Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

Portal came with the advantage that Valve hadn't devolved yet. The Orange Box was a mysterious gift filled with juicy, creative content from a developer whose primary focus was still on games, not storefronts.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 1st 2021 at 10:44:41 AM

The external and social factors gave these games increased visibility, and visibility can make or break a game.

That's the same reason why Steam strangles indie developers to death by letting good-quality games drown in its deluge of shit. Your game could be the greatest game ever designed, but it won't matter if nobody knows it exists.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 1st 2021 at 7:42:55 AM

Valve figured out that it could make more money by selling other people's shit than by making its own.

Another big problem currently is everyone wants a Fortnite style revenue stream without really understanding that Fortnite is just a digital store with a neat game for you to play while your wallet loads. Any attempt at an actual game can't survive a Fornite monetization system.

The other day, I saw someone describe Fortnite skins as digital Funko PO Ps, and I think that really nails it. Selling an endless stream of worthless, low effort garbage is the ultimate goal.

That's rather unfair to the Funko pops, don't you think? At least they don't try to pretend they're anything more than plastic dust collectors.

I don't think DA: Origins gameplay was particularly mediocre or bad though

Bioware's forte may never have been gameplay but it's hard to argue that it could at least have much been better if there had been much in the way of competent (or any) direction for most of the project. Not only was Bioware's staff discouraged from looking at other games like Destiny to learn "how to make a loot n shoot 101", but they also just didn't have good leadership establishing a vision for the game and were just fucking around for years in an endless miserable grind. I think it was some EA exec who told them the flight mechanics should stay, because they were considering getting rid of them.

EDIT:

I don't think the majority of people are even aware of how much garbage there actually is on Steam's storefront. If you're the type of person to only really pay attention to AAA, AA and high-profile indie games then you're probably just searching for them on the storefront, buying them, and letting that be that. Maybe occasionally browsing the most popular or best-selling games if you're bored and want to see if anything looks interesting.

But if you're the type of person to really browse Steam for those diamonds in the rough/hidden gems, or a no-name developer trying to get the word out for your game, it's a REALLY big problem because you won't have any visibility unless you get lucky/manage to get some good marketing/word of mouth, which just won't be the case for most people.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Mar 1st 2021 at 4:19:49 PM

edit: sorry, double posted

Edited by Draghinazzo on Mar 1st 2021 at 4:19:32 PM

Definitely. I don't remember how I found, say, Heaven's Vault on Steam. And the complete lack of direction is a huge problem with the Nintendo eShop.

Aside from it being the Nintendo eShop, that is.

Without some idea of what you're looking for, you're just wading thru page after page of garbage.

I wish game demos were still common but I guess they might be a bit too much for Indie devs.

Nintendo at least does those Indie Directs sometimes.

This reminds me of an observation I saw somebody on YouTube make a while ago. Lots of people (including Jim - hey, I'm vaguely on topic!) have criticised Nintendo for not including the Virtual Console on the Switch. This individual argued that the lack of the VC is what allowed the Switch to become the platform of choice for indie games. For the first couple of years of its existence, big Switch games were released in a steady stream rather than regular blowouts, which meant there were times when one could plausibly have played all the big games available. And when that happens, you go looking into the budget games. Had the VC been present, people would just have bought Zelda: Ocarina of Time again... but since it wasn't, indie games were able to get attention.

The VC still exists in a way. It's called the Switch Online.

And they're drip-feeding games onto that. Hell they're adding some random ass choices.

Remember when Neo Geo games were on VC? Guess since Nintendo and Sony were once more going down the "why bother" route with retro rereleases, Hamster's had to pick up the slack with the Arcade Archives series (and even then its only the Neo Geo MVS versions so there's no home console extras)

I think the bigger problem is that there are only so many NES games that hold up enough to go back to anyway. SNES fares a bit better in that regard, though that said I can imagine some, like the Final Fantasy games, get caught up in licensing.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Mar 2nd 2021 at 9:35:22 AM

Yeah, a lot of classic NES games were, frankly, shit.

They only got super popular back in the day because they followed in the wake of Atari games. Which were, uh, yeah.

Edited by M84 on Mar 2nd 2021 at 10:58:32 PM

I don't know if the lack of Virtual Console is necessarily for the benefit of indies, given how the 3DS and Wii U had a lot of indie successes on them anyways.

And I will say that the NES Online and SNES Online are better values than Virtual Console, since you're getting most of the classics for $20 instead of buying each one piecemeal for $5-$7 a piece.

The problem with it is it's crudely stapled on to the actual product you're paying $20 a year for, which is Nintendo Switch Online. It's artificial value to distract from the fact that crappy peer-to-peer connections are stuck behind an annual paywall. Xbox Game Pass having a far more expansive modern library doesn't make it look much better either, even when accounting for the differences in price.

...though, I guess the "bring back Virtual Console" thing is usually brought up with the suggestion that you should retain all your purchases across all consoles with Virtual Console. I think whenever Jim criticized NSO they brought up that idea, too?

Yeah, I'd have preferred being able to just carry over my VC purchases to Wii U and not have to rebuy them even at a discount. Just give us the updates and reward our loyalty Nintendo come on.

Nintendo is fucking stingy.

This is why I never give my "loyalty" to any company. I owe them nothing but the money I pay for their goods and services.

Nintendo has the mentality of a toy making company. Which makes sense, its origins was as a toy making company - a lot of their weird, stingy, archaic modern business practices make a hell of a lot more sense if you're familiar with toy collecting (as Jim is). I think Jim has even referenced Nintendo's toymaker mentality in one of their older videos right when the NES classic plug-n-play was announced. The IP stinginess, marketing and recently adoption of the moratorium distribution model for certain products is very similar to Disney in that regard.

I think it's smash success mostly comes from Toby's name being very well known from his work on Homestuck, which was still insanely popular at the time. I 100% believe if Homestuck wasn't the insanely large phenomenon it was, Undertale would have been a lot less dominant even if still respected and well regarded (somewhat like LISA: The Painful)

I’m way annoyed at Nintendo.

I’ve been trying to buy Ultimate Alliance 3 but they haven’t marked down the price so it’s still 60 dollars.

I’m sorry but UA 3 is not a 60 dollar game, especially when taking into account the DLC.

Nintendo also doesn't hire people with any history in the gaming industry for the executive suite. This means they keep getting execs from toy companies, and ones who clearly don't understand the issues with the way the company does things. Like Shigeru Miyamoto's weirdass proclamations about the Mario series, trying to prevent the spinoffs from having engaging stories because apparently gameplay is the only thing that matters. This is clearly insane, but it's not a thing that's relevant to toy production so none of the execs are like "hey, excuse me, why are you telling people the Paper Mario series can't have a good story? The first two games are revered for their writing and stories."

I mean, a lot of gaming company execs are completely insane in their own way, but Nintendo's gotten deep into the toy mentality recently, what with bizarrely limited releases and stuff for no reason. A limited edition toy makes sense because they have to physically make them, and the Japanese toy industry is full of very short run figures and models. But limiting all sales of the Mario 3D All Stars collection doesn't make any sense because there's no limits on how many digital copies they can sell.

Edited by Zendervai on Mar 2nd 2021 at 11:00:01 AM

That's not what he said

what's especially weird with paper mario is they try to exercise some type of weird and unnecessary brand control. apparently IS isn't allowed to create original characters based on mario enemies anymore (and by that i mean altering the designs of mario enemies to mark them as unique characters) despite that not being an issue at all for 64 and TTYD.

Nintendo is incredibly paranoid and stingy when it comes to their IP.

This is in large part due to the Cd-i games.