Ghost Ship did not self-publish DRG, they published with Coffee Stain. The publishing deal started in 2017, with Embracer/THQ buying Coffee Stain a year later in 2018. And even later buying Ghost Ship, as well.
DRG was never an indie, it was published by Coffee Stain Publishing, which is a subsidiary of Coffee Stain, which in turn is a subsidiary of Embracer.
Ghost Ship got fully acquired by Embracer in 2021, though their publishing deal with Coffee Stain started in 2017, before Embracer had even touched either company.
They seemed to be acquiring and funding good things for a while there, and then out of the blue went “oops, spent a bit too much there lol, gotta melt some of these down for cash” and then threw some seriously good shit right into the crucible.
After the initial trouble with the Zero Dawn port (which they actually put in the work to fix), the ports have been stellar.
The extensive accessibility settings and configurable graphics have been even more accommodating than some PC-only titles.
And sony has been releasing drivers for the PS controllers so that ported PS5 games could still access and use the unique features on the DS5 controller, even when not running on an PS5. And not just on windows, but on Linux too. Sony has been going out of their way to not just bring the games over, but to explicitly support unique features they could have locked down and made exclusive to PS consoles.
Getting to play with the half/full adaptive trigger pull for main/secondary fire in Rift Apart on PC, was really cool.
It almost feels too good to be true in comparison to companies like Apple and Nintendo.
But how are we going to emulate proprietary online services for games relying on them?
Games preservation should be legally enshrined, and require client and server source code to be published if a provider decides to stop running the online services required to play.
The Expanse was fantastic. I’d love to see the rest of the books adapted some day…
As for other sci-fi, my god there’s so much good shit in literature that will never be seen on a screen.
The Three Body Problem is getting several adaptations, one of which might or might not fix my issues with that series, but it does have conceptual potential.