BougieBirdie
Sometimes I make video games
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Y’know, the prickly thing about using AI for these things is that it seems to be fairly difficult to accurately accuse or deny that it was used.
Like, people see a trailer or a still and there’s something uncanny about it, so AI is the first thing people reach for. It’s kind of like the early days of Photoshop, people get dragged into debate that boils down to “look at the hands” or “check out these pixels.” But at the end of the day, identifying AI is all about the vibes (read: not a super accurate methodology)
And then on the flip side, if you’re defending your work against an accusation that you used generative AI, the only defense is, “trust us, bro,” and that’s not much of a defense either.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the trailer or the selected stills are works of AI. The trailer looks like the union of hyperrealism and stop motion that always bleeds into the uncanny for me - and it has for as long as we’ve been using graphics to tween stop motion frames.
I guess we really let the cat out of the bag with AI
When I originally saw the game on steam I felt a pang of nostalgia. Then I saw the kernel level anticheat and the F2P trappings and was so disappointed
I missed that Tencent had involvement though. Weirdly that makes me feel better. Not because I think that might make it a decent game, but more because it means that the people who made a game I liked didn’t have as much of a hand in this travesty.
It’s like having to kill a zombified loved one. It might look like them, but it’s not them anymore
I’ve got an idea for a game, I call it “Elmo’s Steaming Pile of Bingo”
Make a bingo card with all the horrible dark patterns in gaming on it.
A monthly fee to play a game where you can buy the battle pass with cryptocurrency and you get NFTs in the lootboxes. Watch ads during matchmaking, purchasable respawns, buy your way out of chat bans. The winning team can talk as much trash as they want on the post-game lobby while the losers are sent to farm captchas until they can play again
Get five boxes in a row and you win! I mean, we all lose, but you win!
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs - I know you know what they are, but for anyone reading who doesn’t) are such a terrible metric for performance. Like, yes, well performing teams generate good KPIs because they’re performing well. The minute a suit tries to actually tie a KPI to performance, people start gaming them and the product suffers.
A little bit of a segue here, but Factorio recently released some tidbits about their performance when they wrapped up development. They said they have 0.24 sales per line of code. Now they’re a very different team making a very different kind of game for a very different kind of market, so I take this as the amusing corelation it is without putting any stock into why that is.
Some project manager from Ubisoft is going to read that and think, “Well we can do better,” and start mandating more sales for less code. Next thing you know, devs are being punished for verbosity (an ironic twist on the classic and often abused KPI of how many lines of code are written) and before you know it you’ve got compound statements, nested ternaries, and inscrutable lambdas out the wazoo that make maintaining the code base impossible.
I wonder if I minified all my source code into a single line before compiling if I could game the system 🤔
I’m a big fan of Darkest Dungeon, but I’m also a chronic restarter. Building a roster of heroes is fun, but permadeath is so punishing. I have a similar problem in XCOM where you spend so long in a campaign building up your roster, then you lose your ace squad and the whole thing unravels
I really enjoyed Darkest Dungeon 2. There are some radical changes, but it still hits the core vibe and offers a more roguelike experience. Even if I fail my run in spectacular fashion, I’m able to start over on the next one. Far less frustrating than a whole new campaign
This one is completely different from your typical ARPG, but I’m going to recommend Noita.
It’s a 2d game where you play as a wizard off spelunking. The magic system is rad as heck, you find wands with spell slots in them, and spells that you can put in the wands. You can rearrange and combine spells to get some truly bizarre effects
I’ve killed myself in a dozen hilarious ways trying to make the perfect wand. It never gets old
I read the headline and thought “RIP for a real one”
Then I read “He was 69 years old” and I thought “Nice”
Wtf is wrong with me?
I’m looking over his IMDB page now and it’s a lot of memories. I always knew him as a B-movie horror legend, but it looks like he didn’t shy away from voice acting for films and games. A lot of good stuff there that I had no idea he was in
Goodnight, Candyman
“Why do you want to live? If you had learned just a little from me you would not beg to live. I am rumour. It is a blessed condition, believe me. To be whispered about at street corners. To live in other people’s dreams but not have to be. Do you understand?”
I guess ultimately it depends on what kind of games your family likes
As you mention, party games you only need one. If your family’s into single player or portables then each person needs one
How is it affordable? Well, it isn’t really. Although I guess a switch probably retails for about half the cost of a PS5
It’s funny though, if you compare it to other consoles, I think people are far less likely to buy an Xbox or Playstation for each family member. And yet, people would do that for the gameboy and DS without batting an eye. The switch is trying to be everything, for better or worse.
