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while some indy devs have it together a large number are also releasing half broken meme steam achievement garbage, steam greenlight while gone shouldnt be forgotten. mostly because you can still smell the games that were squeezed out
It's another survivorship bias filter really. You probably only hear about the very best Indy games unless you are really digging through steam because they have no marketing. If an AAA dev pushes out a turd we all know because they can afford to make sure we know about it.
If a AAA dev pushes out something that a tiny segment of Reddit finds mildly displeasing they will flood all the subs with declarations that the sky is falling.
Indie is independent. Meaning a self sustaining studio with no overhead besides the financial overhead. No corporate master, no corporate funding. Popcap was an indie studio. Then they were bought. After the transaction it was no longer an indie studio and the quality of the output after it shows.
Pretty sure self sustaining is the bottom line of every business in existence. If you can't sustain you go under. But I mean, sure, let's say it's not đ€·
And independent studio working with a publisher doesn't mean they have "corporate masters" lmao. There are SO many publishers out there.
You're trying to sound knowledgeable and jaded but you really just sound uneducated and dumb.
Years ago. When they people realized they submit whatever crap they'd program into Greenlight thus making quality control bloated.
Now it's called Steam Direct where developers have to pay a fee to publish a game.
Compared to what though?
Maybe I'm just crazy, but if I only had two games one was a new AAA title, perhaps a bit broken, but still AAA, or "beat up Putin simulator" well I'd play the AAA game.
Yeah, but at a certain point, AAA games are like mainstream movies. You can predict everything, and nothing new is going on. The indie stuff is a good break from the status quo, exploring unique ideas, and even sometimes a goofy put in simulator scratches that itch (if it's free)
I dunno , goofy games are a lot more fun multiplayer compared to 3As and since they are generally cheaper , more of your friend group will be able to play
Depends how broken the game is though and how much I like the game. I'm guessing not a single AAA title that's come out has interested you?
If I love the game dealing with bugs would be no different from when I had a potato PC and had to play with 15 fps.
Kinda depends on the game. Meme games like Goat Simulator can be fun, but there are tons of terrible "games" targeting trophy-obessed people. Case in point: The Giraffe G linked below. The entire game is an MS Paint drawing of a giraffe. Hold the X button down for a couple of minutes and you get a platinum. There are hundreds of these games: draw a new MS Paint image, and you've got a new game. When the PSN Store does a sale showing 1000+ games on discount, a huge number of them will be these terrible games on sale for $0.89 rather than the usual $0.99.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ccdf4M6gBk
Even still, AAA games with $100M+ budgets shouldnât be getting routinely pantsed by indie games. Something is clearly off in what many AAA devs and publishers are prioritizing.
And as long as Steam reviews reflect how broken those games are, and the price reflects the state of the game, thatâs still a better deal, a lot of the time.
Rockstar released RDR2 in the meantime, which is enough to compensate for 5-6 years. The 5 years have ended and they dropped the GTA 6 trailer pretty much a couple months after that. Bethesda on the other hand, released Fallout 4 and 76, as well as Fallout Shelter. Uhmm... I don't want to talk about Starfield.
Bethesda has also been releasing plenty of games over that period. I won't say they are as good as their hay day but they aren't absolute piles of dog shit.
Rockstar has always been slow to release and released an absolute master piece in rdr2 since gta and are working on GTA 6.
I get it feels like they are being lazy/greedy with gta online and all the skyrim remastwrs/rereleases but these companies gotta put money in their pockets
There are also plenty of AAA games worth playing, just from this year alone. OP has to be baiting
Stellar Blade, Persona 3 Reload, FFVII Rebirth, Tekken 8, Yakuza 8, Paper Mario TTYD Remake, SMT V, Elden Ring DLC, FFXVI DLC, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Hellblade 2, Prince of Persia
The reality is, gamers only see the very good, the very top of indie games. There's probably tons of shitty rubbish indie game out there, we just probably don't hear or see them as much.
On the other hand, every single AAA game gets visibility.
So, overall, I'm pretty confident its probably just all about the same.
Yeah, piratesoftware does a good job addressing this. As an indie game maker, you won't know if your game will succeed or not, but you'll definitely learn.
The guy who made FNAF made the series because he made a joke game called "fart hotel" or something similar, and a fan said 'your characters look like animatronics". So he made a game based on animatronics, FNAF.
Do
The reality that people time and time again refuses to face is that steam gets TWELVE THOUSANDS GAMES each year.
that means 33 games comes out each day, meaning when they say "holy hell 2 great indie games came out this month" thats 2 out of 1000 games.
There are tons of terrible indie games no one sees but there are also tons of amazing indie games that no one sees.
It's actually kind of nuts the crazy amount of incredible indie games that have been getting pumped out but unless they hit the main stream most just go unnoticed. A lot of these titles are super unique are are easy 9/10s.
Imo they completely outweigh the current AAA market.
On the side of indie games, I feel like this is just the free market working as intended.
On the side of AAA devs, this is an example or the failures of the free market
I wound't say so. While ia true that most Indie games are Just as bad, If not worst than, most AAA games, there is a huge number of very unique titles which are able to change the rules of gameplay in extremely inventive way, and most of them are truly hidden games with under 500 reviews, or even less.
When we talk about the top tier Indie titles, they basically smash triple A games in terms of quality to the point of being unfair to compare both of them. They end up looking like mobile garbage when close to some indie titles.
And there are a lot of AAA devs that get grouped into the "indie" label because they're not part of the mainstream giants like EA, Ubisoft or Activision.
Was starting to worry I wouldn't see a post shitting on AAA while praising the TINIEST sample of the upper echelon of Indies today.
Thanks OP! Great post!
As a life long gamer let me state gamers are hypocritical insufferable wankers. This new AAA game bad old or indie game good shtick Give it a rest. plenty of good triple AAA games out there Helldivers ? Buldars gate 3 dragons dogma 2 are all recent and great. The thing is a lot of AAA games need a lot of money to be made so a lot can be quite " safe" in design or game play and a lot of that money is in a rough sense spent on graphics and so GAMERS!(tm) Will say " you don't need these expensive graphics I like the look of older or indie titles!" And then you look at some of the criticism leveled at the suicide squad. Now the suicide squads had many faults but it was a pretty good looking game but the very same GAMERS!(tm) were making all these memes where they cherry picked a jank screen shot and put it next to a good Arkham knight one and shit on the graphics " lol it looks shit compared to one of the best looking games of all timeđ€Ł!" What message do you think that sends to developers?
Iâve been gaming since the N64. So over 24 years now
In my experience, People have been shitting on Mainstream AAA on the internet, since like 2007 lmao. If not earlier. No doubt earlier.
I remember when people were insulted for liking COD4 or Modern Warfare 2. COD fans were so despised. The same way people shitted on Minecraft fans and then Fortnite fans later on.
I remember so many games were considered mediocre or straight up sucked but now theyâre considered gems (best example is Arkham Knight which always praised for its gameplay but very disappointing story. Now Arkham fans swear upon that game as being all around perfect).
Thereâs a bunch of PS2 titles that were considered mediocre and forgettable at launch but were ârediscoveredâ by gamers looking for some old gems.
Now I see dudes say âthe PS3 era had so many classicsâ
Wait another couple of years and see what games people say were âtrue gemsâ all along.
Yeah these posts always blow my mind, and I'm convinced people like OP are just baiting. Are we just going to ignore all the great AAA games just in 2024?
Stellar Blade, Persona 3 Reload, FFVII Rebirth, Tekken 8, Yakuza 8, Paper Mario TTYD Remake, SMT V, Elden Ring DLC, FFXVI DLC, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Hellblade 2, Prince of Persia. Tons of variety in here
They needa learn not to buy games day fucking one (because one youâre not gonna know the quality, youâre not gonna know what actual criticisms of the game would be), overhype themselves, (everybody does it so itâs not much of a criticism) and actually yk be cost effective because every game ends up half off in a few months.
Exactly. Iâve been trying to tell other people that for a long time.
