Legacy press coverage of this sort can’t drive a game’s success anymore. Loot at the viewer numbers for these magazine’s youtube videos to get a sense of this – they’re almost all dwarfed by even b-tier youtubers.
Instead, legacy press is useful as a feed-source of news for those youtubers, who then, if they like the games, broadcast it to a larger audience.
On the whole, divorcing impactful press coverage from the small industry of games press isn’t terrible; you may have noticed that coverage here is heavily dependent on personal connections, so, like many things, the internet is destroying old exclusive networks in favor of distributed chaos and winner-take-all new blood.
But it also has little standards and there’s an entire bloodsucking industry of pay-to-play underlying much of the streamers and let’s players and it’s pretty gross.
Anyway, don’t look at coverage in traditional press for an indication of sales potential. Look at youtube trailer views. Under 50k means the game will pass without a blip, unless it spreads virally on launch (this has maybe a 5% chance of happening if it’s really, really good). Most breakout successes can be predicted by watching their trailer views and community engagement in the year before launch.
also Twitch streamers. if one of the really big Twitch streamers were playing VIDEOBALL regularly it’d probably get ten times more eyes on it than a review in Destructoid or wherever.
So what you guys are saying is that we have a responsibility–no: a duty–to dress up in Pikachu bikinis and play video ball with a bunch of figurine in the background.
I also think that minimalist games are on their way out. People understand mechanics in games and have at least an inkling what good “gamefeel” is now. So instead of clean and focused it just looks boring and lacking in creativity. I really liked this kind of aesthetic half a decade ago (TNNS was dope), but it’s 2016 and I think we’re past that.
Minimalism is very popular right now on mobile stores; it connotes clean, simple, elegant, and positions itself against free-to-play’s tendency to more more more; more reward loops, more store items, more customization, more treadmills.
It’s not very popular on consoles and PC games, and VIDEOBALL’s style is more '90s graphic design than contemporary, but I don’t think either of those things are unreasonable bets to make, especially three years ago – we’re in '90s nostalgia and it’s possible there’s an unmet desire for minimalism in competitive multiplayer.
Personally, I like some sketch of worldbuilding like ZIGGURAT had but it doesn’t seem crazy to go for it.
To be honest, I have watched like 20 minutes of gameplay, have no idea what’s going on, and don’t know how to convince 3 other busy people to spend time to learn. And when I’m on the outside looking in, weirdo moments like that make me think that the game is just elitist and annoying rather than valuable.
And for full disclosure, some of those minutes were spent watching the final gameplay trailer where the announcer says something like, “I bet you thought this game was made by a vegetarian,” and I’m really just kind of grossed out about Videoball for the moment.
Edit: this post makes it seem like I don’t have sympathy for VB not making its money back. I do. I am just explaining why I haven’t bought it and, the more that I think about it, why I don’t plan on buying it any time soon.
anothergod, don’t buy videoball. pretty sure it’s not for you.
everyone else, buy videoball and play with me. it’s one of my favorite games ever! it’s beautiful in so many ways. i continue to learn more about how it works and the mind games continue to elevate among the best players. there’s a real meta.
when i think about the potential death of videoball, i get really really fucking sad. i’ve put a lot of effort into this game. cultivating a community, creating content. i’ve probably played more videoball than anyone who didn’t work on the game. it’s a fucking masterpiece. i’m gutted at the current state of affairs. like, actually depressed about this shit.
anyway, maybe there will eventually be some kind of resurgence. probably not, but i can dream.
listening to tim’s gdc talk about the game it seems like the game’s graphics are supposed to be perfectly functional in that they don’t signify anything outside of purely abstract concepts of movement and physics WITHIN the context of the game. so it could be construed as “minimalist” when positioned next to VIDEO-ASS VIDEO GAMES, but tim (and correct me if I’m totally misinterpreting things SORRY) wants this to be thought of in the context of literally sports. like basketball or soccer or baseball or w/e. and as much as people construe the line “you wouldn’t say a tennis ball has bad graphics” in a snarky way, it makes a lot of sense when you think of the role a tennis ball plays in the sport of tennis as the physical manifestation of your will (within the context of the rules of tennis) on the other player. the tennis racket is the physical manifestation of your will on the ball, and so on and so forth
it’s just hard because you can’t talk about videoball like you talk about a videogame; you talk about PEOPLE when you talk about videoball, much like how you talk about players in sports. in e-sports we talk about players controlling “characters” like LoL heroes or cs:go guns and that fits the popular archetype of what a videogame is. it’s also coincidentally why I think halo competitions never really took off in the way cs:go did past mid-00s MLG, but that’s another conversation
I definitely think that videoball can rise to being really popular though! I doubt there were a ton of people playing basketball when it was invented. if fucking ultimate frisbee can have a national league then surely videoball can
EDIT: I resolve from this post on to join the videoball discord and play way more videoball than I have been
it is not dissimilar to how I want to play more tennis but I need to find my racket for that one
yeah OK so having played the game for many many many hours at this point, let’s go back and address this:
as far as I can tell, the game polls inputs in a way that your release can be eaten. if you release and repress super quickly, it’s possible that your release falls between two polling instances and is effectively lost. over time, your muscle memory will generally account for it. most of the timing around great L2 production involves release timing as opposed to repress timing anyway, so it ultimately doesn’t end up being a huge deal. but yeah, it is a thing.
another thing: when tackled while charging, expected behavior is that you can keep the button held down and you will resume charging once you have recovered from the tackle. however, sometimes this is not true. you will get owned because you were sitting there for a few seconds and not charging shit. i have no clue what causes this or how to effectively replicate it, though.
Like when I think of videogames as literally sports I think of Rocket League or Overwatch or FIFA or NBA2k or Counterstrike or Hokra or any of Sports Friends, really.
To me triangles shooting triangles at balls for physics to get into a goal at the end of 1 of 32 different different shaped arenas is VIDEO-ASS VIDEO GAME.
I guess me being confused on this end is confounded by the fact that from many angles the game seems elitist (thanks @meauxdal) AND I don’t really understand the pacing. Like I’m trying to watch gameplay videos and I don’t understand how the beginning of the game changes to the middle of the game which changes to the end of the game. Maybe the strategy is too obtuse for me so it just looks like a mess.
if you want to know what’s up with the game, it’d be in your best interest to actually play it! @rin has offered to purchase the game for those who write a haiku and promise to play with us online. nothing to lose there
sorry i came off as elitist.
your grievances don’t make any sense to me. i just figured it’d be easier to just cut the cord and accept that you aren’t interested. sorry if that was off the mark.
it also pains me to read negative things about videoball at this point (and trust me, i’ve read pretty much every take on videoball that exists on the internet. most of them are hot fucking garbage). it’s a relatively obscure, unknown game that next to no one plays, that i think is one of the best maybe ever, and i’m just not feeling that “yeah but maybe it actually does suck” angle, esp. from someone who hasn’t even played the dang ol game yet!
also sounds like you would be well served in watching tim’s gdc talk
I like how everyone sorta overlooked that this heavily multiplayer focused game launched with online multiplayer that didn’t work for a few days on a major platform. The game was facing an uphill climb before this, that was likely a death sentence.
Ignoring that, I would point out that between when the game was first being shown and when it finally arrived Rocket League came out. While there isn’t a perfect overlap there I think in many ways they scratch a similar itch, and what was initially an untapped market was very much tapped in the interim.