I understand their point - the bar has been raised a lot for indies over the year - localisation, controller support, ultrawide support, scalable UI and text, colorblind support, modding, multiplayer, etc. are all much more "required" nowadays, but that's just the way things go - there was a time when even save-games weren't necessary.

But saying it'll harm the indie CRPGs is bizarre. This will greatly increase the audience for CRPGs as far more people try it out, and then want to try other titles when they finish it. I'd expect Solasta, Pathfinder, Pillars Of Eternity to all benefit in a few months (the only down-side being that none of these have multiplayer).

But I wish more companies would release their tooling as Open Source like id Software used to. It'd help to alleviate this a bit, even just auxiliary stuff for popular engines.

[–] dog@suppo.fi 1 points 1 year ago

Everything you listed as "the bar" are just things everyone knows already. And don't contribute towards game development time, aside from localization, which isn't expected except by chinese players.

Thing is, the tools and literal hand-in-hand tutorials for indies are what make those a non-issue. It's extremely easy to make a game these days, and release it.