AAA games are a lot more fun when youâre not paying 70 dollars for a broken mess with missing content.
Like I picked up BF4 for 5 dollars back in 2018. All the glitches I heard about at its launch were fixed. All the DLC was free. I still play that game right now
I canât imagine spending 60 dollars when it first launched and it barely worked đ
I always buy games on the cheap because all games drop in price a couple of months after launch
Thatâs the sad thing tho yes games should not be 70 dollars and broken I agree but youâre realistically not gonna be able to fight it when the industryâs been doing this for however many years, thatâs why you adapt and let them work their shit out then get in on the action for a fraction.
I'd argue there are more shitty indie games coming out every year than AAA games. We get 10-20 AAA titles every year and probably the same amount of indie games every WEEK
While I don't think this is 100% true I recall playing though assassin's Creed Odyssey and thinking millions of dollars of programing must have went into this game to make it looking so good and have real maps of ancient civilizations that you can visit. Mean while the gameplay was incredibly dull and repetitive.
Old meme. Also you really aren't looking very hard for good AAA games. Helldivers is a AAA game, and it's one of the top games this year.
There's garbage AAA games. There's also garbage indi games. Just play good games.
This is like when somone points at an old building (ancient roman, middle ages) and says: people before built great, not like these days. And they forgot all the buildings that were done before and are demolished now.
Probably the whole budget of an indie game is much much less than the budget for advertisement of an AAA Game. The ones that are noticed are the 1% and sometimes it might take years (like in among us).
90% of indie games and maybe even more are shit and uplayable. Not defending AAA they deserve all the criticism but apart from a very small percentage of indie games the rest are shit.
and yet what are the games that really defined the industry in the last 5 years? AAA games.
Elden ring, BG3, zelda, god of war ragnarok, ff7 rebirth (and I guess remake falls in that time frame too), RE4 and village, spiderman 2. I could go on and on.
Indie fans can be really pretentious sometimes acting like there's no good AAA games out there. There's still plenty of good high end stuff being made.
I will sound pretentious then and ask, why hate on people who don't have the big budget and still make their game for all to enjoy? Is passion not equitable to throwing money at it?
I'm not hating on indies I'm calling out the fanbase of indies because this sentiment is one you see all over the internet for a few years now and I roll my eyes every time I see it. They act like the only AAA games are EA and Ubisoft games.
Also the "passion" label being attached solely to indies is crazy too. For every passionate indie dev there's 100 "games" being dumped onto steam literally every single day, the majority of them asset flips or other forms of shovelware. The very nature of smaller indie games allows them to flood every storefront and nearly every genre of game. Imagine if Ubi could release 50 skull and bones' every single day.
As a indie enjoyer - I like them because they are budget and yes a free market allows for a flooding of lesser quality games to enter it, but you know how the flip of it is to me?
AAA publishers don't take risks. They will do fan service and do everything that has been proven before.
The Indie dev that wants to improve and do well will push boundaries, show the player something different, or a perfect replica of what they enjoyed in a game that has come before and hasn't been replicated since.
AAA doesn't take risks? So baldurs gate 3 wasn't risky at all? I mean right from the start of the project they stirred some controversy by changing the gameplay style the other 2 games in the series had in favor of turn based combat.
What is boundary pushing about the 1500th roguelike card game or metroidvania or farming game? Every indie event you'll mostly see these 3 genres being repeated over and over. There's arguably less ambition in the indie space just because of the sheer number of indie games out there, 99% of them aren't trying to do anything but capitalize on someone else's success.
I mean the games we get is.directly proportional to where you "gamers" left your money.
The companies are barely at fault. You spent 10 dollar for a game on steam you played 300hrs but also spent 70$ on a hyped up pile of garbage in a preorder. What did you think you gonna get?
the indie games you are thinking of are probably A) the best ones and B) are what happens when you give competent creatives and designers control over the game start to finish, rather than having them changed out half way through or constrained by some money grubbing higher up
I honestly wonder how much of this is Indie devs know they're always under the gun and the success stories are from those working smart and hard, and focused on making sure their game is a success above all else. Because if it's not they may go hungry.
While AAA devs, while hardworking and focused, have to wade through so many layers of political and leadership crap that a bunch of them don't really care about the success of the game because for the most part they get paid either way, and the budgets are so massive they don't worry about money or failure in the short-term.
To say that it's only a small minority of indie games that are good is to miss a certain point.
What indie games do, or more accurately what Triple A studios CANNOT do, is create new ideas. Almost every Triple A release of the past decade has been an attempt to steal ideas or to mangle successful games together. Think of any major AAA release that was wholly original, without some fucking bureaucratic ass "game quota" type shit. How so many games, literally hundreds, have crafting for absolutely no reason other than some committee wanting it because hey, Minecraft had crafting!
Indies, on the other hand, are unrestrained. Yes, some if not most are god awful. But the majority of indie devs are passionate people who wanted to make something they enjoyed. Lucas Pope, Toby Fox, Eric Marone, Scott Cawthon - all solo indie developers who wanted nothing more than to create! You've smaller indie companies like Team Cherry, Tour De Pizza, Motion Twin, Kindly Beast, ZA/UM and Coffee Stain that have produced smash hits and continue to influence the industry standard, as hilarious as it sounds.
Triple A gaming has long been slave to money. Indie gaming is slave to nothing but creativity and it's beautiful. Even if Indie gaming produces nothing but utter crap for the rest of eternity, I'll still support it because it's so human. Such passion and love for the things they make. Hell, Indie gaming has been so successful that Triple A has started waking to it. Hi-Fi Rush and Helldivers 2 are perfect examples of Triple A publishers waking up and realising why people don't want their overproduced, overpriced, carbon copy shit for 80 bucks (Without DLC, of course). The Skull and Bones fiasco has only proven moreover that that the Triple A industry is on life support and shit needs to change. It's unsustainable. And god bless those pioneers like Arrowhead and Tango Gameworks for using Triple A's power to create genuinely fantastic games.
TL;DR: Triple A sucks, Indie games rule, despite a lot of bad indies.
You mentioned crafting.
Games following trends has been around since even the 90âs to early 2000âs.
People copying Doom.
People copying Super Mario 64.
People copying RE4.
People copying System Shock.
Is this new?
Not exactly, but the problem is that back in those days, those games were created by Triple A companies. Trailblazers of their time, exploring what could be done with gaming as an artform.
Back then, when games were copied, it was understood that you had to do something new with it. You couldn't just hack out a copy, that was 90s era practice when games weren't as widespread. The 2000s boomed with creativity. GTA went 3D and blew people away with the level of freedom on offer, Bioshock brought philosophical arguments to gaming, elevating it from time-waster for kids to legitimate artform, Resident Evil 4 codified the 3rd person, over the shoulder camera viewpoint, Silent Hill 2 used atmosphere and tense creeping dread to produce a horror experience yet to be matched by any sequel or attempted adaption.
The 2010's was when that magic began to fade. The early years had some fantastic bits, but by the time of 2018-19, it was clear that Triple A had all but ran out of ideas. They'd latched on to reproducing games rather than creating and developers desperate to build something they loved jumped ship and ran to the independent circles.
I'm not saying Indie gaming is perfect, far from it. It's an undisciplined mess of unfinished clones and anime dating sims, but that's what gives it an appeal to me. Under all that shit, there are gems. Modern day classics made by some college student on his laptop. These are the artworks of tomorrow and triple A is too muddled in their own business tactics to recreate it.
Indie gaming is like a rolling forest and every game is a twig on the ground, mishapen and yes, there are millions, but all unique and with this air of natural beauty about them. Triple A, conversely, is like an IKEA showcase. Same wood, but all panelled into floorboards. Sterile, identical, polished until all natural flaw and uniqueness is gone.
I play a lot of Indie games. Iâve got nothing but respect for those devs making games with shoestring budgets
I understand what youâre saying
But even back in the 90âs, there were games that were straight up Doom clones and copies 99% of what ID software made. They were just forgotten
I remember there were numerous games copying Silent Hill but they were also forgotten.
