I remember that.

I really wish society had class conciousness because if we did. That would have been enough to never ever support another AAA dev again

Whole industry has been saying that for a while. It’s unsustainable and to a large extend large studios have fallen to the sunk cost fallacy since they are often on 5-10 years development cycles (!), with very rigid schedules (since they rotate development teams).

Now the big studios are going bankrupt/getting sold to MBS while Expedition 33 is doing tricks on their grave (at least relatively, in absolute numbers their sales numbers aren’t high with normies who only play CoD and FIFA).

Sadly, I think that’s a dead genre, and I don’t even see the Indie Crowd picking it up.

I say this as a big fan of Starcraft and Command & Conquer

Crazy. I want to play a game with staying power.

I want the game that I look at and go “When did I get 1000 hours on the game?” Because I keep coming back to it.

But this is where we agree. I want to play games that are fun.

Seasons, dailies, battle passes, etc aren’t the things that I see as “staying power”, that’s microtransactions to a sunk cost fallacy.

Staying power to me is like Terraria, where I go in, build a world. Run around. Then wander off to something else… to wander back and play more Terraria.

I think game designers and studios have to realize that there is a big market they arent serving as much. I’m not a basement dwelling teenager anymore, I’m in my 40s, I’ve got basically no time, I can’t spend 100 hours locked in on something anymore. Take Kingdom Come Deliverance II for instance, like it’s clearly a banger of a game, but I was like 15 hours in and it still hasn’t really started. I just don’t have the attention span for that kind of stuff anymore. I guess I’m desiring more casual like gaming.

They played it, probably.

The game had massive success on the entire political spectrum.

Fortnite is a great example. It started as a co-op tower defence game. Then they saw the success of PUBG and borrowed their game mechanic (and some developers too I think).

Then epic coined it in selling skins.

I mostly agree with you, I feel like most games with staying power, are games that fundamentally will have you playing because you enjoy it.

I don’t think I can write off seasons in multiplayer games though, some games do benefit from having larger changes that happen at the end of these seasons.

Battle passes can at best be fine(if they at least pay for the next one), I don’t think any are particularly good as a metric for staying power, you still need/want to enjoy playing the game to progress the battle pass.

For me the best staying power is a game that has complexity and depth to mechanics. So I have something to improve on and chase(like lap times in sim racing)

Factorio, rimworld, stardew valley, and project zomboid are the games I’m likely to be playing at any given time of year since they came out and every time there’s an expansion or update.

These weren’t expensive games to develop, I even played them for years when they weren’t yet finished.

I’m still of the opinion that the best games are the ones that are developed in a way is friendly to the mod community.

Mods literally made MechWarrior mercenaries, Minecraft and GTA5 into Great games rather than merely good ones.

I think the big studios lost reality with what the gaming market is. It’s a hit based business, you need a level of volume that they’ve been backing off on. It’s not that the expedition 33 devs were so much better, they just happened to be the lucky ones that put out a solid game that got traction.

Combined Arms just got a big update!

If you want something that isn’t trying to be mid-90s and you like rogue-lites, Rogue Command is really good.

The starter edition bundle is 11.99 us and the ultimate is 104.80 in USD. There’s basically 2 different types of DLCs in the paradox model. The core expansion type that is released every year or so and adds or fleshes out an area of the game, these are generally must haves and reasonably priced if you have played the game for a year(s) to mix it up. The second is smaller focused packs that add a faction or some extra flavor to a more minor mechanic. These are relatively expensive for what they offer, but aren’t always intended for everyone to buy.

If you are a hardcore completionist this model is bad for you, but if you can live with not having everything then it’s not terrible.

I dunno about anyone else. I don’t wanna pay 100 for a half finished buggy as fuck game. Wait a year for bugs to maybe be fixed. Only to then pay another 50 to get the 3 dlc’s to make it the complete game. So I can finally buy the same game the for 67th time as cause it’s got a new skin or some shit this year. All while the dev calls it staying power.

Oh I keep thinking in the shareholders (Pours querosene in the funnel). I always do…

Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap

Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.

Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!

This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.

I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later

It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it

E33 did not just get lucky. They used a completely different formula.

~10M€ development cycle with 30 full-time devs + outsourcing is one order of magnitude smaller than what the big studios consider to be the “standard”. AA vs AAA.

30-40 hours of main story and no open world keeps the development resources focused and gameplay/story loops tight in a way that can’t be achieved in an “expansive” open world without unfathomable resource expenditure. But modern games from major studios literally cannot get greenlit if “open world” is not in the feature list because execs see it as “standard”.

Smaller budget also means that they did not pour 50 %+ of their capital into marketing, which allows mores resources to be put into the game and lowers the barrier to profitability. That’s an understated issue; AAA games can’t afford to fail, which is why they all end up bland design-by-committee.

Those parts above were not risks Sandfall took, they were actually basic risk mitigation for an indie studio that big studios aren’t doing based on the overstatement that bigger = more chances for “THE hit game” = better.

Where E33 took some risks was with the strong creative vision and willingness to ignore genre trends and focus group feedback (going turn-based and not lowering the difficulty to “baby’s first video game”). But for the cost of 1 Concord a big studio could afford to make 10 E33s at which point it’s really not a matter of “luck” for at least one to be (very) good. E33 would have been profitable with 1 million units sold, it did not even have to be that good.

The industry has absolutely noticed that E33 wiped the floor with their sorry asses, and I predict that in ~5 years we’ll see many more AAs popping up.

They also just got lucky. No matter how you cut it, you could do everything right and still have a flop.

Fighting your tool is how you figure how what you actually want to make to a large degree. Limitations is how you are pushed to actually decide what is actually worth it to you. Otherwise you just create endless slop with got bits mixed in cause your never challenged.

Sure after a long enough time you can still get there but it takes so much longer if you have no challenge.

About half of every triple A game is actually indie by the strict definition. Look at world of Warcraft for example. But the strict definition it’s indie

Self published is a bad metric to go by and means basically nothing. There’s a good reason the term has lost basically all meaningful definition and is just a vibes based measuring stick nowadays.