You must log in or register to comment.
Indie games are showing the way with the amount of content these days
I didn’t realize 7 years was a full decade.
I’m just wondering why it’s the decade’s fault for the long delay.
No no, you see, this is an alternative universe where we all use base 7
I use base 10, what’s base 7? Also, what’s a 7?
All bases are base 10
Damn, Elder Scrolls fans must feel real fuckin old then.
Just a different intelligent species with 7 fingers.
Maybe they’re using the “Fight Club 5/7” scale?
I think it’s great they’re charging such a reasonable price, but I hope people don’t hold other smaller devs to this standard and compare them one to one. It’s a lot easier to charge $20 when you’re about to sell a bajillion copies of something. A solo dev making something way smaller might charge $20, too, but they may only sell a few dozen copies.
In other words, celebrate the pro consumer decision but please don’t use it as a cudgel against other indies in the future.
Nah, this is gaming. Get your grounded nuance out of here! Indies must meet these personal expectations of mine. Holds hand impossibly high.
I expect perfect ray tracing with my igpu!
And I only accept as a true Indie when it has its own game engine!
The $199 side omits that the poor ceo had to buy his 3rd luxury car in 2 years time because reasons.
*yacht
Destiny 2 moment
I cannot wait for all the AAA developers to whine, cry, and complain about how everyone is saying Silksong is so good and that AAA can’t compete with their own games.
If this is a reference to the BG3 thing, it was only like one person who originally said that, and I’m pretty sure it was a smaller dev talking about small games compared to BG3. That whole situation got blown way out of proportion.
I’m not saying that it’s not irresponsible to grow to the size that they have, but I don’t think people understand the staggering difference in the size of the development teams between GTA and Hollow Knight.
MobyGames lists 4,771 people in the credits for GTA V and just 85 for Hollow Knight. Honestly most of those on Hollow Knight are translators and testers, people who weren’t working the full length of development time.
As a reminder, 99.9% of the cost of a game is number of staff * salary * time.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/62275/grand-theft-auto-v/credits/windows/
https://www.mobygames.com/game/84194/hollow-knight/credits/windows/i’m all for boycotting big companies slop in general; gotta stop rewarding mass produced, corner cutting productions
Yeah, well ‘gamers’ do what they do at scale.
Apparently they can’t even be bothered to price shop for GPUs, as Nvidia has 94% market share at a time when Intel and AMD are selling sublime mid range cards. How can we expect folks to stop buying Call of Duty on principle?
crypto ai bros and the companies they work at unfortunately
That statistic didn’t count the bulk of ‘AI cards’ other than the rare rich dev who picks up a 5090, its almost purely gaming GPU sales. It’s gamers buying the 94%.
How does the data differentiate between AI cards and gaming cards?
That 94% does not include AI GPUs at all. Just ‘pro’ cards like the RTX Pro, and gaming ones.
The vast majority of inference/training is done on top end SXM GPUs like the H200, MI325X and such, and sometimes on server only PCIe cards like the L40. But the statistic you’re quoting is for ‘Addin boards,’ which don’t include this server stuff.
There are tinkerers who run ML stuff locally on desktop GPUs, but its a pretty small market, and honestly they’re all useless for many experiments because they don’t have enough VRAM.
Point I’m making is ‘AI GPUs’ don’t skew this statistic much; it’s gamers pushing that 94% market share.
Ah ok, so specific models. Gotcha, thanks
let’s see more passionate small teams than micromanaged large teams appeasing their quarterly shareholders
*subject to inflation
yeah, since everything costs more and wages have barely increased, it’s more like 15$ these days if you want to keep buying things like “food” and “transportation”
Indie devs keep winning. I can’t really remember the last time I played a really good AAA game. Mid maybe, but not good.
TotK is a great game. And I’ve heard Baldur’s Gate 3 was excellent although can’t play it until I’ve got myself a new computer. I think they’d probably count?
BG3 is in a strange sort of limbo. It’s self-published, was partly crowdfunded, but is AAA in scope and polish.
Every single game Larian made would come out on steam in early access, and always with an early access price. When BG3 hit early access with a released game price I was pissed. But then I found out that they were making a game with Wizards of the Coast those greedy fuckers so the price made sense. Still waited almost a year after it was released to buy it, because the released game price was higher than every other fully released Larian game. Fuck WotC and Fuck Hasbro.
I’m playing prey at the moment, I think that was considered AAA? Anyway, I’m enjoying it a lot. But yeah, generally I agree with you. Also, I never buy them on release, only a few years later on sale. Way too expensive otherwise, it’s refreshing to see a game come out at an affordable price.
Prey would be double A, I feel? I quite liked Resident Evil 4 remake, which should be AAA
deleted by creator
Ah fair enough. Yeah I’ve not played much resident evil, just a bit of 7, but I’m told 4 is good. I’m catching up on a twenty year gaming gap!
