- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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I’ve found some of my favorite smaller games from watching twitch streams of people searching for new games.
It’s got to be miserable to make a game and know its probably going to be lost in the sea.
My favorites are Heaven’s Vault, Astronaut: The Best, and Wazhack.
I would hope most of the industry learned a big lesson from Apex Legends. The day before its release, no one knew of its existence. The sole reason that it blew up was because it was fun.
Viral sharing of interactivity is likely the most cost effective way to run a marketing campaign for games - not bus ads, pre-order hype, etc. In other words, Make good games.
Good games fail to make their money back all the time. It’s not enough to just make a good game. In the case of Apex Legends, a game that needs to keep you playing long term at the expense of others, it needed to not only be good but also be earlier to market than its competitors, which is impossible to plan for. Its success involves a lot of luck, too, and using it as an example is survivorship bias.
Almost like things were better when we bought physical goods, instead of slop inside a program.
Take off your rose-tinted glasses. We would be having this issue with physical goods as well because every game would still be competing for the attention of the customer with every other game ever released. The only thing physical goods would do is chop off the legs of the indie scene because it would simply be too costly to put their random ideas on a disc. Vampire survivors wouldn’t exist without digital releases, Balatro also probably wouldn’t exist. A lot of even weirder indie games wouldn’t exist because the cost of physically releasing them would be too much to take these random chances of releasing something weird.
I will highlight the existence of shareware, freeware, and other indie physical distribution channels. Both IBM compatibles and other PCs had “homebrew” scenes, not dissimilar to the “indie” scene today. The Amiga is still noted for the PD offerings it boasted. Many of the big companies now started as Indies. So, no.
Maybe I’m not old enough but I don’t remember a time where shareware and freeware were part of a physical distribution channels. Most of my shareware I found on the internet and my knowledge of the Amiga public domain comes from Aminet, which started as a FTP site. I still had to get physical discs for full games, but shareware and abandonware I could easily find on the web.
As for for many big companies starting as indies. I’m not arguing “indie” didn’t exist back then, my point was that it was too expensive for most people to be indie. The fact that we had 10-20 “indie” studios (kinda hard to call them indie when most of the time they also ended up being publishers for other studios) back in the day and now we have thousands of indie studios supports my point that it is easier to be indie today than it was when physical media was dominant. Part of it is because of easier development tools, part of it is easier publishing.