When we got ours, we were pretty content having just one and then playing party games or taking turns on single player games. Sooner or later though, we had to get another so we could play pokemon together. Which is a shame because my interest in pokemon seems to have suddenly fallen off a cliff and now my switch is collecting dust
So I guess all that to say: your mileage may vary
This looks like a screenshot from 7 Days to Die
This appears to be a farming plot that a player has buried into the terrain. Due to limitations in the engine, the terrain renders weirdly when it’s deformed this way. This creates a weird sort of edge in the terrain, which appears to be made of dirt, stone, and grass
I’m surprised and relieved to hear such a salient take.
It’s not really surprising that if the big names in gaming spend an enormous amount of budget on a game that it’s not automatically going to be a hit. After all, a large chunk of that time and money is spent on further monetizing the game. The more monetization features they work on, the less attractive a game becomes to the player. It feels like that should just be common sense, I’m surprised a bunch of business majors never learned that they need a good product.
Like, honestly, a game isn’t going to automatically generate enormous profit just because a lot of money has been spent on it. It also has to be a decent game in its own right.
This is something that indie gamers have been saying probably as long as there’s been indie gaming. Maybe it will carry more weight when a suit says it. But then, he’s a former executive, so maybe it won’t have as much impact as it should.
Time for an anecdote:
I can think of two Blizzard games that I really enjoyed until they had a 2.0 release. Both used the 2.0 as an opportunity to change their monetization model in favour of squeezing more cash from players. They’re Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch.
Heroes of the Storm was free, but had a cash shop where you could buy cosmetics. Each cosmetic was listed for individual purchase. There were bundles, but if you really wanted just a single skin you could buy it for about $5-$15. That’s not an unreasonable price and I was happy to support a free game by buying the occasional skin for my favourite heroes.
When Heroes of the Storm had their 2.0 rework, they changed the cosmetic shop to be based entirely on lootboxes. You could no longer get the things you specifically wanted and had to rely on random chance. You could of course get more lootboxes by throwing more money at the game, but you’d have to buy way more lootboxes for a chance to get the thing you wanted. That turned me and a lot of players off of the game, and it wasn’t long after 2.0 that Blizzard stopped active development and put the game in maintenance mode.
Funny enough, Overwatch did the opposite, but it was still a step towards greed and super frustrating. In the original release, you had a lootbox based economy and a cosmetic shop where you could spend currency earned from the lootboxes to buy skins. Lootboxes were available for free as you played, but also available for purchase. You could ultimately get whatever you wanted just by playing the game enough.
When Overwatch 2 came out, the model switched to free-to-play and battlepasses. The free stuff you could get was limited to something like half the battlepass cosmetics (you can buy the pass to unlock more), and the cosmetic shop became a cash shop with insane valuation of skins. I think the average skin is like $30, and often they’re only available in bundles where you have to spend even more to also get skins that you might not care about.
In an attempt to reach more market, Overwatch 2 was released on Steam. This was the first (and I think only?) platform that Overwatch got released to where users can leave reviews on the game. It has a 20% recommendation rate, which is categorized as “Mostly Negative” and makes it one of the worst releases of all time on Steam. And this is for a game that you can play for free - it costs you nothing and people are trying to warn you not to waste your time.
The reworks between Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch are both examples of studios taking a beloved game in its own right, and lobotomizing it to make it more profitable. Never forget what they’ve taken from us.
I’m pretty dialed into indie games. What kind of games do you like? I might be able to recommend some. I get most of my indie recommendations through word of mouth or curators.
The steam store page has an algorithm tuned to your preferences. If you’ve already been playing a lot of live service games, then it assumes you must like them. Once you start showing an interest in other games, you can probably just cruise through your discovery queue.
To skip the algorithm, you can try looking at the steam store web page in a private / incognito window. But if most of the money makers are live service or free-to-play then that may just be the default offering.
I’d love to see more developers with this attitude.
Atmosphere? Love it. Dread? Great! Darkness? Tolerable. Jump Scare? No thank you.
Jump scares are like the fart jokes of horror. Cheap thrills, low craftsmanship, and turns people off of the market.
And that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the occasional jump scare. They can be tastefully made, or used sparingly. Less is often more with these, and it helps add to the tension knowing it might come up again. But if they’re just non stop they lose their payoff quickly.
