I think you and Rudie are more in the same space than it might have seemed on the episode, though the way of saying it there was a bit confusing. Rudie wasn’t saying that non-mainstream games are not actually videogames, but that the way that mainstream games are made and sold in the current time has moved on from what he (or, to some similar degree I) have been interested in for a long time. Which is to say like there are a ton of things we consider really good games that are outside of the paradigm of what current AAA gaming is doing, and that is good.
The independent/marvel movies thing is a good thing to bring up because, from the perspective of a lot of the major movie studios, independent movies almost don’t count as movies. That doesn’t mean they don’t count as such for you, me, or obviously the people that make them, but it means that the vast majority of funding isn’t going to them, which has positives and negatives. When you don’t have a lot of money tied up in your product, you are both freed to do whatever you want and limited in the scope past a certain point.
What spawned this whole conversation was an observation Rudie had about Last of Us 2, almost separate from its quality as a game (neither of us have played it, but gonna bet it is not for us), which is that it was built and sold in a single player, serious story, not socially optimized experiencem the way most AAA games are being sold currently. Which was interesting that the Big Sony Push was going on for a thing that is so outside of the multiplayer social experience that seems to be the target domain of Big Publishers and such lately. It was an observation that spawned a lot of conversation for us, because we feel even more pushed out of that Big Publisher space than maybe we used to. And part of that is normal (we are The Olds, and they already have what they want from us from the most part) but part of it is how games have shifted in the past 10 years or so.
And yeah, no one is diminishing social spaces for anyone else. It’s mostly just us noting that things have moved on from where we are, and that is OK. We are The Olds, in videogame publisher terms, and that is OK. As Rudie got at with the comment about our love of STGs, we’ve been talking about the financial relevance of things we love for a long time, because unfortunately, games cost money/time to make, and that is a big factor in their continued existence. We joke a lot about that 20K STG buyers meaning that STGs don’t get the budget they used to. I mean, shit, the only reason Ikaruga keeps getting re-released is Nicalis loves exploiting a license, and I am sure Treasure aren’t objecting if they can keep getting a cut.
We aren’t obsolete as humans (far from it), but we have to acknowledge that, in terms of mass market videogames, we are not their targets, and both of us have been feeling that lately. This doesn’t mean the things we enjoy aren’t actually games or anything, just that we can’t really expect that to happen much outside of smaller communities and such. And hey, that is fine, and in a lot of ways has been pretty normal for years; TLoU2 was just kinda a flashpoint for it.
