New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

Where is Helldivers 2?

If goty is chosen by sales then we'll just get a lot of FIFA as goty for many years.

I think goty should either award creativity or technical breakthrough or both, but not sales. Since gaming industry technical aspect has peaked these years, I am perfectly fine if they put creativity on a higher priority.


This encourages game dev experiment with new game mechanics and stop making AAA generic 3D arpg with a stamina bar No.1275.

The graphic works for a solitaire/poker inspired game. What kind of graphic do you expect for this kind of game? HD cards rendered in unreal engine with ray tracing or something? =.=

I wouldn't say the graphic is bad. It works well for this kind of game. There are someone that I know of irl plays solitaire for over 20 years every single day for a few hours, they are probably the target audience for Balatro. This kind of graphic may be appealing for solitaire fans because they are familiar with the graphic style. You make it any more fancy the real target audience may not "get" it immediately.

Should sales not be part of GOTY metric?

I'm not disputing your claim that it would be FIFA every year, but surely sales should matter. Can a game truly be "Game of the year" if it only sold < 500k copies its first month? Great games dont sell poorly.

I think HD textures is a pretty reasonable baseline for 2024.

HD texture doesn't enhance roguelike deck building experience that much, since it's a very game mechanic focused genre. A properly made addictive roguelike deck building is still equally addictive even if all the cards are made with MS paint in 30 secs. I can probably play Slay the Spire all day even if all cards have no graphic, just icons and numbers. Because it is the interaction of those numbers that made those games fun.

But HD texture makes it much harder to run on a potato PC.

It seems like the gain doesn't outweigh the loss.

I have a potato PC with with 4G ram and 64 gb emmc. My space is often below 3-6gb until I delete stuffs. Balarto's system requirements is 1gb ram and 150 mb available space, actual game is less than 100 mb.

Change texture to HD we'll see the system requirement skyrocket, to a point that even potato PC like this may not run. And it doesn't even enhance the core gameplay, what's the point?

If the game works with 100 mb space without hindered experience then the lower the system requirement the better imo.



How well a game sells depends on the target audience number(market size) and market saturation(competition). Quality matters in the competition within the same genre but it is not the only variable.

Same rules applies to every type of product in the field of business really.

Sometimes innovative games don't necessarily have the biggest market size unfortunately, because it's not "mainstream".

You're going to have a very difficult time trying to sell me on the idea that a game is GOTY candidate despite horribly low sales because "target audience".

I will flat out refute the notion of market saturation being a culprit. If your game sold poorly because of competition, then that likely means the competition put out a better product.

Huh? Balarto didn't have horrible low sales. It sold over 2m copies 6 months after release, which is probably about the same as FF7R.

I was only saying that as a general rule great games can sell poorly if they picked a target audience with smaller size. But this doesn't applies to Balarto. This game in particular actually sold pretty damn well.

or better marketing.

1-I never said it had low sales. I was replying to your statement in regards to sales counts.
2-But now that I looked it up, its $19 CAD, under $14 USD. Yes, this matters. Its easier for a lot of people to fork over $14 USD vs $70 USD.

There was a couple of such example in the gaming history. One of them is Okami. It received 90+ metacritic review and user score but it only sold 270,000 copies on PS2 1 year after release. The game director said the initial sale was a huge failure.

Over the years Capcom re-released it on every platform and through the words of mouth it eventually reached 4m. If Capcom just give up on it after initial failure it would have been forgotten in the history despite it was a good game.

It's hard to make an argument that Okami failed because it is a bad game in this case.


Another example is probably Viewtiful Joe. This game received 90+ on metacritic too. Sold about 320,000 worldwide on 2 platforms.

So it's not uncommon to see games with creativity that don't sell well despite small amount of people praised it.

Funny how you mentioned Okami because I was gonna mention Kunitsu-Gami, a new Capcom game which failed to meet the initial sales target, and its failure immediately reminded me of Okami

Idk anything about the game aside from it looking pretty & received well by critics. So I guess we do have another Okami situation, the result of poor marketing.

Being cute and fun take a backseat to name recognition, most of the time.

More complex than one sentence allows, but too much risk on a new IP for $70 when you can buy the sequel to a game you already know you like.

Viewtiful Joe is awesome, but fun quirky games you rent. And renting is all but obsoleted.

weird, I completely agree with an Afania post

Until generic AAA 3d arpg stops selling 20 million copies, the risk doesnt seem to exceed the reward.

If were talking creativity and technology, then you cant be mad about Elden Ring. It took the soulsbourne genre and gave it a jump button made it truly open world. Doom Eternal took the generic "kill bad people" shooter and actually found a way to break the mold and force players to not just use the one meta weapon / their fav weapon.

There is a difference in the development costs, do you think Balatro which became profitable just 1 hour after it's release, making 1M, had any where near the dev costs of any AAA?

it is less risky because you put less money into it, a flop cost an order of magnitude less, and the scale to succeed is an order of magnitude easier to reach.

