There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
By its very definition weird isn’t going to sell to mass market. That being said I do agree that we need more weird AAA or AA games.
There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
Oh yes. Ever heard of Beautycopter?
I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.
Looking from another angle from Yoko Taro’s point, I’d say that, in fear of failing due to being too big, companies would rather play it safe, but that causes creations to grow sterile.
And as consequence, people allegedly “weird”, which I wouldn’t think are necessarily people with curious antiques as Yoko Taro himself, but simply people whose game ideas are far from a safe ground, go for making indie titles instead as then they can be free to do whatever they want.
Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
The indie scene is so much fun.
Part of the issue is that AAA still hasn’t learned how to manage and produce passion projects, which most great games are. They keep wanting to use what’s working elsewhere with no regard for what makes sense in their own game.
Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with making games.
Happens with any industry that gets big, I think. More profits=more suits/vampires coming in and replacing artists/scientists or whoever is more qualified to make key decisions.
This won’t stop unless infinite wealth hoarding is tackled by governments, if ever.
You’re not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline “video games earn more than movies for the first time ever,” and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
Next you’ll tell me mainstream is not niche
Fewer weird people.
There’re fewer weird people.
Fair play!
I wasn’t saying you were wrong, just adding a further correction.
Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
False, Tlou part 2 was peak normie writing
TLOU2 controversy wasn’t because the unlikable character was a woman, it was because the writing was garbage. If the unlikable character was a man the reception would have been exactly the same.
Also, woman characters in games hasn’t been a risk since Metroid came out in 1986. It seems nowadays that the tables have turned and the vast majority of main characters in more than half of games from the past 5 years are women.
Killed the franchise so much that the original game has been remastered twice, the second game once, and a TV series has been made out of it…?
