I think Digital Extremes, at least currently, is still very aware of what made them successful.

John Bain for example spoke out about the games potential very early, earning them a big influx of players, and they’ve previously stated that Warframe wouldn’t have been a thing if not for him. I guess it can be particularly contrasted with the fact that Warframe was kind of a Hail Mary project for the studio. They’d pitched it around for a while but no publisher responded positively. When they were running out of money they just said “fuck it” and went to work on it, publisher be damned.

I’ve been playing on and off for years now, since around the release of The Second Dream. It makes me really happy to see that they’re doing well. I hope they’ll continue to do well, and do well by the community.

I don’t know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you’re not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.

Sometimes you get both. And then it’s really special (especially 8 years later when you can turn the settings up), see RDR2.

Can’t think of a game that really needed more than like 10GB of RAM. It’s all VRAM for textures and even then 8GB is enough

How does Paradox DLC work at all? The EU4 bundle with all the DLCs is on a 50% discount right now and still costs $142 CAD. Crusader Kings 2 is also over a hundred bucks at half off for all DLCs. And these are their old games that they already have sequels for. I’d literally play these games all day every day if I could but the price is prohibitively expensive and prevents me from doing so.

and rest of the budget on ads

That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!

Nightreign pretty damn good too

There’s even more than one Power over Ethernet 2s, and both of them are good games, often played by similar groups of people.

(Pillar of Eternity 2 and Path of Exile 2)

Heh, that’s correct.

This meme video about sums it up:

The answer is “you play at release and buy them over time, like a crab in slowly boiling water,” though the absolutely incredible rate they introduce bugs into the games kinda knocks you out of the habit.

It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.

Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.

All they care about is the next forknight.

They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine

Problem is that they can’t micromanage that into existence, ConcernedApe more or less created a money printing machine with Stardew Valley all by himself, at least at first. It would be so much cheaper for studios to find like 15 inspired independent devs/designers that need money to make their dream a reality, give them just a lil equity and room/time to cook and they might actually get something amazing. But ain’t no way execs and shareholders would let that happen, they’d yank the plug after year one of a three year contract.

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.

I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.

I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.

Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.

Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).

With staying power I thought of games like Factorio.

Bought it once, played it for thousands of hours. A decade later or so it gets an extension which basically quintuples the content, am playing it thousands of hours more.

I blame botw, everyone thinks they can squeeze out more play time for less effort with it’s open world/collection/crafting model. In reality it just makes the game slow, boring and unrewarding by introducing a shit load of pointless travel and breaking rewards in to shards

This is what happens when you chase trends instead of just having a solid idea.

Newsflash: You aren’t going to turn random horror IP into the next Dead By Daylight. DBD is already Dead By Daylight

You aren’t going to make a multi-player online shooter that is the next Fortnite. Fortnite is already Fortnite.

Actually now that I’ve said that aloud it seems like the problem is that they’re trying to be the next big multi-player experience when they should be focused on a solid single player

I played BG3 and liked it, but stopped because the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right

Who would have thought that the long years of constantly pushing hard for monetization/profits from leadership while not giving a fuck about making a good game would end up eroding their reputation and choking their golden eggs goose. They released too many AAAs that were really AA$$.