beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

got the whole feywild thing mostly figured out, it's gonna be pretty cool actually i think. i found a good way to tie it into the major, overarching story.

@alyx @Gatitasecsii yeah i'm not even saying games are necessarily hard to make, they are pretty easy to make. however, it is still pretty hard to make something GOOD. if that makes sense. that's why the $200m these massive companies throw at a game will ensure that the game is easily made, but the small and dedicated team with a quarter of that budget will work a lot harder to make something much better. that's how it goes typically, at least.

game dev is a lot more homogenized now, and that leads to some problems too. but, it also isn't like every game a studio made even back in the day was using a brand new engine from scratch. bethesda is an extremely famous case of it being quite the opposite too. nintendo will often make an engine that targets their console and use it for pretty much everything. sega has always used the same engine for sonic for tons of other stuff (phantasy star online has always run on whatever the current iteration of the sonic engine is, for instance).

you're right, we should be paying based on how good the game is and not how many people worked on it. absolutely i agree with that statement. the problem is that the games do still need to get made, and if the quality isn't up to snuff then the studio gets axed and no more games from them are made. it is a problem that i think will fix itself and is already fixing itself. the only major studios left are going to be ones that can actually justify the larger price points. unless, that is, the game industry does have a "come to Jesus" moment and really scales things back.

not gonna lie, this does actually look pretty cool.
it's a d&d sourcebook that is inspired by ghibli films.
i can imagine running a pretty awesome campaign with this, but you'd really need the right group of people for it.

@Gatitasecsii if i keep typing like this i'm going to wear out my keys lol

@Gatitasecsii this is part of the equation though, because games are still selling millions of copies and not even breaking even. Alan Wake 2 had a budget of 70 million euros, and it wasn't able to break even. this is why games need to seriously scale down and offer tighter experiences, especially ones that are more replayable.

back in the 80s you had teams of like 10 dudes making mario 3. they were able to keep budgets a lot lower. a modern day example is expedition 33, which has a team of like 30 dudes and they were able to keep the budget a lot lower while still offering GOTY quality at a more affordable price. that's the key to "solving" the industry, imo. there is just way, way too much bloat.

there are also way more factors that go into it than just the game's budget and the sales themselves. there is the profit margin so they can keep making games, there are all the fees paid to various platforms and manufacturers that aren't included in the budget of the game, there's the cost of running the actual studio itself (rent/maintenance/etc).

in nintendo's case, i do actually think that a large part of it is them arbitrarily deciding that the game is better than the competition with much higher demand and so it can be priced more. it's greedy, for sure, but i can't exactly argue with that logic. especially when you take into account the whole thing about games not actually costing $60 technically for a long time now.

@djsumdog @Gatitasecsii no game company is without their issues, but i personally do like nintendo games. i wish i didn't because then i could just drop them because of their shitty legal strategies. the only times i've bought games for $60+ in the last decade have been Nintendo games, though. other than like, doom 2016. they're games i know i'll pretty much always enjoy.

personally, i also get extremely tired of the bloat that basically every AAA game has at this point. the crazy focus on massive open worlds has really tanked my enthusiasm for a lot of games. i like nintendo though and i know i'll play a lot of mario kart even if i don't do the open world stuff so that's fine with me personally.

also, i've said this before, but basically no games are $60 anymore. not from anyone. they might say they're $60, but then they've got microtransactions, and special editions, and paid early access, etc. and that's before we even take into account live service games.

i made the comparison to FFXIV where if you want to play the game for a year you'll be paying $216 minimum ($60 for the game with all the expansions + $156-$180 subscription). yet, FFXIV is literally the biggest MMO. these are prices people have been paying for a long, long time.

@Gatitasecsii it's not good for a AAA game, perhaps even a AA game. indie games though, absolutely, 200K sales is pretty notable.

@Gatitasecsii 200K sales has never been good for a game. at least, not since like the NES. maybe before then? go look at the sales figures for any notable game back then, they're waaaay higher than 200K.

@Gatitasecsii inflation + bigger games + bigger teams + bigger budgets = higher price.

i'm of the opinion that games need to be drastically scaled down and a lot of the industry needs to be cut with a focus on smaller, tighter experiences. that's kind of what indie games are for, though.

as far as nintendo goes, i guess we'll have to wait and see if $80 is really worth it for mario kart or not. it doesn't seem like they have shown that much of it. there could be another situation like tears of the kingdom where the depths weren't talked about at all, they were just in the game for players to find. personally, i know i will get $80 worth of mario kart world either way, just because i am a huge mario kart fan and will likely play it for hundreds of hours, but if other people don't think that then i guess we will see a change in direction.

i do know that with how many people already don't want to buy a lot of AAA games at $70 or even $60 (or in the case of something like concord, even $40), with tons of studios closing down because of it. things are going to be accelerating faster now with the game industry i think, if these companies are really going to try pushing for their shitty games to be $80 without a huge change to every facet of development.

@Ghislaine @nicholas @caekislove it can be nice for more niche things though, because you can pretty much guarantee there will be a discord for it and someone in there who can answer your oddly specific question, and much faster too.

@Tony shoppin
Then doin some D&D stuff for the session on Friday
If I got time I might play some vidya or fuck around with some drawing or something

@Ghislaine @nicholas @caekislove emulator devs have literally quit over this lmao

@Ghislaine back in like 2010 I actually had a wait time of infinity on a download once. It was still downloading too, just extremely slowly to the point where I guess it gave up trying to calculate the time.

@SuperDicq ha ha ha ha ha ha ha