Trust me when I say that 95% of the company was in on the joke as well.
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the new fnaf monsters looking sort of like humanoid lanky plastic mecha figures is presumably connected to the ā80sā theme but does feel weirdly like they were pulled into a feedback loop of being mostly influenced by their own fanart
wonder what people will make of an official 3d freeroaming game in that world after like half a dozen in the same admirably limited Multimedia Fusion 2 format. i donāt know if the earlier style can really still be said to be a case of imagination drawing from limitation after 7 years worth of increasingly convoluted lore but still something a little sad about seeing everything consolidate further into the same first person gloop format.
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weāll be there in a few years give us a bit
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also apple literally did this with apple arcade and if anyone here even remembered that apple arcade exists Iād be shocked
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and in 2020 we can look at that game list and go, āehā but if XBLA dropped 40 games with that breadth of design and polish 8 years agoā¦! Weāre drowning in content
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I guess Iām at the point of my blackpilling where I expect that google should pay, fuck it, I dunno, $1 million to 100 small developers, or a thousand, expecting zero of them to financially succeed, just for shits, just for something to do with its liquidity, just to be able to put its name behind something on the off chance that itās great, for posterity. If our feudal lords are going to capitalize so much that they ascend the godhead they may as well practice some noblesse oblige
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Chefās kiss if it stutters badly during autosaves.
O face if it has the most gnarly sharpening.
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but isnāt it that we are drowning foremost in our own eclectic tastes that we have acquired by hand-picking only the most prospective works of artā¢?
We do love us our musous or ex-Irem-works, sure, but i also caught myself ditching games that fall short of expectations in some domain and trying to convince myself with the excuse that i donāt have time for too many games and backlog and yaddayaddayadda, and i am sometimes wondering whether thatās just me or a sign of a bigger problem - and considering the content thatās available, honestly, iād rather say itās me, not the games.
Just talked to a friend of mine about remember me of the PS3/360-era a few days ago, and been wondering since then which games (in a similar vein) i must have missed in the decade since playing it, and it is only my fault for not discovering them, instead of lamenting that thereās nothing that engages me like that ambitious but slightly flawed game did back then.
So tl;dr, baka me 
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this is how iāve thought about movies for a long time. instead of making one hundred million dollar movie that looks like shit, give one million dollar budgets to 100 creators who actually have imagination and/or talent
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I take a bit of issue with this framing of it
like, if you mean ācontentā to mean every games outlet talking about the same 5-7 games for 2 months, sure, but weāve never actually had a situation where ādrowning in contentā meant ātoo many games for people to choose fromā because weāve never had the ability for the smaller games to be talked about in anywhere near the same manner as how much everyone talked about TLoU2 and immediately dropped, or like RDR2 and immediately dropped
when the landscape exists such that thereās actually coverage of those 20 or 100 developers getting one million outside of one article when itās announced and one article when itās released, then we can talk about whether weāre drowning in content or not - there are enough people playing games where we donāt need to get millions of people to pay 70 bucks for a single game anymore, we donāt need to pretend that every one of those millions is paralyzed by so much content that they end up deciding to play call of duty again for the 100th time
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I think itās neither you nor the games. Itās the collapse of online community and journalism, both replaced by centralized platforms (social media and stores).
On SB we havenāt particularly made it a mission to seek out and get the rest of SB to play and discuss unusual picks, which is part of why being in this community hasnāt solved your problem. Still, sometimes that happens here. In SB1 DAIS got everyone to play the Shiren fan translation so we were ahead of the curve of the roguelike revival, and more recently weāve had little bubbles of people motivated to try Elliot Quest and Tactical Nexus, for instance ā games that would easily be overlooked by idly browsing screenshots in a store. And the experience of discovering these games together has also given these games a particular spark for me, that can create the motivation to look past surface-level polish issues and give the game a chance to shine.
Makes me wonder if we should plan more āgame of the monthā type activities?
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itāll probably soon be time for the fox junction thread to come back into orbit
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hope itās better than the remake of 1 but YES anyway
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you donāt need coverage of games to have too many options available to you, though, and you donāt even need coverage of a game for it to be wildly successful. the games press exists to push an increasingly narrow band of AAA games on players, yes, but thatās because those are the games that need millions of players in order to exist, so they have the money behind them for coverage and a reliable pipeline of people who have bought into that ecology to provide that coverage. but the games media is increasingly irrelevant in producing successes outside of that sphere. did they have anything to do with valheim finding 3 million players in two weeks? among us? fall guys? even fortnite? and these are only the big story successes, there are so many games with long lasting, growing, sustainable player bases that have produced life changing money for their developers that you never really hear about, because the gaming world is so big and social media (in a broader sense than twitter and facebook) so utterly dwarfs traditional media as a means of discovery.
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I am pretty sure broco and spacetown and company are speaking from experience.
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someoneās been lurking the sonic thread
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maybe Iām not being ambitious enough when I talk about āthe landscapeā because while youāre totally right about the games press being less and less influential in hitmaking over the last few years I do feel like all the successes that youāre talking about fall in a relatively narrow range of like, easily scalable multiplayer games with a good central hook that people can understand when someone plays it on twitch or youtube
there are a lot of smaller games and an even larger amount of games in development that just donāt have the ability to be that visible in that way, even if the bar for success involves just making enough money to continue to make games, because theyāre interested in a different kind of experience. I see a lot of student games pass through the program I teach in and a lot of them are smaller, narrative-driven games that are pretty focused in what they want to talk about and it makes me kinda sad to think about how thereās just really no way to get those kinds of games to register on anyoneās radar outside of being a strong enough experience to make it big through the IGF or something. and itād be nice to see some of them be sculpted into more than just portfolio pieces, but when the landscape is such that even your modest indie successes are mostly multiplayer games OR enormous content-filled 100 hour games like stardew valley, I just donāt know how anyone gets there with the way the landscape is
and even those games with good playerbases that came out of āānowhereāā still serve a relatively small section of people who play games - those are the players that frequent twitch and youtube and are interested in a specific style of game. maybe Iām overestimating the number of people who are interested in playing different kinds of games but I still feel like there are enough players interested in enough different kinds of things that we canāt really say that the āaverageā player is drowned in choice
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https://www.libretro.com/index.php/dosbox-pure-out-now-for-public-testing/
Yoooo Dosbox but for controllers.
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