I’ve also been playing cyberpunk, and I’d say that’s definitely AAA. But TBF I bought it in a recent sale, and while I’m really enjoying it I understand it was a buggy mess on release. I can’t see myself ever buying a AAA title until it’s had a couple of years to get updated and the price reduced. Plus there’s so much AA stuff that’s excellent.
Cannot wait to buy another Ubislop-like that costs $80, takes 70+ hours to complete the mainstory and plays exactly the same as the last 20 iterations over the past decade
This could very much represent troubles not just in video game development, but project development in an investor-driven market entirely.
Everyone is focused on short-term wins and profits - so they can demonstrate they’re a fantastic manager making incredible things. They hire 1000 people, then show the grandiose things they made with those people in 2 years so they can take more investment. But the way creative work goes, there are far better ways to play that lottery - they just don’t involve as much active management, and are far less showy.
As a publisher, you could just start 50 small studios of only 10 employees each, with occasional external support as needed to each one, and give all of them 5 years to develop. That would equate to the same or much lesser cost as some of these gigantic multi-outsourced projects, but it means investments are left for longer. And of course, few of them would be a “Hollow Knight” or “Minecraft”, but just enough of them would likely succeed to pay for all the others.
You can see similar concerns in R&D and other similar fields across industries, that give randomized and unpredictable benefit when every manager is watching every quarter’s earnings.
As a publisher, you could just start
This actually happens a lot, but kind of the other way around. Small indie shops run out of money and small publishers / companies swoop in with venture, throw a lifeline worth of money for a decent stake in the product. It either gets made, or it gets bought by a bigger fish. Sometimes the product is already done and they just need help expanding the audiience
Places like forklift.gg, who helped accelerate Cash Cleaner Simulator
And of course, few of them would be a “Hollow Knight” or “Minecraft”, but just enough of them would likely succeed to pay for all the others.
I would contest this. The vast majority of indie games ‘fail,’ and there is some Machiavellian logic to “let’s make a mediocre game we know will sell.”
Basically zero “micro team” indies turn into Rimworld or Hollow Knight or Stardew Valley, statistically, much less Minecraft. That’s a fantasy.
…That being said, I think there is a “sweet spot” dev team size where diminishing returns are quickly hit. Coffee Stain (the Satisfactory dev) is my classic sweet spot example: Big enough to license Unreal Engine and pretty dependably make something “big” and fantastic, without burning cash detailing pores in ass cheeks and making some broken custom engine to fulfill some suit’s “1st party synergy” fantasy.
They have marketers and such, but it’s frugally spent.
And publishers are pursuing this strategy. Paradox seems to be on a spending spree for mid sized studios, and Embracer Group is notorious for it.
The funny fact than i don’t give a fuck for both games
ITT: Folks comparing labor hours without cost of those hours.
Folks, coders who understand how game engines work and can make graphically intense well running games are 3.5-4 times more expensive per hour.
I really can’t believe I have to spell this out for everyone. Do you really think naughty dog or Rockstar aren’t hiring folks at 200k+ to work on these games for thousands of hours only still to fuck out up after 6 years of development?
I’m not saying 3d is better, it’s clearly too expensive for everyone to push these boundaries and different tools for different games; but this is just the economic reality.
But graphically intense is a supply side decision not a demand side one, most of the big hit indie games including 3D ones are either overtly styalized or doing a kind of pseudorealism that looks clean without having to model the refraction index of individual rain drops.
Silksong is using a 2D hand-animated style, which is not cheap to make, not because of coders but because it requires way more work from artists than other art styles.
I designed this penis slicer using the absolutely best components, and years of German engineering. I’m charging $1000, which is a steal if you think about the cost of the labor and parts.
Removed by mod
Who asked for these games to look photo real, I used to like GTA back in the San Andreas and Vice City days. I hated the look of GTA 5 and didn’t even finish it, the older games had cartoon graphics and lots of charm, these new ones suck
valheim out there setting a massive record in sales, with graphics that look like the PS1 with better lighting
Everyone who isn’t being pedantic and ignoring the vast majority and economic data and sales that led us to giant graphically intensive open worlds rpg and action games.
You don’t like that shit, good for you. But pretending the demand isn’t there is head in sand dumb.
Graphics peaked for me in the 360 era. Bioshock Infinite is probably the best that graphics ever needed to get. Focus on frame rate and shit, I guess, but I don’t need my mud brown shooters to look any more hyper realistic than they did in 2013.
As much as I like this platform, there’s a lot of this kind of thinking on here. People with niche opinions acting like they’re a worldwide fact.
I don’t care about hyper real graphics either, but many, many, many people care about it a lot. The reality is indie games are quite niche compared to larger games even during this time of increasing spotlight on them. Hopefully that will continue to shift but we aren’t there yet.
The left part is the reference to what? Who is Lucia?
Plus, you can’t realistically ask more than 20 bucks for a 2d platformer.It honestly bugged me that people think there’s like a ceiling price for 2d even though it require artist to animate frame by frame, but 3d it’s unlimited even though you could tweak everything far more easily.
