Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the other game that ruined his reputation for me is Godus. He funded it with a kickstarter with the promise it would be a successor to the God-Sim genre like Populous. It turned out to have all of the dark patterns of mobile games (time-gating with micro-transactions), but in a PC game.
The cautionary note against “feminist propaganda” is a reminder that Game Science have yet to respond to allegations of pervasive sexist behaviour from November last year. In a lengthy report for IGN, Rebekah Valentine and Khee Hoon Chan described “a studio plagued by claims of sexism”, linking this to misogyny elsewhere in the Chinese games industry and on the government-firewalled Chinese internet. The developers have raised the drawbridge in response: when Edders attended a preview event earlier this year, they refused to say anything on the subject in advance.
Any novel idea that gets a modicum of success is immediately and repeatedly flogged to death by copy-cats, both indie and corporate, for the next several years until the gaming public is sick of seeing it. See any recent successful gaming trend for an example.
TLDW: 8 minutes of vacuous navel-gazing which could have been distilled to the following 4 sentences:
But who involves themselves that much with games? Critics, journalists and enthusiasts. But what percentage of the whole do these people make? If you’re watching this video right now I imagine you’d be considered an outlying statistic a few steps away from the average demographic the industry continues to target.
Non-endemic companies such as Google and Amazon are among the biggest threats to the games industry.
That’s according to former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, who shared his thoughts on the future of games during the keynote at last week’s GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit in Seattle.
The irony is palpable throughout this entire article.