MudMan

What nobody is saying is that if you go into a test with a near-empty ink cartridge your hipsterism has outpaced your skill.

Refill that stuff going in or bring a second pen, you pleb.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

Right? I’m guessing this is a teenage thing and we the olds just don’t understand?

I mean, I keep track in the sense that I’m introverted enough to never, ever, ever call anybody socially unless I have a practical reason, but that’s why social media, group chats and extroverted people exist.

The Spanish thing with 5 is a lewd rhyme as well. A pretty tortured one, too. It refers to anal sex, but the word they’re rhyming isn’t butt. Or sex. It’s just a less common word for sticking a thing into a thing.

I don’t know what the 33 thing is about, though.

I looked it up, apparently there’s a saying where people say “my balls 33” to mean that something is false or not gonna happen? Even people who know the expression seem confused about where it came from. I don’t know, your guess is as good as mine here.

Different metrics, though.

I do have to disagree that this chart proves what you say it proves, though. Arguing that Rockstar in particular does not care about quality is… a sizzling hot take.

Look, there are plenty of grifters in gaming, particularly those coming from the tech side of things (not “business school” so much, honestly). And yeah, there’s a lot of money to be made and the majors are going to want a piece of that pie. Which is fine, because I want them to have money to also go after the big flashy triple-A single player stuff.

But it’s obviously not true that all you get from the games industry is cookie cutter GaaS stuff. It’s less true by the minute. Which is not to say I want online games to go away, either. I will actively play some of the games on that list. On purpose. I don’t want them to be the only thing there is to play… but fortunately they’re not, so… cool?

I agree that when the game doesn’t work it doesn’t matter how creative it is, what I’m saying is that when it’s fixed and it does work that doesn’t make it indefinitely worse.

The late-game thing you’re talking about is a good example of why I think prioritization habits are a bit busted. I do think it makes sense to say that hey, this part of the game is only going to get seen by a small portion of players, so it’s a lower priority than the parts that are going to get seen by everybody…

…but if a bug is a major showstopper that prevents any amount of players from going through the game, then it’s a major showstopper, you can’t just push it to a patch and call the game shippable.

I’d even make a big distinction about minor bugs… and minor bugs that do something peristent. You’d be struggling to convince the average producer to do a late fix for a minor visual glitch, but if the inor visual glitch stays there forever it makes the whole thing look unacceptably broken (which is where some of those BG3 glitched quests would fall for me, btw).

We’re getting into the weeds now. The point is that yes, revenue and money are a factor, but I think the current issues with reliability and technical polish in games are coming from more places than that. There’s a culture of prioritization that is looking at things that will block shipping externally or that are software-end dealbreakers where the whole game crashes. This has to do with both applying only software development logic to game creation and from having historically relied on first parties to draw the line of shippable quality and a period there in the early 2000s where people were getting very mad at eternal delays and vaporware. That culture needs to change and producers and QA need to start being rated on how clean the game ships, not just on whether it ships on time. Again, the weeds… but it’s relevant that it’s not as simple as “greedy publishers”.

Oh, also to be clear, when I say “prioritization” that also means what gets shipped versus not fixed. That’s also a prioritization choice, not just which bugs get fixed first or later. Especially if the dev cycle doesn’t end at ship and instead ends five patches and several years down the line.

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Wow, that took a turn, there’s some tonal whiplash in going from complaining about lack of creativity in gaming to calling games “goods”.

It has a lot to do with misjudging bug severity (and on PC with compatibility testing, which is its own thing). All games are under pressure to ship late in development, all studios are under pressure to clean that backlog in any way possible and all games ship with known bugs. That’s all fine. The question is which bugs are a dealbreaker. The console first parties used to be more stringent about stuff, patches used to be harder to distribute and the whole thing culturally just looks at crashes as the original sin that must always be stopped but will often put a lot of pressure to fix everything else later and ship nominally on time.

It’s a bad call and it needs adjustments. I’m glad that peoplpe are angry and not super understanding about it. That will help.

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True, but that cuts both ways. Games being shipped before they are finished doesn’t mean they’re not good games when they’re finished. Sometimes even before they’re finished, because being technically sound and being a good game are different things.

