Games

I love long complicated games, like breath of the wild, but I think the world also needs more concise games, those 20-40 hour masterpieces that keep you wrapped up without having to memorize 3600 pages of back story to remember where you left off.

What the studios (especially Nintendo) don't understand is you can't charge the same ~$60 for both games. People don't hate shorter simpler games, they just hate paying the same price for less content.

Right now, Nintendo is selling the Switch version of Link's Awakening for only $10 less than TOTK ($60 vs $70). That's right, a remake of a 20+ year old game with a pretty limited story is selling for almost the same as the largest most complex and expansive game Nintendo has ever produced.

I don't know why they're so fixated on matching prices between games that took orders of magnitude different amounts of effort to produce.

"And games will be less fun of course"

Anyway...Have y'all tried Animal Well?

It has never been easier to make A Game. The only thing getting harder is meeting shallow expectations imposed by empty suits. What a small team can accomplish in a few months keeps expanding, and unless you chase some zillion-dollar trends, what they can do is plenty.

Shareholder puppets like Microsoft should figure this out - they demand instant turnaround. They own enough studios to have several of them try cranking out six games in two years. If you want it to happen faster, use fewer people. I dunno, build a friggin' pipeline for indie devs to slap together a killer idea that gets fixed-up, art'd, and polished by different teams. Then you can sell more things to more people for more chances to trip into a brand new trend. You don't have to perform ritual sacrifice when a decade-long project makes a shitload of money! You can still get angry when the actual profits are less than the number you made up in your head! Just-- put money behind cool things that cost $20, instead of constructing situations where people have to spend $140 each or you lose. It's like a fuckin' Mad TV skit. Spend less, sell more.

What he's saying is that major studios are locked playing chicken with each other, and that the industry is going to remember the 1983 crash fondly in comparison with what's going to happen.

There are too many breakout indie hits developed by one person or a small team that prove this isn't true across the industry.

AAA development may be that way because there are higher expectations, just like blockbuster movies invest heavily in special effects and A-list celebs. But at the end of the day gamers just want to be entertained.

We have to go back

It doesn't have to though. Tools are so easy to use now and the gaming industry will never have a shortage of people trying to get jobs in it, there is no reason that so many games need to be spending 5+ years in devepopment.

Among the games I've recently played and enjoyed:

• Nova Drift
• Rule the Waves 3
• Dominions 6

Those are all one- or two-man efforts.

I also like some games with much larger teams, but I'm not sure that things are simply getting bigger.

how about no?

Sooooo

Phisticated

Just as long as they don't hop onto the procedurally generated bandwagon. While I appreciate the attempts at making unique gameplay while focusing less on level generation, those types of games end up making me feel like a hamster on a wheel.

Because they ban us from changing the source code: that's what they won't tell you.