2D is not even less work than 3D imo if you’re comparing “good looking” 3D and 2D work. Modern techniques have all but rendered them as merely separate art styles.
Yeah, It really depend on how detail you want it to be, both is hard, but somehow people will pay one more than the other.
So the smart thing to do here is have a 2d metroidvania with 3d artstyle, and suddenly the price ceiling is removed lol (bloodstained is $40 on release)
You want 3D vibes in a 2D platformer, just for laughs? They call that parallax.
You can also do the 2.5D style of like Trine or Mandragora.
Or 3d pretending to be 2d like Deadcells
A lot of 2d games are done in 3d engines these days anyway, because it gives “free” parallax, depth buffering and masking, hardware accelerated compositing etc.
So it’s all the work of hand-drawing animation frames with all the complexity of rigging and mapping in 3d.
Enter the Gungeon and the Shovel Knight series are two examples that come to mind.
There is a price for every D. You go to the store and buy a D for like 15 bucks, so reselling it for more than 20 is criminal. You get one D for free with a game engine, then you buy another D, that’s why the top price for two D is 20 bucks. You would think a game with 3 D will be capped at 40, but then you need to add some A to it, so it’s OK if a game with 3 D and 3 A costs 80 bucks at retail, A aren’t free.
When I take D I usually get paid for it.
Have any openings?
How else would they be taking D?
A couple
It’s not about hours. It’s the cost of those hours. Despite tons of helpers, performant 3d is hard as fuck. And with that comes expensive coders. In extreme cases you’re talking about 3.5:1.
And the median case?
It’s going to depend on lots of factors and the type of game you’re making. They are just two different damn tools.
That’s capitalism for you: first you say that the price doesn’t depend on the production expenses and can be as big as the seller wants, and now you try to explain the price with “production expenses”. No. It is a 2d platformer. 20 bucks is already a very high price.
Twenty bucks gets you a good sandwich and a soda these days. The same money twenty years ago would get you a second sandwich.
20 years ago we were still in the era of $5 footlongs
I’m spoiled though. When I said good I meant something special. Like Paseo back when, or Un Bien nowadays.
A second sandwich, yes, but what about a second breakfast?
You could make it a week of brunches and I’d still have gotten more pleasure from the video game.
deleted by creator
$20 is cheap AF for a game the length and quality of Silksong.
The only real argument you are making here is that “capitalism sucks”. So, I guess we unintentionally agree.
first you say that the price doesn’t depend on the production expenses and can be as big as the seller wants
Huh? When did i even claim that?
Edit: also even if i said that, which i didn’t, let’s not pretend selling a 2d metroidvania at $30 or even $40 is as same as AAA studio justifying selling their game at $80. It’s like a different issue altogether because one is actively firing people and exploit cheap worker and giving their CEO a fat bonus while claiming inflation, the other is people pretend a dimension of their artwork is the limiting factor.
My beliefs are that all software, with no exceptions should be free and non economic, set this aside for a bit:
I still see absolutely no reason for why one art style would have more value then any other art style.
A game can be anything we can conceive. The best games i played where not about the gameplay but the stories they tell, the vibes they set, the feelings they make me feel.
Thomas was alone and limbo are technically speaking not very complex but the value those games hold is infinitely more then a modern urbisoft title.
One is expensive produced soulless junk i wouldn’t even want to install ending with an abstract value of 0 to me, the others are experiences i cherish that i cannot buy for 20 bucks anywhere else therefor far exceeding the abstract value that 20 bucks is. Its worth way more, its factually sold for way less.
But i repeat, all software should be free, art and experiences should be shared freely and the people who make them deserve the means to flourish by getting acces to the many natural resources that are being wasted on capitalism.
Nintendo: Yes, you can shove that Mario in your socialistic arses; now give us those “the means to flourish by getting acces to the many natural resources”! All of them! Now!
Nitendo already has access because they have money and connections, if they would want to build something new, lets say a themepark or just a big event on public property there is not much stopping them, they can just do that with faster signed permission then you would receive a rejection email.
Nitendo also isnt indie game at all, just because they happen to make 2d platforms doesn’t mean they represent the default Businessmodel for all 2d platformers.
As a consequence of Nintendo already having more then a reasonable share, it also becomes morally correct to use their products and services without payment. The costs of All their games, hardware, regardless of 2d style should be 0 to consumers who almost all have less then they should have.
Than*
Luca and the two people on the left are a reference to the protagonists from GTA6 which is rumored to cost ~80 USD.
Plus, you can’t realistically ask more than 20 bucks for a 2d platformer.
Nintendo is infamous for ridiculous pricing, though.
AAA games are infamous for their ridiculous pricing, not just Nintendo. I included Sony and they are also charging $60 for their 2D platformer.
I would have paid $40-50 myself. Maybe I’ll get a second copy at some point.
I don’t think anyone would have complained if it was $30-$40. They could have sold well at $60 with some people complaining about it and others defending them for the choice.
That’s like N64 game prices.
deleted by creator