Isn't this all the more reason to give those games more visibility and allow them to profit more? I'm not really seeing a reason to be against this type of game's inclusion unless you care more about your favorite game winning than the implications to industry/market.

Dwarf Fortress GOTY 2024


I think 2016 did it a little better IMO, it felt more like a fair challenge on the higher difficulty settings and it didn't have the platforming *** Eternal did.

I'm not usually a huge FPS fan, it's one of those genres I keep wanting to like and every time I buy one, I get bored after 30min, but that one did keep my attention. That and my old *** gets motion sickness from them now, so that kinda kills it.

Anyone gonna be on that POE2? I haven't looked at any info yet but might give it a shot.

I might, I've been playing Last Epoch off and on, it's been a nice mix of being able to get on and do something for a few when I have some time and content difficulty. I like ARPGs and trying different builds esp when time is shortish.

I played PoE very very early on but didn't play much beyond that, so I won't be coming in knowing much about it either

So.....some random leaker/rumor said (unconfirmed) Unknown 9's developer Reflector Entertainment employee Salaries ranged between CAD 100,000 and CAD 150,000. Employees spent their time watching YouTube videos, chatting, and drinking beer on Fridays as early as noon.

https://www.smashjt.com/post/unknown-9-s-ex-reflector-entertainment-whistleblower-exposes-kim-belair-as-mentally-disturbed-crazed

What a happy work environment......

Meanwhile, Game Science paid below average salary and gave their employees tons of overtime. They nearly made a GoTY.

If western games cost too much to make, I think this is the reason....some people value happiness at work over productivity....

None values happiness over productivity, but every now and then there are reasearches pointing happy employees are more productive, and some companies buy that idea others no.

Personally i think human brain isnt that behaviorist that one incentive will positively lead to an answer.

Everyone will be more or less productive for varying reasons, and maybe reason unrelated to some random stuff given in name of "employees happiness"

this sounds like what the dudes having happy hour friday morning would say, I bet panta is a slacker at work

This sounds like everywhere I've ever worked. Take 10 developers:

1-2 are burned out and tired from having everything lumped on them for years
1-2 have no clue what they are doing but are trying to frantically learn so they can actually do their job
1-2 are constantly doing work outside their job description, trying to manage their own jobs themselves while making up for others
4-5 do nothing all day or are incompetent then complain that it's someone else's fault (toxic work environment, etc). These tend to be the ones that know best how to find flaws in everyone else.
<=1 know how to manage their workload to not burn out while still being good at their job

I've worked at places that had everything for their employees to be happy at work: beer kegs, arcades, ping pong/pool, multiplayer tournaments, etc. It's the epitome of "take responsibility for yourself and be an adult". You still had a large % of people who never did anything and constantly tried to find excuses for it, then complained when they were put on a PIP and blamed everyone but themselves.

game awards nominees if you want more stuff to discuss argue about

https://www.thegameawards.com/nominees

SE not doing too bad, got some noms for XIV and VII Rebirth in several categories.

I've worked at some of those places too. Perks don't make a happy working environment.

Not expecting your employees to work 12+ hours a day, dump stuff on them on short notice that is of course always urgent then blame them when it goes wrong even after being forewarned given the urgency, expect some lack of testing/breakages, would be a good start.

It goes both ways. I've worked with really good managers that I was happy to work with even under those conditions. I've also worked with absolute pieces of excrement that could not manage their way out of a paper bag and constantly blamed their own team for not achieving the unrealistic expectations they themselves set.

As always - the buck stops with the leader(s).

I read all that am Im left wondering how you think any of that is a good thing. Presuming every dev was there from day one to release 8 years later at a median of 125k, each dev costed the company 1 mil. 1 mil to spend all day chatting, watching youtube and getting drunk at work on fridays. If there were 50 devs, thats 50 mil right there.

The end result of Wukong and Unknown 9 speak for themselves.

Shot: "Unknown 9 Dev's spent all day watching youtube, chatting, and getting drunk during work hours on Fridays"

Chaser: Unknown 9 developer Reflector Entertainment lays off 18% of staff

kek

Where did you read that I think it's a good thing? In nearly all of the economy related discussion on FFXIAH my position has always been quite corporate friendly, and I critized work-life balance mindset and UBI mindset on the same site. Why would you think that I believe it is a good thing?

The "happy work environment" comment is obviously sarcasm. People like to say happy work environment and higher pay=higher productivity.

Which is obviously not proven to be true as plenty of company are still very competitive with more intense work environment and lower pay.

(Fromsoftware is another low pay competitive company btw)

You made it seem like it was supposed to be a good thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How did you read that =.=


I said western games cost too much to make because of salary and more relaxed work culture. If you read that as "good thing" then idk what to say lol.