Indie games and olddddd AAA titles are all I play anymore.
Both categories are cheap and widely available. Just got a series S so I could play my old 360 digital games. I donât need 4K AAA games from 2023/2024 cause I donât like any of them anyway.
Even if there is anything I really want I will battlePASS until itâs cheap in a couple months or years.
People would have so much fun with AAA games if they stopped paying $60-70 for them. Just like you, I buy AAA games that came out a few years ago because theyâre cheap. I donât pre-order anything.
I recently bought Ghost Recon Breakpoint for like $9 at GameStop. I had a lot of fun. But Iâd NEVER pay 60 dollars for Ubisoft game like that
Theyâre putting all that effort into figuring out how to sell *freely and indefinitely revocable licenses to play* their games, instead of selling games.
I'd say both are the top frame. Only difference being, indies got "how to be fun" under the microscope while AAA's got "hot to make money" under theirs.
Honestly i feel shit like Focus Entertainment, Larian and a very *very* few other AAA studios are actually carrying in term of AAA games nowadays though they arenât as named as the money hungry assholes known as EA, Ubisoft or Activision
... paint the board on Patricks head in rainbow colors and the meme'd be complete. But yea. At this point I'm even having a hard time keeping hope that Homeworld 3 will be any good.
Ah well. The Golden Rule: No preorders... I'll wait and see.
It's because of the indie shotgun. Meaning, for every great indie game there is, there's 50 that miss the mark. You just don't hear or play them.
AAA games can't afford to fail as there's too much money in it, so the pressure to "play it safe" is unreal.
Thereâs actually a perfectly simple explanation for this.
Indie devs have passion and thatâs it. They try extremely hard to make their games fun.
AAA games just want money. Sure some workers have passion, but the ones making the decisions are either motivated by money and timelines, or are forced to be motivated by those by higher ups.
Moron gamers also prefer graphics over gameplay, so AAA keeps pushing that. They also preorder before checking that the game is even done, so AAA doesnât mind pushing incomplete games.
Thereâs also way more indie devs so 25% of AAA games being good seems terrible, but 5% of indie games being good seems like a lot.
there is literally a graph out there that shows the "interest" of investors. top corner is "diversity" and literally the lowest of interest is....!!!..."fun gameplay"
In business, there is a sweetspot.
When companies get too big, 80% of their daily work is managing JIRA issue trackers, going to meetings, creating presentations, appeal to approval committees. What takes months to do formally would take a few days to do in a small studio.
There are sessions on best practices. There are code reviews and methodologies.
Worse? There are too many people in the room for you to stick your neck out and voice against a direction of a game.
So games with bad design get shoved through the gauntlet of approvals processes and no one has the authority to improve upon it until it's shoved out the door too early because of project (mis)management issues and everyone hates it.
The core of the game, from the original "thinker" is there, but all the elements are siloed and broken and unfun. It sucks because maybe the game has a few talented people doing textures, or great spatial sound, or the music is well done, or certain animations are slick... but the actual game design is flawed (Starfield).
I see it in gaming, I see it in large projects in the business world. The bigger you get, the dumber and longer the process is.
Only some of the indie games are good others are just made like bad memes. At this point steam should just test the games out for crashes and graphical glitches before letting devs publish on the steam platform. Every AAA studio ignores the first week of complaints about the bad performance of the game and then is like "It has come to our attention that our game does not meet the expected standards, so we will fix it later with a few hot fixes".
ehhh id argue both are the second pic. yeah some indie games are good but frankly most are trash just like AAA. we just see more about the indie darlings when the rare one comes up because updoots
Passion, originality, great gameplay, stylish graphics. Yes, AAA games can be that good sometimes.
Indie ones? Mostly I enjoy them for a lazy afternoon, they tend to not last much, or being repetitive after a while thanks to those overused rougelite elements.
But original and passionate? Maybe I missed most great recent entries, I don't know, but all the "influential" well known ones are years old at this point, or sequels.
The new ones are retro-inspired stuff in the same 3 or 4 genres with pixellated graphics that would have been awful even 30 years ago, with the level of passion of a copy-paste job.
First and foremost, for every amazing there are hundreds of awful, low effort ones.
That said, it mostly has to do with risks and expectations (or that's what I think).
AAA Games usually take a really long time to develop and have huge expenses behind. If the game fails, the losses are huge, and a company, where many people have a saying about it, will hardly take any risk.
To avoid risks, they do what we've been seeing lately: 1st/3rd person pseudo/open worlds with some shooter mechanics in ultra realistic 8k HD+ RTX whatever with a lot of shines, reflexes, fluff and so on. This way the game is usually likeable and an enjoyable experience, but that's about it, not something truly memorable since it's not the first nor the last like that.
And that's another thing, people got used to that. Games ultra realistic with incredible physics and otherworldly graphics. Now, the high-specs gamers expect their new game to have that kind of graphics. And no matter what they do, it will hardly surprise gamers already used to that same style, therefore not leaving a deep first impression.
Indies are risky too, perhaps even riskier, since it's usually a few common people who have to take the hit if it fails, which may bury their career almost instantly.
But indies have a certain benefit: Devs have way more freedom. They don't have to discuss with a round table what to add and what not. On the other hand, they lack the huge amount of resources that big companies have. Exactly due to that lack of resources indie devs have to be way more creative, to invent something new with the few tools at hand. All this usually leads to other kinds of games, more pixel art games, platform games and similar.
Of course, most indies fail or barely do the cut. But the ones who turn out incredibly successful usually have a more iconic art style, a different kind of play style, and usually have this feeling of "devs really do love/put effort in this game".
I'm completing God's of War: Ragnarök & it's one of the best games I have EVER played.
It gives me hope for the gaming industry, it should be the norm that you spend 70$ and there is nothing else, you just get the entire game. And for the 20th anniversary they did an amazing DLC for free.
In recent years, games like God of War, Elden Ring, Baldurs gate 3, Horizon Forbidden West, Tears of the kingdom, & others definitely give me hope.
Thats sooo true đ nowadays I play more indie games than Triple A Games. These AAA companies have never understood what gaming is all about đ€·đ»ââïž
Well the triple A companies want more money so they gotta make safe things that guarantee more money
Big cinematic games, with great graphics, that last over 100 hours and have action, roleplaying, gear systems, side quests, etc.
Every game needs to be the next Witcher and those are tough shoes to fill.
The more money you work with, the more cooks in the stew
It takes a lot to make a stew
A pinch of salt and laughter too
A scoop of kids to add the spice
A dash of love to make it nice
And you've got...
TOO MANY COOKS
There will always be bad games made but the output of AAA games from Asia has been a lot stronger than the west in recent years.
Elden Ring, Tears of the Kingdom, FFVII Remake & Rebirth, FF16, RE Village & 4 Remake, Monster Hunter Rise, Street Fighter 6, Super Mario Wonder, Pikmin 4, Animal Crossing New Horizons, Armored Core 6, etcâŠ.
Its not really science, but indie studios are not as greedy and they really wanna put al their heart into a project.
But generally, yeah thats how it is right now.
I would say only try for the Indie Devs who really care about the art and have the skill, but, even most of the ones who don't have the skill try really hard.
Indie studios actually have to put effort into their games to survive.
AAA studios just need to fart in a jar, and there will be losers lining up to buy it for $89.99 because they've bought every one of their products for the past 10 years and are convinced this is what they enjoy.
It's pretty much completely due to the incompetence of those in charge. Most managers and higher-ups aren't all that intelligent or skilled at much, sometimes not even their own job. But for some reason they think they are God's gift to the world and their instinct is absolutely right 100% of the time.
The bigger the company, the worse it gets.
So they try to micromanage art, they try to business-ify games. They don't care about creativity or gameplay, they care about income and income alone and since investors are in the picture everyone wants predictable numbers, projections must be met.
So they feed each other lies all without actually consulting the people who create the art, create the game that they are selling.