The industry needs to redefine what a showstopper issue is and what ship-ready means… but the games are still good.

Because they’re not all failures, they’re also making single player games and you’re assuming that the one example of publishers wanting to tick a box in their lineup is somehow all they (let alone the entire industry) are producing.

The fact that people are making extraction shooters doesn’t mean they’re not making anything else. Warner’s biggest game this year is a narrative RPG. EA’s biggest game is (as always) a sports game, and their highest reviewed games are a Star Wars single player action game and a single player horror game. Sony’s biggest game is an open world superhero action game. I don’t know about Ubi’s sales off the top of my head, but what they’ve shipped recently is a 2D metroidvania and a throwback to classic Assassin’s Creed.

I don’t understand why you want publishers to be judged by what they don’t make, as opposed to what they make. Major publishers are billion dollar companies that put out many games. I have zero problems with EA running Apex Legends if I get to play Dead Space. I have zero problems with Sony trying to get a live service game going if they keep making insanely refined narrative action games. I don’t enjoy every game people make, but I don’t hate that people make games that are not for me if there are also games for me happening at the same time.

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Alright, new theory:

You guys don’t play too many games, right?

For the record, the best selling games of this year had fewer live service games than last year and the year before. The top of the charts was consistently single player games without microtransactions and this is one of the main GOTY candidates of 2023 following trends from “business schools” straight into… eh… a climactic absurdist musical number.

I’d tag that as spoilers if I could because, as I said, it’s increasingly clear you guys haven’t been playing this stuff.

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That is a very weird take.

So let me get this straight, Street Fighter 6 is a “20 year old franchise” so not fresh and original (it is maybe the biggest redefinition of the series since SF3, but hey). Somehow The Talos Principle 2, a direct sequel to a 10 year old game… not that.

But also, Dave the Builder, Sea of Stars, Hi-Fi Rush, Life of P, Lethal Company, Terra Nil, Humanity, Against the Storm… even going by new IP alone it’s been a great year. Not that I accept your premise, sequels and licensed games can obviously be, and indeed have been, fantastic and innovative.

I am very confused and you are either being disingenuous or so comitted to arbitrary requirements that any year is an equally good year.

You could have figured that out in the century it spent in Early Access, I suppose.

Honestly, yeah, I do think devs need to reassess what is a showstopping bug and what isn’t. Not much question on that. But also, I have seen worse. I even played a ton of Cities Skylines 2 at launch. Which paid off weirdly, because once they fixed the balance (or at least improved it) my starter city is now an insane utopia.

In any case, my backlog is enormous, I can wait for games to be actually finished before I play them. In BG3’s case, I think there was the one quest that didn’t pop once, but I spent a hundred hours on it just fine… and then had to go live my real life, so I still have to do the last act at some point. I’ll get to it.

None of that changes that this year had banger after banger, from studios large, medium and small. You can complain about many things relating to the business, but man, the skill, creativity and artistry from game developers of all stripes is nuts.

There’s a bit of a hump you get over, though. I’ve been recently doing some long franchise-wide marathons and once I got into the groove it was surprisingly nostalgic. It recaptured that feeling of coming back from school and just playing games until I got called for dinner.

I do understand that when I lose that flow I REALLY lose that flow. Not sure if it’s age or distractions or what. All I’m saying is you can get it back and it does feel good when you manage it.

Oh, man, I had forgotten those were this year.

My list also includes:

Pikmin 4
Baldur’s Gate 3
Spider-Man 2
Street Fighter 6
Mortal Kombat 1
Dead Space and RE4 remake
The Talos Principle 2

And I didn’t even get around to Alan Wake 2, which everybody’s been raving about. Or that Dave the Builder thing. Or Lies of P. Or Jedi Survivor. And I guess I’m not counting the new Prince of Persia because that’s this year, technically. And I’m not into 2D Mario games, so I’m guessing skipping Super Mario Wonder makes me a bit of an outlier.

Look, I know it feels good to be jaded and edgy and cynical, but… yeah, no, it was an all-time great year for games in 2023. And a terrible year for the games industry. But the games? So good.

Meh, still a better greenlight process than most major publishers.