this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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Indie games have never been better, there's no problem here that doesn't solve itself if people just stop buying bad AAA titles
The problem with indie gaming is that it's nearly impossible to actually find the few good games within the massive crush of shovelware. Even besides that, this thread is specifically about a large publisher.
So exactly like gaming in the 90s and 00s? You can't have it both ways
Well that's just completely the opposite of my experience. Blizzard Entertainment, for example, was reliably putting out hit after hit after hit for many years. AAA studios used to actually hire talented people, and allow them to make the games they wanted to make, which resulted in fantastic products.
Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:
Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.
Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.
A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.
Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can't buy the space, Valve doesn't bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn't enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I'm interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam's success that often gets overlooked.
I agree. It does seem like media literacy vis a vis video games is not as generally strong as it ought to be, and if people did have a deeper understanding of game design, art, and writing in general even a brief look at gameplay would be enough for most people to make up their minds. If you have an even somewhat strong understanding of games I think it's not too hard to sense at a glance how the game you're seeing is trying to contribute to the conversation in game development. Between that, weighted reviews, and even the thumbs up or down from one familiar reviewer is usually enough for me to tell if I will get my money's worth. I almost can't remember the last time I bought a game on this basis and wasn't happy - it was Nier: Automata actually, and that was basically because I didn't like the feel of the combat, which is hard to spot. Didn't even get to all the bleak philosophy stuff I was looking forward to, I just bounced off it hard.
Indie games are currently in problems starting early this year, https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/03/game-pass-woes-for-indie-devs-as-microsoft-epic-funding-reportedly-drying-up
Honestly, very few of the indie games release with microsoft and Epic banking are truly good. The best indie games right now are the ones released and self-published through steam, you just have to find the ones you like. Steam Next Fest is a good start if you don't know where to look. The next one starts next monday, October 14th.
What did they do before Game Pass and Epic?
Self-fund or kick-start and hope (and beg) some YTer plays their game and it explodes.