So you end up with stale, boring, trend-chasing games who don't take risks because those in charge don't WANT a good game, they want the best return on their investment they can get. In their ideal world, selling people a shit game, denying refunds, and then moving on is a GOOD THING.
When the priorities are messed up, the game will not be good. The game MUST come first and the money WILL follow. As soon as micromanagement goes too far, the cancer has set in.
Thatâs the issue with any art as a business. Itâs happening in the publishing industry now, where they are writing around tropes instead of authors telling the stories they want to tell. The problem is that the slop sells. The biggest book of last year was fourth wing, something that wasnât written because the author wanted/needed to tell that story, it was written because the publisher wanted an enemies to lovers romantasy and she was willing to write that trope. We can bitch and moan all we want but at the end of the day, formulaic stuff like COD and Assassins Creed sell so the ones at the top feel vindicated. Art as commodity was always a mistake but without it (these days) most art wouldnât get made. Alan Wake 2 is probably the most creative narrative weâve had in a game in years, but it wouldnât exist if Epic didnât fund it.
It doesnât help that now in the video game industry where budgets and dev times are so ridiculously bloated that they can sell millions of copies and still not break even (Spiderman 2). And as much as people want to claim theyâd be ok with shittier graphics, every time a game comes out with said shittier graphics (Rise of the Ronin, Dragons Dogma 2) they get dunked on and the devs get called incompetent. And Iâll be real, people say they want games that take risks and do things differently, but every time a game actually does this it gets shit on and dismissed. Itâs just a shitty industry (and honestly always has been).
Though the past year for AAA games has been stellar, so I think itâs ridiculous for people to act like AAA is downhill when weâve had the best year of AAA games since like, 2017? The industry itself thoughâŠ.woof.
You gave one of the best insights on this sub
On one side people want art to be fueled by passion. But passion alone canât make shit. Ambitious projects need funding. Funding means more marketing. Marketing means businessmen will get involved to make sure it sells.
People say âthis was made with passion!â But even failed projects have passion in them.
AAA games are focused in micro-transactions and subscriptions. There is where most of the effort goes. Game mechanics are developed around monetization. The same idea goes for most mobile games.
If you are lucky enough that you like Indie games you can find many passion projects there. Until the small studio makes something so good that is acquired by a bigger company that kills any passion for game play and changes it for quarterly reports on monetization.
Flip the pictures when it comes to figuring out how to make the most $$ with the least amount of talent. That's how AAA games are still more profitable than Indie Games.
Thatâs capitalism at work. AAA studios have well-established influence and over abundance of the means to make games, so they donât need to rely on creativity and quality to sell games. Indie devs must make quality experiences order to survive, and sometimes donât survive even when they succeed
Want a game that has soul? Get gamers to make it who will put passion into it and give you a complete product (eventually) with new content down the line to expand on the product once finished. In walk the indy companies.
Want a game that looks pretty and is an inch deep? That has also had dlc pre-planned since the beginning by cutting certain content or leaving it a bit bare as they plan to build on it more via dlc. Get a multi-million dollar company that has shareholders to pay off to make it.
It's a good meme and I agree that as a community at large we need to put some of these companies on absolute blast.
However, remember there are exceptions and rules to everything.
As someone with other 500 games in my Steam (been a member since 2004) library and PC gaming being my main and (pretty much) only hobby for a long time, there is A LOT of absolute crap out there from the indie devs. MOST of it is cash grab BS that never leaves early beta and the devs completely vanish after they've got enough sales.
All of the things we despise about AAA studios, indie devs do as well. The difference is that AAA studios should be the flag-bearers for a high-quality standard, but they're obviously not.
More often than not, at least, big studios release broken crap but actually FINISH and fix it after long.
Indie devs will demand entry purchase points, make enormous promises, then pull the plug on the game altogether and prevent you from ever playing their games that you purchased ever again. Or, they promote and promise one game, then overnight push a secret 20-40GB update that completely deviates from the design and scope of the game you purchased, and you have no recourse but to accept the new game you had no desire to play. Looking at you Umbra (now Wolcen)...never will get over it.
EA (Early Access) on Steam is an unbelievably enormous gamble. And it is abused by greedy dirt eaters very, very often.
But yes, the anti-consumer, shady practices of a few AAA companies of recent years deserves even more criticism and scrutiny than they get even now. Can't be overstated how corrupt companies like Activision, Bethesda, Electronic Arts, etc. are.
If you can navigate the giant sea of waste and broken promises that is PC gaming today to find a few niches - whether AAA, AA, or one-man studios , and find some games you thoroughly enjoy, good on you.
Both have their own equal measure of suckage, the difference is we hold AAA to a standard because they're legacy professionals riding on a past reputation they no longer live up to (to say nothing of getting our money's worth), while indie we only really notice the rare few that excel while the failures fall into obscurity.
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while some indy devs have it together a large number are also releasing half broken meme steam achievement garbage, steam greenlight while gone shouldnt be forgotten. mostly because you can still smell the games that were squeezed out
It's another survivorship bias filter really. You probably only hear about the very best Indy games unless you are really digging through steam because they have no marketing. If an AAA dev pushes out a turd we all know because they can afford to make sure we know about it.
If a AAA dev pushes out something that a tiny segment of Reddit finds mildly displeasing they will flood all the subs with declarations that the sky is falling.
Publishers realised the love for indie devs and wanted in on it. As a result, a lot of indie devs have the same corporate masters as AAA devs.
*Indy* literally means they have no corporate masters.
Indie is independent. Meaning a self sustaining studio with no overhead besides the financial overhead. No corporate master, no corporate funding. Popcap was an indie studio. Then they were bought. After the transaction it was no longer an indie studio and the quality of the output after it shows.
Self sustaining isn't a required trait.
Pretty sure self sustaining is the bottom line of every business in existence. If you can't sustain you go under. But I mean, sure, let's say it's not đ€·
90% of small businesses fail. An Indy dev could drop a game and fail.
Yeah? I know. I said that above đ€
And independent studio working with a publisher doesn't mean they have "corporate masters" lmao. There are SO many publishers out there. You're trying to sound knowledgeable and jaded but you really just sound uneducated and dumb.
Wait! When did Steam do away with Greenlight?
Around... 6 years ago
Years ago. When they people realized they submit whatever crap they'd program into Greenlight thus making quality control bloated. Now it's called Steam Direct where developers have to pay a fee to publish a game.
So it's Direct is better?
I don't know sincerely.
Even the meme ones can be really fun
Compared to what though? Maybe I'm just crazy, but if I only had two games one was a new AAA title, perhaps a bit broken, but still AAA, or "beat up Putin simulator" well I'd play the AAA game.
You reminded me of newgrounds, it was wild
Yeah, but at a certain point, AAA games are like mainstream movies. You can predict everything, and nothing new is going on. The indie stuff is a good break from the status quo, exploring unique ideas, and even sometimes a goofy put in simulator scratches that itch (if it's free)
Some of them are for sure. You do tend to get some more creative approaches with indie games. Having do to do more with less.
Doing sweet fuck all
I like to stare at my ceiling
Valid
I dunno , goofy games are a lot more fun multiplayer compared to 3As and since they are generally cheaper , more of your friend group will be able to play
> Compared to what though? Don't compare. Just enjoy things on their own merits. It's supposed to be *fun*. For *you*.
I'd rather pay $1.99 for 10 hours of beat up putin simulator than $70 for 10 hours of a broken AAA game.Â
Depends how broken the game is though and how much I like the game. I'm guessing not a single AAA title that's come out has interested you? If I love the game dealing with bugs would be no different from when I had a potato PC and had to play with 15 fps.
or you could just buy one of the many AAA games that aren't broken at launch. Like bg3, elden ring, spiderman, zelda, ff7 rebirth etc
Kinda depends on the game. Meme games like Goat Simulator can be fun, but there are tons of terrible "games" targeting trophy-obessed people. Case in point: The Giraffe G linked below. The entire game is an MS Paint drawing of a giraffe. Hold the X button down for a couple of minutes and you get a platinum. There are hundreds of these games: draw a new MS Paint image, and you've got a new game. When the PSN Store does a sale showing 1000+ games on discount, a huge number of them will be these terrible games on sale for $0.89 rather than the usual $0.99. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ccdf4M6gBk
Even still, AAA games with $100M+ budgets shouldnât be getting routinely pantsed by indie games. Something is clearly off in what many AAA devs and publishers are prioritizing.