I agree that it’d be nice if they depreciated in value like in the days of physical media.
In those days though, the store only has a certain amount of shelf space. So in that sense it makes sense that they depreciated because a new game is always going to have a higher perceived value.
Digital storefronts don’t have that problem. The game can be shared infinitely without accruing a ton of publishing costs. There’s always more shelf space.
In this sense, there’s no financial motivation to depreciate. And we all know the social responsibility of big companies will be to only do what they’re forced to do.
We often feel games ought to depreciate because that’s how it’s always been. But just because that’s how it’s always been doesn’t mean that’s how it always will be.
Battlefield is an interesting case though where each game in the franchise is highly derivative of the previous game. So if each new game is essentially an upgrade of the previous one, then I’d agree that there should be an expectation that the older version is less expensive.
The same could be said about many of the giant titles. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and most major sports games come to mind.
One final thing to think of is that many games have continuing development. It’s basically the early access model (a whole other can of worms), and you could argue that many of these games appreciate in value. Some notables have - Factorio comes to mind.
I don’t think Battlefield 2042 falls into that category though
Discounts on games creates a sense of urgency in the buyer, as most discounts are temporary. Since discounts are often shown on the front page of a storefront, it gets a lot of eyeballs on it. If someone’s wishlisted the game then they’ll even usually get a direct notification.
Another way to look at it is that the game is always available at the full price. But if you’re a patient gamer then you can expect to get a lower price eventually.
Depending on how much discretionary income you have, you might be forced to wait for a sale. Or the difference in price might be no object to you. Or you may have to hoist the black flag.
Something else to consider is that the perceived value of the game differs from buyer to buyer. If I’m a big fan of a niche genre, I might be willing to spend more on a weird game than the average user. A $30 game might be worth it for me, but you might only think it’s worth $20
And more to that point, it’s extremely difficult to nail down the exact value of a game. What honestly separates a $12 game from a $15 game when they both offer a unique experience?
Anyway, all this to say, I don’t think having sales on games is strictly a predatory thing. Sometimes a discount is the only way you’ll get eyeballs on your game, or a way to reach more of the market that wouldn’t have otherwise bought your game.
I do agree that modern AAA prices are out there. I don’t pay very much for games now, and usually AAA prices me right out of the market
I once played this game that was styled as a museum of lockpicking mini games throughout the history of games. Super niche, but I’m in game dev so I eat that stuff up.
In four different places the curator mentioned that the lead developer Daniel Vávra is a terrible human. But they also acknowledged that the lockpicking was unique and interesting in that game. It read something like I imagine a museum with an exhibit of the Nazis enigma machine would - innovation spurred by terrible people.
If you’re on the fence about the game, know that the lead dev is a gamergate chud. But if you want a whitewashed and misogynistic game with a thin veneer of “historical accuracy” then I guess the game is on the cheap right now.
If we were to compare it to our day jobs, the opportunity cost for the team and me would probably be around ten grand.
If we compare the time spent to the money earned, then we’re each worth several cents an hour.
It’s a good thing I didn’t get into game dev for the money, it seems I’m quite bad at it
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Thank you all so much for your interest! :)
The game is called Shoot Your Friends. It’s a death match couch game for 2-4 players who share a screen and pilot tanks around an arena.
Please be aware that it is somewhat niche, it’s only compatible with controllers and local multiplayer. But if you ever get the gang over for game night it can be a fun way to spend the evening.
@[email protected] I completely agree with this take. You don’t need to get the secret ending or unlock everything or anything like that, but the sequel builds on mechanics from the first one. You can do more stuff in the second game, and I’d also say that it’s a bit more difficult too.
IMO I prefer the basic ending to the true ending of Hotline Miami 1.
spoiler
It feels like it’s targeted at the player instead of the character, and I eat up those meta storylines.
I’m hoping they keep working on Darktide. I played it on gamepass when it came out, and the gameplay feels just great, but the progression is very bare-bones and doesn’t really feel complete.
Vermintide went through a similar period too, so I have hope that it’s going to be a great game eventually. Fatshark has something of a reputation for making games that feel great but then just boondoggling some kind of implementation. It seems like they’re devs that care, but their corporate overlords keep their hands tied too.
Say what you will about the woke gaming agenda, I love to see a company brave enough to take this stance. It’s refreshing to see a publisher wear its beliefs on its sleeve because now I know that I don’t have to spend money on their trash games