Sure. My point is that AAA studios have massive marketing budgets so it’s more likely you’ll consider them than an indie that you night like more. We need a better way for good indies to get noticed.
How did they settle on AC? Is that the only game that would ever appeal to them, or did one of their friends introduce them and they got hooked? How many of them played Balatro or Among Us and other “viral” games?
The way to market to these people is to get that one person in a friend group to try something new and sell their friends on it. I used to only play a handful of games too, and back then it was mostly StarCraft and Halo. Then a friend introduced me to FTL, Factorio, and Minecraft (back when the last two launched, not what they are today), and I fell in love with indie games. All it takes sometimes is a single experience to show people what they’re missing.
Second Wind
I took a quick look, and it seems to be a mixed bag of content, from first time experiences with games to meta discussions on what makes parts of games great and interesting. Looking at last dozen or so videos, it’s mostly bigger games like Borderlands, Hollow Knight, and Subnautica. If you play any indie games, you’ll hear about those (and Borderlands isn’t even indie).
I think what I’m looking for is something that goes over the top new games from the last month or something, with deeper dives between those videos.
I’ve found niche games to scratch a certain itch I’ve had just by going to the Steam search and filtering by tags
I’ve done the same, and it’s way more miss than hit. When I finally find a hit, it’s usually a few years old, and is going for a fraction of the launch price.
For any given game, I can usually find a decent review by some random fan on YouTube, but going the other direction is a lot harder.
You’re not going to convince the Madden/FIFA/etc group because community is more important than the game itself. The same is true for the big competitive games, since again, community is more important than the game itself.
The rest of the market is massive though, and even the people who only play a handful of games still pick up the occasional game to play on their own.
The solution here, IMO, is a high profile reviewer that focuses on indie games. In fact, we don’t really need reviewers going over AAA games because their marketing departments are already handling it. I want professional reviewers who try hundreds of indie games every year and promote the top 10-20 or so. Indie games are some of my favorite, but finding them is incredibly time consuming.
I disagree. The PC gaming market is about $76.67B. That’s ~$4M for each of the 18,626 games, most of which are asset flip crap. Many of the remainder are by indie devs (generally <30 people). The article mentions about ~10% of those games receive 500 or more Steam reviews, so we’re probably looking at $40M on average person game w/ 500+ reviews (i.e. probably not asset flip crap).
There are only about 20-30 AAA games released every year. The indie game market size is about $5B, and that’s across platforms. Even if that was only for PC games, that’s still 85% going to AAA studios, as in those 20-30 games that get media attention.
We don’t have too many games, we have a problem where too few people buy indie games. The average successful indie studio isn’t making $40M per game, it’s likely much less than that.
Can confirm, my neighbor makes indie films, and I don’t live in Hollywood or anything, just a random town in Utah. There are more than you and I expect.
Really? They had some bangers in the 90s, such as Road Rash and Need for Speed, as well as a ton of great games they published, like Sim City. Even their sports games were generally great.
It wasn’t really until the 2000s and 2010s that their games became money grabs.
Mine exists so I can avoid the front page. I have it filtered to show only discounted games, so when I need a game, there’s almost always something I’m interested in that’s on sale since I have over 100 games on that list.
I just open the Steam app on my phone periodically. I have over 100 games there, so there’s usually a few on sale on any given day. I have my wishlist set to “discount” so only games on sale are shown, and I check it periodically and buy when a game gets to an interesting price.
It’s an opportunity cost. What other games would have otherwise shown? If the game isn’t appealing, that’s poor use of ad space and could result in lost sales for another game that would then in its place.
I think it’s the right thing to do, though perhaps the window should’ve been longer, like 3 days. But saying it costs nothing isn’t accurate.
I’m the same way. I’ll periodically prune it, but most of the games there have been there over a year. If the game goes on a really good sale, I might get it, but I probably won’t.
When it comes to suicide prevention, the most effective solution I’ve seen presented and implemented are red flag laws, yet suicide and mass shooting rates don’t seem particularly impacted by that. It turns out people are really bad at taking advantage of those laws, and there’s always the risk that innocent people get hit as well.
We already have laws in place in most (all?) of the country that, if actually followed, would prevent a lot of these cases (not suicide, but access to guns). You already can’t own guns if you have a felony, if you’re on certain medications, or have a history of mental illness. The problem is that many people don’t actually get officially evaluated for mental health, don’t report medications, etc, so the laws end up missing the very people they’re intended to prevent from getting guns.
And then when we look at suicide statistics, the US isn’t all that different from European countries at 15.6 per 100k, France at 16.6, Germany at 12.9, and Belgium at 18.4 (IIRC, guns are largely banned in those countries). The US is higher than its neighbors (i.e. Canada has 9.4, and Mexico has 7), but I don’t think that’s a smoking gun here since Europe also has a wide range (UK is 9.5 and Spain is 8.7). Guns existing doesn’t seem like a major factor in suicide rates, it just happens to be the most convenient method so it gets used the most. If guns were effectively restricted from suicidal people, the biggest change we’d likely see would be shifting from firearms to other methods of suicide, not a significant drop in overall suicide rates (though maybe an initial drop due to delayed suicides).
Real solutions here are hard, and banning guns is comparatively easy, but I really don’t think it would actually solve the problem.