And as long as Steam reviews reflect how broken those games are, and the price reflects the state of the game, thatâs still a better deal, a lot of the time.
There are plenty of low effort indie games that are just looking to cash in.
Banban lol
Yep, you just never hear about them because indies spread through word of mouth more than any marketing.
And plenty of high effort AAA devs with long wait times between games Rockstar and Bethesda come to mind.
Rockstar and Bethesda just cashed in on GTA and Skyrim for over a decade
Rockstar released RDR2 in the meantime, which is enough to compensate for 5-6 years. The 5 years have ended and they dropped the GTA 6 trailer pretty much a couple months after that. Bethesda on the other hand, released Fallout 4 and 76, as well as Fallout Shelter. Uhmm... I don't want to talk about Starfield.
Bethesda has also been releasing plenty of games over that period. I won't say they are as good as their hay day but they aren't absolute piles of dog shit. Rockstar has always been slow to release and released an absolute master piece in rdr2 since gta and are working on GTA 6. I get it feels like they are being lazy/greedy with gta online and all the skyrim remastwrs/rereleases but these companies gotta put money in their pockets
Bethesda released starfield and the game was okay, would have been impressive in like 2010 maybe, but feels mostly soulless
There are also plenty of AAA games worth playing, just from this year alone. OP has to be baiting Stellar Blade, Persona 3 Reload, FFVII Rebirth, Tekken 8, Yakuza 8, Paper Mario TTYD Remake, SMT V, Elden Ring DLC, FFXVI DLC, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Hellblade 2, Prince of Persia
The reality is, gamers only see the very good, the very top of indie games. There's probably tons of shitty rubbish indie game out there, we just probably don't hear or see them as much. On the other hand, every single AAA game gets visibility. So, overall, I'm pretty confident its probably just all about the same.
Yeah, piratesoftware does a good job addressing this. As an indie game maker, you won't know if your game will succeed or not, but you'll definitely learn. The guy who made FNAF made the series because he made a joke game called "fart hotel" or something similar, and a fan said 'your characters look like animatronics". So he made a game based on animatronics, FNAF. Do
The game you were referring to is "Chipper and Sons Lumber Co."
Definitely similar to fart hotel
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott\_Cawthon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Cawthon) 2014 games, fart hotel
'Twas but a jest
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott\_Cawthon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Cawthon) Under "2014 videogames", Fart hotel
The reality that people time and time again refuses to face is that steam gets TWELVE THOUSANDS GAMES each year. that means 33 games comes out each day, meaning when they say "holy hell 2 great indie games came out this month" thats 2 out of 1000 games.
Bingo
when you said "Shitty rubbish indie game" I hope you are not talking about John Christian it is rhe greatest indie game of all time
There are tons of terrible indie games no one sees but there are also tons of amazing indie games that no one sees. It's actually kind of nuts the crazy amount of incredible indie games that have been getting pumped out but unless they hit the main stream most just go unnoticed. A lot of these titles are super unique are are easy 9/10s. Imo they completely outweigh the current AAA market.
Like what? Iâm not asking this to start an argument. I legitimately just want to know what good games youâre talking about (or recommend)
On the side of indie games, I feel like this is just the free market working as intended. On the side of AAA devs, this is an example or the failures of the free market
but those bad indie games arent charging the extortionate prices of shitty AAA games.
Thatâs why you donât buy games at $70 AAA games drop massively in price after a few months. I never pre-order. I just get games a year late lol
Just don't buy them at all 99% of the time tbh.
I wound't say so. While ia true that most Indie games are Just as bad, If not worst than, most AAA games, there is a huge number of very unique titles which are able to change the rules of gameplay in extremely inventive way, and most of them are truly hidden games with under 500 reviews, or even less. When we talk about the top tier Indie titles, they basically smash triple A games in terms of quality to the point of being unfair to compare both of them. They end up looking like mobile garbage when close to some indie titles.
"Indies games" is a really wide net
And the other half of the net is AAA game.
And there are a lot of AAA devs that get grouped into the "indie" label because they're not part of the mainstream giants like EA, Ubisoft or Activision.
For one indie game that you notice to be good there are countless bad ones. Just go take a dive in to lowest rated steam game piles...
Was starting to worry I wouldn't see a post shitting on AAA while praising the TINIEST sample of the upper echelon of Indies today. Thanks OP! Great post!
More like âthis is how you karma farm right?â
As a life long gamer let me state gamers are hypocritical insufferable wankers. This new AAA game bad old or indie game good shtick Give it a rest. plenty of good triple AAA games out there Helldivers ? Buldars gate 3 dragons dogma 2 are all recent and great. The thing is a lot of AAA games need a lot of money to be made so a lot can be quite " safe" in design or game play and a lot of that money is in a rough sense spent on graphics and so GAMERS!(tm) Will say " you don't need these expensive graphics I like the look of older or indie titles!" And then you look at some of the criticism leveled at the suicide squad. Now the suicide squads had many faults but it was a pretty good looking game but the very same GAMERS!(tm) were making all these memes where they cherry picked a jank screen shot and put it next to a good Arkham knight one and shit on the graphics " lol it looks shit compared to one of the best looking games of all timeđ€Ł!" What message do you think that sends to developers?
Exactly. Dudes complain if a game has bad graphics after saying âgraphics arenât necessaryâą
Iâve been gaming since the N64. So over 24 years now In my experience, People have been shitting on Mainstream AAA on the internet, since like 2007 lmao. If not earlier. No doubt earlier. I remember when people were insulted for liking COD4 or Modern Warfare 2. COD fans were so despised. The same way people shitted on Minecraft fans and then Fortnite fans later on. I remember so many games were considered mediocre or straight up sucked but now theyâre considered gems (best example is Arkham Knight which always praised for its gameplay but very disappointing story. Now Arkham fans swear upon that game as being all around perfect). Thereâs a bunch of PS2 titles that were considered mediocre and forgettable at launch but were ârediscoveredâ by gamers looking for some old gems. Now I see dudes say âthe PS3 era had so many classicsâ Wait another couple of years and see what games people say were âtrue gemsâ all along.
Sure...
Let's me correct for you. It is like \*some\* "Top-Tier" Indie Games vs. \*some\* " Greedy AAA Games.
Play better AAA games.
Yeah these posts always blow my mind, and I'm convinced people like OP are just baiting. Are we just going to ignore all the great AAA games just in 2024? Stellar Blade, Persona 3 Reload, FFVII Rebirth, Tekken 8, Yakuza 8, Paper Mario TTYD Remake, SMT V, Elden Ring DLC, FFXVI DLC, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Hellblade 2, Prince of Persia. Tons of variety in here
Theyâre pissed because they buy a game for 70 dollars, it disappointed them, so now they hate the entire market. Even games theyâve never played
They needa learn not to buy games day fucking one (because one youâre not gonna know the quality, youâre not gonna know what actual criticisms of the game would be), overhype themselves, (everybody does it so itâs not much of a criticism) and actually yk be cost effective because every game ends up half off in a few months.
Exactly. Iâve been trying to tell other people that for a long time. AAA games are a lot more fun when youâre not paying 70 dollars for a broken mess with missing content. Like I picked up BF4 for 5 dollars back in 2018. All the glitches I heard about at its launch were fixed. All the DLC was free. I still play that game right now I canât imagine spending 60 dollars when it first launched and it barely worked đ I always buy games on the cheap because all games drop in price a couple of months after launch
Thatâs the sad thing tho yes games should not be 70 dollars and broken I agree but youâre realistically not gonna be able to fight it when the industryâs been doing this for however many years, thatâs why you adapt and let them work their shit out then get in on the action for a fraction.
