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Gaming hot takes?
(lemmy.fmhy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Games
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Gaming has been actually dead for almost 10 years.
Occasionally the body twitches, but virtually all of my purchases in the last long time are just catching up with all the great things created before the collapse.
Latest twitches for me: Dave the Diver and Rogue Legacy 2. Incredible games.
Many stellar games also go unnoticed. The Forgotten City didn’t get nearly the amount of love it deserves. The Hex is basically an unknown game, overshadowed by the same dev’s excellent Inscryption.
…I loved Inscryption… but I found myself walking away from The Hex loving it EVEN MORE. If anyone is interested, go in blind. Ignore the graphics, they’ll make sense. Playing Pony Island first isn’t necessary, but it’s two hours long and does make the experience even better.
@SJ_Zero @LeylaaLovee Maybe this can be said for the tripple A space, but indie devs have been firing on all cylinders the last 5-6 years.
When the western Roman empire fell, it was the Germanic people in the wilderness who came in to fill the vacuum, bringing new ideas and new vitality to what was a stagnant slave society (which is why it collapsed in the first place). In the same way, indie game developers are the ones bringing new ideas and vigor from the hinterlands. In one sense, the fact that indies are hitting so hard only proves that the industry has mostly collapsed.
What was the collapse?
If we consider the golden age of video games to be between 2007 and 2013, a lot of the stuff that caused that era to be so extraordinary was companies taking risks and succeeding at making something people had never seen before. Part of the fall from there was that companies stopped taking risks because they found massively successful formulas. Another part of the fall was companies realizing that video games could have a 10 year lifecycle. That meant that video games became an investment that had a far longer window for success or failure so the successes would pay off far longer and the failures would hurt that much worse, so staying with established formulas and making things more vanilla paid off more than taking risks.
Valve did a lot of smart things in focus testing and sanding off rough edges back when there were some really bad examples of rough edges breaking good games, but eventually everyone was sanding so much that everything was a fisher price toy.
If the formulas were so successful, everyone would be doing the same thing. I'd argue that Golden Age of Video Games is more so now than the far past. It's an Age where anyone can make a video game and be recognized as being among the greatest games of all times.
Also, companies definitely take risks. They take a lot of risks, it's just that a lot of those risks don't necessarily play out and we never really hear about it. If you only focus on the largest companies putting their entire company on the line, then that company wouldn't have been so successful in the past anyways. Risk doesn't make a game good and honestly, with stuff like Game Pass these days, developers are way more likely to make riskier games when they don't need to make a return on that game to actually keep going. For instance, Pentiment by Obsidian, in their own words, would have never been a thing if things were as they were in the early 2010s.