For instance, I miss stealth games and Splinter Cell, but I wouldn’t want Ubisoft to make it. I would love to see a new Metal Arms, but Blizzard (and now also Microsoft) owns that one. I miss racing games like Burnout and F-Zero, but I wouldn’t trust EA or Nintendo to make a successor that makes me happy. So really, I think I want new stuff that’s more of a spiritual successor type of deal.
I’d love to find a $40 PVP FPS. That has split-screen and lets me host my own server. Tuned to work with small groups and large groups. This one is just tied to a server that I don’t control and will inevitably die a painful death.
I’m with you, but they’ve got a very generous 30 day refund policy, no matter how many hours played, if it doesn’t work. So far, I’ve only had to use it once, on Phantom Fury, which is Verified on Steam but had issues in the tutorial through GOG; some day I’ll pick up the Steam version and see if it does any better. I also buy my GOG games through Heroic launcher, which has a referral link so that some of the revenue of my sale goes toward the development of Heroic. That way GOG knows that if they want all of the revenue from my sale, it’s clear what they have to do to earn it.
And as a reminder, there are Linux native games on GOG. I just played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami on the native Linux version from GOG.
I just played through it for the first time recently, as my first foray into this genre, and I did feel like the game sorely needed a dodge move, which of course every new entry in this genre now has.
Well then I guess your recommendation would be to keep trying to be Rocket League, even though statistically you’re going to leave a crater in the ground formed by hundreds of millions of dollars and the better part of a decade of work? Keep in mind there are single player games that make more money than Rocket League too, if we’re going to cherry pick.
It’s not confusion. Your perspective is survivorship bias. For every Rocket League, there are 10 Concords. That’s why the entire industry is imploding right now. Everyone thinks their game will be Fortnite, but only so many games can be Fortnite, and a lot of that even comes down to luck, so you’ve got games like Avengers and Suicide Squad losing hundreds of millions of dollars each instead of making games for half or a quarter of their budgets that would have recouped their costs and then some.
When your game isn’t live service multiplayer, your incentives change to putting out more sequels rather than iterating on the same game. So your revenue per game goes down, but there’s no reason it can’t necessarily be as lucrative overall.
There’s plenty of room to monetize single player games when it’s add-in content to games that you continually replay as opposed to add-on content for something that’s story driven. More systemic games like Civilization, roguelikes, simulators, etc.