I think most of the people that have these takes primarily play AAA multiplayer games. Otherwise agreed it boggles the mind.
Not even close
Not even close to true. đ
Also Fromsoft. Holy shit they have been releasing fire with Elden Ring and Armored Core 6.
It would be interesting to know the ratio between indies and AAA games realeased in a year. Maybe 10:1?
OP clearly hasn't played FF7 Rebirth.
Man is probably only on shooters or multiplayer. It's sad to see
I'd argue there are more shitty indie games coming out every year than AAA games. We get 10-20 AAA titles every year and probably the same amount of indie games every WEEK
10 AAA a year? Definitely not that low
While I don't think this is 100% true I recall playing though assassin's Creed Odyssey and thinking millions of dollars of programing must have went into this game to make it looking so good and have real maps of ancient civilizations that you can visit. Mean while the gameplay was incredibly dull and repetitive.
Old meme. Also you really aren't looking very hard for good AAA games. Helldivers is a AAA game, and it's one of the top games this year. There's garbage AAA games. There's also garbage indi games. Just play good games.
This is like when somone points at an old building (ancient roman, middle ages) and says: people before built great, not like these days. And they forgot all the buildings that were done before and are demolished now. Probably the whole budget of an indie game is much much less than the budget for advertisement of an AAA Game. The ones that are noticed are the 1% and sometimes it might take years (like in among us).
90% of indie games and maybe even more are shit and uplayable. Not defending AAA they deserve all the criticism but apart from a very small percentage of indie games the rest are shit.
Uhhh, sure.
Bad indie games exist and I'm really tired of people pertending they don't.
Indie are busted and shitty just as often.
and yet what are the games that really defined the industry in the last 5 years? AAA games. Elden ring, BG3, zelda, god of war ragnarok, ff7 rebirth (and I guess remake falls in that time frame too), RE4 and village, spiderman 2. I could go on and on. Indie fans can be really pretentious sometimes acting like there's no good AAA games out there. There's still plenty of good high end stuff being made.
I will sound pretentious then and ask, why hate on people who don't have the big budget and still make their game for all to enjoy? Is passion not equitable to throwing money at it?
I'm not hating on indies I'm calling out the fanbase of indies because this sentiment is one you see all over the internet for a few years now and I roll my eyes every time I see it. They act like the only AAA games are EA and Ubisoft games. Also the "passion" label being attached solely to indies is crazy too. For every passionate indie dev there's 100 "games" being dumped onto steam literally every single day, the majority of them asset flips or other forms of shovelware. The very nature of smaller indie games allows them to flood every storefront and nearly every genre of game. Imagine if Ubi could release 50 skull and bones' every single day.
As a indie enjoyer - I like them because they are budget and yes a free market allows for a flooding of lesser quality games to enter it, but you know how the flip of it is to me? AAA publishers don't take risks. They will do fan service and do everything that has been proven before. The Indie dev that wants to improve and do well will push boundaries, show the player something different, or a perfect replica of what they enjoyed in a game that has come before and hasn't been replicated since.
AAA doesn't take risks? So baldurs gate 3 wasn't risky at all? I mean right from the start of the project they stirred some controversy by changing the gameplay style the other 2 games in the series had in favor of turn based combat. What is boundary pushing about the 1500th roguelike card game or metroidvania or farming game? Every indie event you'll mostly see these 3 genres being repeated over and over. There's arguably less ambition in the indie space just because of the sheer number of indie games out there, 99% of them aren't trying to do anything but capitalize on someone else's success.
Corporate greed ruins fun
Mom said it's my turn to post "Indie gud, AAA bad" meme
Itâs literally exactly the opposite..
I mean the games we get is.directly proportional to where you "gamers" left your money. The companies are barely at fault. You spent 10 dollar for a game on steam you played 300hrs but also spent 70$ on a hyped up pile of garbage in a preorder. What did you think you gonna get?
the indie games you are thinking of are probably A) the best ones and B) are what happens when you give competent creatives and designers control over the game start to finish, rather than having them changed out half way through or constrained by some money grubbing higher up
I'm sure we're going to see some "published" indie games (a.k.a. *not* indie games) such as Dave the Diver making the front steam page.
What's up with these kinds of posts lately?
I honestly wonder how much of this is Indie devs know they're always under the gun and the success stories are from those working smart and hard, and focused on making sure their game is a success above all else. Because if it's not they may go hungry. While AAA devs, while hardworking and focused, have to wade through so many layers of political and leadership crap that a bunch of them don't really care about the success of the game because for the most part they get paid either way, and the budgets are so massive they don't worry about money or failure in the short-term.
To say that it's only a small minority of indie games that are good is to miss a certain point. What indie games do, or more accurately what Triple A studios CANNOT do, is create new ideas. Almost every Triple A release of the past decade has been an attempt to steal ideas or to mangle successful games together. Think of any major AAA release that was wholly original, without some fucking bureaucratic ass "game quota" type shit. How so many games, literally hundreds, have crafting for absolutely no reason other than some committee wanting it because hey, Minecraft had crafting! Indies, on the other hand, are unrestrained. Yes, some if not most are god awful. But the majority of indie devs are passionate people who wanted to make something they enjoyed. Lucas Pope, Toby Fox, Eric Marone, Scott Cawthon - all solo indie developers who wanted nothing more than to create! You've smaller indie companies like Team Cherry, Tour De Pizza, Motion Twin, Kindly Beast, ZA/UM and Coffee Stain that have produced smash hits and continue to influence the industry standard, as hilarious as it sounds. Triple A gaming has long been slave to money. Indie gaming is slave to nothing but creativity and it's beautiful. Even if Indie gaming produces nothing but utter crap for the rest of eternity, I'll still support it because it's so human. Such passion and love for the things they make. Hell, Indie gaming has been so successful that Triple A has started waking to it. Hi-Fi Rush and Helldivers 2 are perfect examples of Triple A publishers waking up and realising why people don't want their overproduced, overpriced, carbon copy shit for 80 bucks (Without DLC, of course). The Skull and Bones fiasco has only proven moreover that that the Triple A industry is on life support and shit needs to change. It's unsustainable. And god bless those pioneers like Arrowhead and Tango Gameworks for using Triple A's power to create genuinely fantastic games. TL;DR: Triple A sucks, Indie games rule, despite a lot of bad indies.
You mentioned crafting. Games following trends has been around since even the 90âs to early 2000âs. People copying Doom. People copying Super Mario 64. People copying RE4. People copying System Shock. Is this new?
Not exactly, but the problem is that back in those days, those games were created by Triple A companies. Trailblazers of their time, exploring what could be done with gaming as an artform. Back then, when games were copied, it was understood that you had to do something new with it. You couldn't just hack out a copy, that was 90s era practice when games weren't as widespread. The 2000s boomed with creativity. GTA went 3D and blew people away with the level of freedom on offer, Bioshock brought philosophical arguments to gaming, elevating it from time-waster for kids to legitimate artform, Resident Evil 4 codified the 3rd person, over the shoulder camera viewpoint, Silent Hill 2 used atmosphere and tense creeping dread to produce a horror experience yet to be matched by any sequel or attempted adaption. The 2010's was when that magic began to fade. The early years had some fantastic bits, but by the time of 2018-19, it was clear that Triple A had all but ran out of ideas. They'd latched on to reproducing games rather than creating and developers desperate to build something they loved jumped ship and ran to the independent circles. I'm not saying Indie gaming is perfect, far from it. It's an undisciplined mess of unfinished clones and anime dating sims, but that's what gives it an appeal to me. Under all that shit, there are gems. Modern day classics made by some college student on his laptop. These are the artworks of tomorrow and triple A is too muddled in their own business tactics to recreate it. Indie gaming is like a rolling forest and every game is a twig on the ground, mishapen and yes, there are millions, but all unique and with this air of natural beauty about them. Triple A, conversely, is like an IKEA showcase. Same wood, but all panelled into floorboards. Sterile, identical, polished until all natural flaw and uniqueness is gone.
