did you read the article? do you understand the state that the industry is in atm? Yes there are indie games and yes they are great, but it has become incredibly difficult to break into the industry. Most of the indie games that we celebrate these days are coming from devs that entered the indie scene over a decade ago, devs like Supergiant or Davey Wreden. We still have breakout debut hits like Balatro, but it’s becoming harder and harder. The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery. Gaming publications are flatlining left and right, so you can’t look to them for discovery anymore. 1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago. Balatro broke big because of a lucky discovery by NorthernLion, but the reach of creators like NorthernLion is shrinking every day.
TikTok and its peers are the new normal, and as the article discusses, this eats up the exact recreation time that people have been putting into video games and other long-form media. The kids don’t care about indie games because Tiktok is more fun/addictive. If they play videogames at all, they only care about Fortnite and Roblox and maybe some gacha game on their phone. Some of them care about indie creations within Fortnite and Roblox, but obviously even those games are becoming long in the tooth.
So idk. Maybe Tiktok will become the new main discovery platform and this is how the industry will survive, but it remains to be seen if people will actually get off of Tiktok to go play the games in question, or if people will just stay glued to Tiktok itself.
I hit a wall recently with Star Wars Outlaws. The open world is cool until you realize that every enemy base has two or three possible entry points, complete with yellow-painted paths. There’s no room for creative infiltration - either you do it Ubisoft’s way, or it isn’t possible in the game. The NPCs in the open world just drive around aimlessly. It doesn’t feel like anyone in the world is trying to achieve anything besides you. It makes me realize how far we have come with modern open world games like the recent Zelda games. Without room for emergent gameplay, an open world feels like little more than a framing device for a game that is actually linear.
i would feel okay about it if the energy cost of AI wasn’t so astronomical. It would be a fun quirk to play an open-world game full of characters that can sort of hold a conversation with you like this. But if we have to boil oceans to do it (and we still do as of this writing), then it just seems beyond frivolous. I love video games, but nothing in a video game is important enough to justify that energy cost.
hell yeah the rumors is true. Well it LOOKS solid, but i don’t know how much actual info there was to glean out of that video. This is coming from a different studio than the people that brought you THPS 1+2, so it remains to be seen if Iron Galaxy can pull off the same kind of loving remake that Vicarious Visions gave us in 1+2. I think Iron Galaxy was responsible for the Killer Instinct reboot, so we know they have some cred on bringing old games back to life.
I saw a YT comment that said “I feel like this is like peeking at your presents before Christmas then pretending to be surprised on Christmas day” and that’s where I’m at. Basically all rumors confirmed, in the best way. Looking forward to those magnetic joycons 🙏