No, you don’t understand, if they hadn’t cut UT to do Fortnite, Epic would be destitute and wouldn’t have enough money to make the games people actually want them to make…wait…
Time will tell. I mean, he’s not wrong. I think it’s pretty clear that studios have to make profitable games at the cost of interesting games. But it’s not like msft or anyone else is going to change their behavior. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to profit as much as possible.
I have to think part of this is just all the ancient representatives we have. They’ve lived long enough to know what gambling looks like, and what good ol’ sports ball looks like, and by golly nobody can tell 'em any different!
I would use the term “licensing” rather than leasing. A video rental store “leases” the license.
But the point is, they’re selling you a license to play the game, and then at some point after sale, without you knowing when or why, they rescind the license without compensating you. Any reasonable person would think that purchasing a game means a license to play it indefinitely, especially if you received some kind of binary in exchange for money at the point of sale.
It’s the difference between Uber offering a subscription model, but then a year later suddenly saying they don’t offer it anymore, vs Tesla selling you a car, but a year later disabling features on it, saying, “you were merely licensing/leasing those features”.
This should be a legal requirement, imo. It’s unreasonable for them to sell a game to people, and then make it impossible to play because they weren’t making enough anymore. That’s like making a movie unwatchable because dvd sales dropped
The expected profit margin when you try to make a genuinely good passion project is razor thin, if it’s there at all. There are two kinds of games that make money: outliers and whale hunters. When we think of good games proving the games industry wrong, we’re thinking of outliers. The rest of the industry is whale hunters.
In theory you could create some kind of game dev collective where a bunch of indie devs all work on their own thing under the same umbrella, and if any of them make it big, they all split the take to fund the group going forward. But you run into all the same logistical difficulties that normal communism runs into: what does leadership look like? how do you hold members accountable? what does contributing look like when development hell can look like not delivering anything for years, or forever? who pays the lawyers who have to figure that all out?
Silicon valley often had “incubators” which are kind of a middle ground between collectivism and capitalism. An investor funds a shoe string budget to several start up ideas to create minimum viable products. If one looks promising they all switch to shipping that and they’re all part owners.
I’m kinda surprised we don’t see more game dev incubators. Maybe indie outliers are just that rare.
Yeah, I generally don’t like most rogue likes though, because they often lean on procedural levels and there’s usually not an “ending”. So I play it enough that I feel like I get it and then I’m done.
Minit is one that comes to mind. It would actually be rad if someone put Minit on an OG Gameboy cartridge. I think it totally would have worked as a Gameboy game with no save data.
Edit: ah I forgot that there is a bit of info retained between runs, like spawn position.
Apart from preferring Kirby in Smash, the only Kirby game I’ve played is Kirby’s Dreamland on Gameboy. They hadn’t yet figured out how to persist save data in those cartridges, and it didn’t have any codes. So you had to beat it in one sitting, which I could do as a kid, which was no small fear for that era of gaming. Replaying it meant finding where the secrets are, making runs quicker each time.
I kinda like this concept of no save, I think there aren’t many games, even retro-themed ones, that make use of it as an element.