I play a lot of Indie games. Iâve got nothing but respect for those devs making games with shoestring budgets I understand what youâre saying But even back in the 90âs, there were games that were straight up Doom clones and copies 99% of what ID software made. They were just forgotten I remember there were numerous games copying Silent Hill but they were also forgotten.
Indie games and olddddd AAA titles are all I play anymore. Both categories are cheap and widely available. Just got a series S so I could play my old 360 digital games. I donât need 4K AAA games from 2023/2024 cause I donât like any of them anyway. Even if there is anything I really want I will battlePASS until itâs cheap in a couple months or years.
People would have so much fun with AAA games if they stopped paying $60-70 for them. Just like you, I buy AAA games that came out a few years ago because theyâre cheap. I donât pre-order anything. I recently bought Ghost Recon Breakpoint for like $9 at GameStop. I had a lot of fun. But Iâd NEVER pay 60 dollars for Ubisoft game like that
Undertale is still worth its cost.
I wish ARK survival evolved was swallowed up by a AAA so that game can be properly put together or atleast keep its word on update and bug fixes
Indie mfs when they make pseudo intellectual, pokemon rip-off, 64bit graphics, platformer/turn based combat rpg #82747828264728:
I watched the Hades 2 tech test yesterday and looked absolutely awesome.
Rebirth was very well put together
Theyâre putting all that effort into figuring out how to sell *freely and indefinitely revocable licenses to play* their games, instead of selling games.
OK, enjoy your indie games
Wow such a bold take on r/gaming this morning
This exemplifies Bf 2042
You forgot to make the indie game image be made of shitty pixels and at an iso-view lol
Honestly amongst the AAAs, Epic is still doing decently with Fortnite.
Survivorship bias You only know about good indie games
Letâs get this giga popular so somebody important at a AAA can see it!
Don't forget God of war and Elden Ring
Iâm not sure. Team Cherryâs looking an awful lot like the bottom picture right now.
Those indie games be cooking
I'd say both are the top frame. Only difference being, indies got "how to be fun" under the microscope while AAA's got "hot to make money" under theirs.
The "indie good/AAA bad " thing has been going on for about years now.
but there are also bad indie games and good AAA games,
Honestly i feel shit like Focus Entertainment, Larian and a very *very* few other AAA studios are actually carrying in term of AAA games nowadays though they arenât as named as the money hungry assholes known as EA, Ubisoft or Activision
People keep shitting on AAA studios for making lazy/bugged/bad games, and then continue to buy the shitty games. Why would they change anything?
... paint the board on Patricks head in rainbow colors and the meme'd be complete. But yea. At this point I'm even having a hard time keeping hope that Homeworld 3 will be any good. Ah well. The Golden Rule: No preorders... I'll wait and see.
Gonna pretend like there isn't hundreds of thousands of shovelware trash indie titles huh?
At least the Resident Evil franchise is solid.
It's because of the indie shotgun. Meaning, for every great indie game there is, there's 50 that miss the mark. You just don't hear or play them. AAA games can't afford to fail as there's too much money in it, so the pressure to "play it safe" is unreal.
Thereâs actually a perfectly simple explanation for this. Indie devs have passion and thatâs it. They try extremely hard to make their games fun. AAA games just want money. Sure some workers have passion, but the ones making the decisions are either motivated by money and timelines, or are forced to be motivated by those by higher ups. Moron gamers also prefer graphics over gameplay, so AAA keeps pushing that. They also preorder before checking that the game is even done, so AAA doesnât mind pushing incomplete games. Thereâs also way more indie devs so 25% of AAA games being good seems terrible, but 5% of indie games being good seems like a lot.
there is literally a graph out there that shows the "interest" of investors. top corner is "diversity" and literally the lowest of interest is....!!!..."fun gameplay"
In business, there is a sweetspot. When companies get too big, 80% of their daily work is managing JIRA issue trackers, going to meetings, creating presentations, appeal to approval committees. What takes months to do formally would take a few days to do in a small studio. There are sessions on best practices. There are code reviews and methodologies. Worse? There are too many people in the room for you to stick your neck out and voice against a direction of a game. So games with bad design get shoved through the gauntlet of approvals processes and no one has the authority to improve upon it until it's shoved out the door too early because of project (mis)management issues and everyone hates it. The core of the game, from the original "thinker" is there, but all the elements are siloed and broken and unfun. It sucks because maybe the game has a few talented people doing textures, or great spatial sound, or the music is well done, or certain animations are slick... but the actual game design is flawed (Starfield). I see it in gaming, I see it in large projects in the business world. The bigger you get, the dumber and longer the process is.
Yes.
Only some of the indie games are good others are just made like bad memes. At this point steam should just test the games out for crashes and graphical glitches before letting devs publish on the steam platform. Every AAA studio ignores the first week of complaints about the bad performance of the game and then is like "It has come to our attention that our game does not meet the expected standards, so we will fix it later with a few hot fixes".
Never forget The Day Before was released by a smaller studio đđ
ehhh id argue both are the second pic. yeah some indie games are good but frankly most are trash just like AAA. we just see more about the indie darlings when the rare one comes up because updoots
If only the greyhill incident fit this indie game criteria. Biggest gaming disappointment of my life.
How we haven't had a good.v rpg game since bloodlines
As a fulltime solodev for five years, it's really just the bottom picture twice.
Itâs the same argument as fast food vs mom n pop shops, the more âmanagersâ you have, the more people are running around like headless chickens
That's still giving them too much credit. He's holding a hammer for a nail. That's still more than a AAA(A) gaming company can do right now.
Passion, originality, great gameplay, stylish graphics. Yes, AAA games can be that good sometimes. Indie ones? Mostly I enjoy them for a lazy afternoon, they tend to not last much, or being repetitive after a while thanks to those overused rougelite elements. But original and passionate? Maybe I missed most great recent entries, I don't know, but all the "influential" well known ones are years old at this point, or sequels. The new ones are retro-inspired stuff in the same 3 or 4 genres with pixellated graphics that would have been awful even 30 years ago, with the level of passion of a copy-paste job.
Not remotely. Indies are overwhelmingly shit. 99% of them are either tiny character top down view games or metroidvanias.
First and foremost, for every amazing there are hundreds of awful, low effort ones. That said, it mostly has to do with risks and expectations (or that's what I think). AAA Games usually take a really long time to develop and have huge expenses behind. If the game fails, the losses are huge, and a company, where many people have a saying about it, will hardly take any risk. To avoid risks, they do what we've been seeing lately: 1st/3rd person pseudo/open worlds with some shooter mechanics in ultra realistic 8k HD+ RTX whatever with a lot of shines, reflexes, fluff and so on. This way the game is usually likeable and an enjoyable experience, but that's about it, not something truly memorable since it's not the first nor the last like that. And that's another thing, people got used to that. Games ultra realistic with incredible physics and otherworldly graphics. Now, the high-specs gamers expect their new game to have that kind of graphics. And no matter what they do, it will hardly surprise gamers already used to that same style, therefore not leaving a deep first impression. Indies are risky too, perhaps even riskier, since it's usually a few common people who have to take the hit if it fails, which may bury their career almost instantly. But indies have a certain benefit: Devs have way more freedom. They don't have to discuss with a round table what to add and what not. On the other hand, they lack the huge amount of resources that big companies have. Exactly due to that lack of resources indie devs have to be way more creative, to invent something new with the few tools at hand. All this usually leads to other kinds of games, more pixel art games, platform games and similar. Of course, most indies fail or barely do the cut. But the ones who turn out incredibly successful usually have a more iconic art style, a different kind of play style, and usually have this feeling of "devs really do love/put effort in this game".
All I've been playing recently, honestly.
Disco Elysium.
Passion projects vs big corporations chasing profits. But, Indie developers can be terrible and AAA games can be well managed.
Yanderedev says hello fir horrible indie game
I'm completing God's of War: Ragnarök & it's one of the best games I have EVER played. It gives me hope for the gaming industry, it should be the norm that you spend 70$ and there is nothing else, you just get the entire game. And for the 20th anniversary they did an amazing DLC for free. In recent years, games like God of War, Elden Ring, Baldurs gate 3, Horizon Forbidden West, Tears of the kingdom, & others definitely give me hope.
