It’s really telling how their shiny new games are so lacking in substance that they are afraid of retro games. ‘Surely it can’t be that out generic mmofps crafting shooter collectathon battle Royale clone game is bad. It must be that damn Tetris game stealing all our sales!’
They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases.
To be fair, as an indie dev one of my major concerns during development has been why someone would buy my game when they could just download a ROM of something in a similar genre. It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t use pixel art.
I don’t know what you are developing, but I mostly play RPGs. And sure, I tend to go towards older games I’ve played and know a lot. But I also picked up Eiyuden Chronicles, Sea of Stars, and Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 and played them through completely.
The issue for me is that new games try really hard to emulate and reference older titles in the genre. They act as a love letter to the original games and, in my humble opinion, end up worse for it.
The developers chase nostalgia and don’t let their games stand on their own two feet. They don’t trust the game they made to be good without being propped up by the old games they reference. They fail to write a compelling and unique story instead of filling them with references to games they loved. In some cases, they try to have all these different systems and mini games that were innovative in their original form, but now are clodged together and fighting each other for my limited attention.
Take Eiyuden Chronicles for example, I loved the Suikoden games and have played them multiple times. But they added every single minigame from the 5 games that came before it as well as adding new ones. I couldn’t focus on the story while trying to navigate all these little systems. I’m not young and with a ton of free time anymore. I don’t want to study in order to figure out some skill tree with hundreds of branching options. I don’t want to feel like I’m missing out on story or game play because 20 minutes in I had to make a decision where I wasn’t aware of the consequences.
Personally, I just want an emotional story that I can immerse myself in without having to study how to play a game or time pressure where I can’t enjoy the journey.
Anyway, if you take anything away from that long winded rant it should be: if you make your game good, trust that it will be able to stand on its own against those old ROMs then people WILL play it and love it. Don’t compare yourself to the past and people falling back to their “comfort games” and make your game as great as you can. Create the game that you love and would want to play and know that others will want to as well.
My game is linked to in my profile. It’s a metroidvania that also takes influence from immersive sims like System Shock and Deus Ex as well as cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback. It uses a combination of high-definition 2D art (sometimes with normal maps applied for lighting) and cel-shaded 3D graphics.
They’re pissed cause the talent that made all their great games have all moved on and they can’t figure it out like indie studios can.
What? How is that game selling!? Theres no season pass, new content isn’t constantly being revolved, and theres no in-game storefront?! This doesnt make sense!
- AAAA Execs
Well, get downloading. I’m waiting…
(If you know of better torrents to seed, let a guy know)
How else are publishers going to charge you for the same game every 7 years?
Not gonna lie I’ve bought Minecraft like 8 times at this point for my 3 kids over the years for various platforms. Most recent was the Switch
Minecraft at this point is one purchase for all platforms
Came here to argue, left with Minecraft installed on my phone
FYI, you can play Java edition on Android using Pojavlauncher.
Yoo congrats. Cubes on the go
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Maybe come up with titles that are more compelling and can be played anywhere? If your competition is retro games you’ve done a shit job.
Like two months ago
The idiots are acting like we don’t already have it all and they’re just marking themselves to be ignored when they try to hype up their latest cash grab.
The missing piece that very few people want to touch is that, at the heart of the industry (as with all industry), they intend to use games as a mechanism for social control. That becomes extremely difficult if they can’t change and adjust everything in response to modern issues.
Circuses, you say?
But are you also saying they need to impart social ideologies with them? Like what ones? Where you going with this?
Glorifying/justifying war? Or are you talking stuff in the realm of equal representation?
You’re thinking in far too limited a scope. It can be as basic as implanting certain ideas about how tasks are performed through the structure of gameplay.
Hell, it could just be implanting newly developed subliminal messaging through background acoustics, or adjusting the general mood of themes.
Oh, that’s even more engineered and conspiratorial than I was thinking. You’re right.
I mean, it’s just musing on what is possible. Certainly the motive exists to explore whatever is possible.
Hell, if you want conspiracy: They could train a generation from a specific culture on heroic epics, then train another generation of the global population with grievance porn to create villains.
Ah, ok. I was worried the W word was going to come up. 😬
I mean, I do personally think that’s an issue, but I think that it’s an issue which has been thoroughly astroturfed so any time someone attempts to use that term to succinctly describe the issue it evokes an antagonistic paradigm which prevents discussion of the actual issues. That’s actually a great example of how social media and journalism can be used to pre-program the conversation, to prevent real discourse.
The important thing to recognize is that the types of people who do these things will gladly use any issue at all which happens to serve their purposes. Treating the world as though certain issues are always good and other issues are always bad will make you easy prey for those such as them.
