VIDEOBALL

Game is real good it sucks the PS4 playerbase is a few french guys a few australians and my group. One of which isnt that hot on it. 3 of us really like it though. I will just keep blasting that I want people to play with though lord am I buried in games to play online right now.

I’m fairly certain they’re dead in the water with respect to this one. it sucks but there’s not much they can do.

i will eventually petition Tim to future proof the game with one of the following:

  • ability to host without playing (dedicated host/obs)
  • LAN support

either of those would mean i can just enjoy the game indefinitely even if only a few people ever care to play, and we can deal with the host advantage a little more fairly

1 Like

haven’t seen this game advertised anywhere, depressing

I’m not sure if they didn’t get what they wanted out of the publisher or what but it probably wasn’t realistic to expect this to have a huge audience?

I heard it mentioned on a podcast ad the other day. I guess Iron Galaxy sponsors the Chicago podcast cooperative.

Sometimes I wonder if games like these would benefit to be on a single platform as opposed to multiple because it doesn’t fragment the online user base as much and makes network play more viable?

I have no trouble believing VIDEOBALL could be huge if it fell into the right youtuber’s hands, but clearly it hasn’t (yet?)

but seriously, please play online with me - i want everyone to see how incredible this game is
bonus if you’re on the east coast. i play on steam

@meauxdal I’m sad I will probably never get the chance to play against any of the steam players, I’m so curious to see how I stack up against everyone’s play styles. I love my little group of ps4 buds but it’s such a tease knowing there’s this knot of experienced players just out of reach.

@BIGHEADMODE the lag on this side of the world is significant but manageable! It’s usually pretty consistent, so it’s mostly just a delay you need to account for. it forces you to read the play instead of react to it. I might be a lunatic for being okay with it though, I guess most people are pretty put off by it.

oh and again, all_monsters on psn, get videoball and play me!

Gunna be playing some in-person videoball on Sunday!, so will probably be on Steam trying to practice on Friday-Saturday.

for real y’all tweet @ me
@meauxdal
i will play.

New patch is out. You can now toggle XInput off/on in the options menu!

This is true!!

You’ll want to turn XInput off if you want to play a six-player local game, by the way.

Just about everything in yesterday’s Steam patch was in the game about four months before we released, by the way!! We had to lock the game down with really weird timing in order to appease the console overlords.

I am not sure if we will be able to afford another patch . . . :frowning:

By which I mean, I am 99% sure we can’t afford another patch. The game didn’t make any money. The publisher hasn’t recouped their money. We haven’t seen a penny from the game. It was a pretty big disaster! We always knew it had a high potentiality for disastrousness. We just figured, we bought a lottery ticket, so we might as well scratch it. You know what I mean?

Anyway, it’s a game I like.

All of the non-PC-specific elements of the patch we put on Steam yesterday should be available on the consoles in a week or two. Once that happens, well, maybe that’s it for VIDEOBALL :frowning:

If anyone is ever in Oakland, California, come on over and let’s play a six-player local game with Xbox One Elite Controllers (ie, The Best Way To Play)

Anyway, please look forward to our next console game: COPTER WILDE (A 3D Zelda Where The Hero Has A Shotgun And A Helicopter (coming Q4 2020))

(and the two mobile games we’re going to release (hopefully) before the end of the year: HECKACHOPTER and TRUCK HECK)

3 Likes

I live in the Bay Area and would like to play Videoball. For various reasons, this may be the only way I’d be able to play it (let alone play it in The Best Way), so if anyone else wants to do this, I promise to actually show up!

What do you think made it high risk and is that the reason you think it hasn’t taken off?

My main thought for the last three years or so has been that going abstract was setting out for an uphill battle. Like, tacky as it may seem, slapping an unnecessary narrative aesthetic onto the game with space cats vs. volcano dogs (or whatever) would probably be a stronger aesthetic hook than simple, clean graphics.

I get why you’d want to stick with an aesthetic that–uh–isn’t totally lame, but I just kept thinking, “Man, if it were elves vs. trolls, this game would have a much stronger fighting chance.”

But that is obviously pure hunch, based on no industry experience.

Anyway, sorry that it’s not panning out. I have room in my life for another competitive game, and I was starting to think up team tactics in my head.

I’m sure @108 has a better grasp of what hurt them and what didn’t, but my guesses are:

  1. Most players will want to play something by themselves, and the solo play is pretty much tutorial “for the real thing”.

  2. Playing online multiplayer with randoms here is not fun. You either feel good dominating or feel shitty getting crushed. There are very few small victories.

  3. The lack of aesthetic makes the game really very much about itself. And while that may seem unnecessary it hurts because it’s hard to attach something cool for one player to play by themselves without made up context.

Think about how hard something like NBA2k is pushing for a “single player story mode”. Part of it is so players can “be themselves”. But it structures the solo mode so people are willing to buy and play the game on their own. Otherwise people are buying it so they can play with their friends which isn’t exactly a compelling purchase if you’re like most gamers without friends.

Anyways, I’m sorry that Videoball didn’t turn out to be as big of a success as ya’ll hoped it would have been. I bet it’ll do well in bundles.

I think that the state of indie videogame press has a lot to do with it, too. Were there any thoughtful and well-publicized reviews of the game that weren’t written by someone who played the game for an hour and then spewed out a 7/10 for their deadline to get more hitz n clickz?

anyway I’m going to get a PS4 soon and this will be my first purchase as soon as I get it set up.

FWIW just the other day I showed videos of the game to my 15 year old nephew who’s really into watching Overwatch matches on Twitch and he balked at the graphics and the 9.99 price tag. very sad state of affairs. I think there’s a whole generation of young gamers whose default setting is to make fun of anything they aren’t already aware of and that doesn’t look like what they already expect games to look like. I just hope VIDEOBALL can be preserved and maybe build some kind of devoted following down the road.

I don’t really pay much attention to gaming press or fully get how most game players hear about stuff these days, but I thought it was getting pretty good coverage!

Tim streamed a game with the Giant Bomb guys, and they’re still pretty influential, right?

Polygon and Destructoid both gave it 9/10, and GameSpot gave it an 8! I guess IGN never touched it, though, and they’re pretty big, right? Like, they’re technically the most trafficked video game site, I think–which is weird, because I always thought of them as the soulless lame duck, but don’t they actually employ more people than anyone other than Polygon? I really don’t know at this point.

So…I dunno: doesn’t seem like Videoball was ignored. But maybe it just didn’t get enough buzz from these outlets. I feel like Steam had made indie games kind of like indie music: to cut through the noise reviews aren’t enough; journalists have to actually be writing stories about you and talking about you on their podcast and anticipating the game prior to release.

Maybe if VBall were a fake vector game it would have had black screen retro appeal :confused:

yeah, you’re prolly right. signal to noise ratio in the indie game scene seems real high.

and as Tim was saying pre-release, getting a PS+ free release would have been a boon to the game’s exposure.