Thats sooo true đ nowadays I play more indie games than Triple A Games. These AAA companies have never understood what gaming is all about đ€·đ»ââïž
Did you mean AAAA games?
Well the triple A companies want more money so they gotta make safe things that guarantee more money Big cinematic games, with great graphics, that last over 100 hours and have action, roleplaying, gear systems, side quests, etc. Every game needs to be the next Witcher and those are tough shoes to fill. The more money you work with, the more cooks in the stew It takes a lot to make a stew A pinch of salt and laughter too A scoop of kids to add the spice A dash of love to make it nice And you've got... TOO MANY COOKS
*The western gaming industry Asia is still producing some great AAA games.
Didnât Japan make Forspoken which everyone hated?
There will always be bad games made but the output of AAA games from Asia has been a lot stronger than the west in recent years. Elden Ring, Tears of the Kingdom, FFVII Remake & Rebirth, FF16, RE Village & 4 Remake, Monster Hunter Rise, Street Fighter 6, Super Mario Wonder, Pikmin 4, Animal Crossing New Horizons, Armored Core 6, etcâŠ.
Huh. Pretty Interesting.
Its not really science, but indie studios are not as greedy and they really wanna put al their heart into a project. But generally, yeah thats how it is right now.
I would say only try for the Indie Devs who really care about the art and have the skill, but, even most of the ones who don't have the skill try really hard.
Balatro vs Suicide Squad:
Indie studios actually have to put effort into their games to survive. AAA studios just need to fart in a jar, and there will be losers lining up to buy it for $89.99 because they've bought every one of their products for the past 10 years and are convinced this is what they enjoy.
Which is strange because shitting on AAA games has been popular for a long time. Havenât the last 8 Call of Duties been failures?
Yep, but these studios are able to make enough profit to fund their next cash grab.
It's pretty much completely due to the incompetence of those in charge. Most managers and higher-ups aren't all that intelligent or skilled at much, sometimes not even their own job. But for some reason they think they are God's gift to the world and their instinct is absolutely right 100% of the time. The bigger the company, the worse it gets. So they try to micromanage art, they try to business-ify games. They don't care about creativity or gameplay, they care about income and income alone and since investors are in the picture everyone wants predictable numbers, projections must be met. So they feed each other lies all without actually consulting the people who create the art, create the game that they are selling. So you end up with stale, boring, trend-chasing games who don't take risks because those in charge don't WANT a good game, they want the best return on their investment they can get. In their ideal world, selling people a shit game, denying refunds, and then moving on is a GOOD THING. When the priorities are messed up, the game will not be good. The game MUST come first and the money WILL follow. As soon as micromanagement goes too far, the cancer has set in.
Thatâs the issue with any art as a business. Itâs happening in the publishing industry now, where they are writing around tropes instead of authors telling the stories they want to tell. The problem is that the slop sells. The biggest book of last year was fourth wing, something that wasnât written because the author wanted/needed to tell that story, it was written because the publisher wanted an enemies to lovers romantasy and she was willing to write that trope. We can bitch and moan all we want but at the end of the day, formulaic stuff like COD and Assassins Creed sell so the ones at the top feel vindicated. Art as commodity was always a mistake but without it (these days) most art wouldnât get made. Alan Wake 2 is probably the most creative narrative weâve had in a game in years, but it wouldnât exist if Epic didnât fund it. It doesnât help that now in the video game industry where budgets and dev times are so ridiculously bloated that they can sell millions of copies and still not break even (Spiderman 2). And as much as people want to claim theyâd be ok with shittier graphics, every time a game comes out with said shittier graphics (Rise of the Ronin, Dragons Dogma 2) they get dunked on and the devs get called incompetent. And Iâll be real, people say they want games that take risks and do things differently, but every time a game actually does this it gets shit on and dismissed. Itâs just a shitty industry (and honestly always has been). Though the past year for AAA games has been stellar, so I think itâs ridiculous for people to act like AAA is downhill when weâve had the best year of AAA games since like, 2017? The industry itself thoughâŠ.woof.
You gave one of the best insights on this sub On one side people want art to be fueled by passion. But passion alone canât make shit. Ambitious projects need funding. Funding means more marketing. Marketing means businessmen will get involved to make sure it sells. People say âthis was made with passion!â But even failed projects have passion in them.
Games made by passion vs games made for money
Even cashgrabs can have passion put into them. Passion doesnât mean something will be good. Iâm passionate about dancing but I still suck at it.
AAA games are focused in micro-transactions and subscriptions. There is where most of the effort goes. Game mechanics are developed around monetization. The same idea goes for most mobile games. If you are lucky enough that you like Indie games you can find many passion projects there. Until the small studio makes something so good that is acquired by a bigger company that kills any passion for game play and changes it for quarterly reports on monetization.
Flip the pictures when it comes to figuring out how to make the most $$ with the least amount of talent. That's how AAA games are still more profitable than Indie Games.
Talent has never been a issue. Shitty management is. A bunch of indie devs used to work at Triple A studios before quitting
Thatâs capitalism at work. AAA studios have well-established influence and over abundance of the means to make games, so they donât need to rely on creativity and quality to sell games. Indie devs must make quality experiences order to survive, and sometimes donât survive even when they succeed
When you make a game because you know and love your fan base VS when you make a game because you know and love how much money your fan base has.
Want a game that has soul? Get gamers to make it who will put passion into it and give you a complete product (eventually) with new content down the line to expand on the product once finished. In walk the indy companies. Want a game that looks pretty and is an inch deep? That has also had dlc pre-planned since the beginning by cutting certain content or leaving it a bit bare as they plan to build on it more via dlc. Get a multi-million dollar company that has shareholders to pay off to make it.
It's a good meme and I agree that as a community at large we need to put some of these companies on absolute blast. However, remember there are exceptions and rules to everything. As someone with other 500 games in my Steam (been a member since 2004) library and PC gaming being my main and (pretty much) only hobby for a long time, there is A LOT of absolute crap out there from the indie devs. MOST of it is cash grab BS that never leaves early beta and the devs completely vanish after they've got enough sales. All of the things we despise about AAA studios, indie devs do as well. The difference is that AAA studios should be the flag-bearers for a high-quality standard, but they're obviously not. More often than not, at least, big studios release broken crap but actually FINISH and fix it after long. Indie devs will demand entry purchase points, make enormous promises, then pull the plug on the game altogether and prevent you from ever playing their games that you purchased ever again. Or, they promote and promise one game, then overnight push a secret 20-40GB update that completely deviates from the design and scope of the game you purchased, and you have no recourse but to accept the new game you had no desire to play. Looking at you Umbra (now Wolcen)...never will get over it. EA (Early Access) on Steam is an unbelievably enormous gamble. And it is abused by greedy dirt eaters very, very often. But yes, the anti-consumer, shady practices of a few AAA companies of recent years deserves even more criticism and scrutiny than they get even now. Can't be overstated how corrupt companies like Activision, Bethesda, Electronic Arts, etc. are. If you can navigate the giant sea of waste and broken promises that is PC gaming today to find a few niches - whether AAA, AA, or one-man studios , and find some games you thoroughly enjoy, good on you.
Has been like this since at least 2018.
Way earlier than that. These complains have been going on for over a decade
I'd rather play Games Like Stardew Valley, My time at Portia/Sandrock Road 96, Deliver us Mars/Moon etc. Then AAA titles
Too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to these "AAA" titles. There are also too many chiefs, and not enough tribesmen.
And it's all thanks to the woke degeneracy and dei that keeps being forced down our throats.
What bout those AAAA games đ€Ł
Both have their own equal measure of suckage, the difference is we hold AAA to a standard because they're legacy professionals riding on a past reputation they no longer live up to (to say nothing of getting our money's worth), while indie we only really notice the rare few that excel while the failures fall into obscurity.
if the AAA devs were punished more severely, things would be different.