The last game that blew me away from a sound perspective was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They used sound in just the ways I imagined it could be used. It is sad that people don't dare to try more stuff like this. Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.
I'd argue that the past year has been one of the best for the success of games that were the passion projects of smaller teams. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hades and Valheim are good examples that the industry isn't only soulless triple-A productions or quick cash grabs.
Super fun and cool, but given the context of their previous games, def in the iterative camp.
Also, they don't actually make dead cells, motion twin does
I am the complete opposite, I liked both, but Hades easily is the winner for me (and I am saying that as one of the very very early dead cells backers). Because they managed to refine the roguelike gameplay to almost-perfection, but the storytelling and writing are on a whole other level compared not only to other roguelikes, but a lot of games in general.
My advice for Hades is to give it about 2-3 hours of try, and then decide if you want to play more. Mostly because it takes about an hour or two until the game gives you all the essentials before releasing you into the world where you can play it "for real". Sort of like a less extreme version of Red Dead Redemption 2, which requires you playing 10+ hours to finally to be able to play it "for real" (referring to having to get to chapter 2 or so, before you can free roam and enjoy sidequests and start doing things at your own pace).
There's lots of indie games that don't have those issues.
But, the problem with making games is the same problem with art or music or opening a coffee shop or becoming a doctor or nurse: it's something that people want to do, and so supply will overwhelm demand until conditions and pay get bad enough to outweigh the romantic appeal.
Programmers in the game industry are treated much worse on average, than programmers working on in-house CRUD apps.
(Similarly, I assume working conditions at Tesla and SpaceX must be comparatively bad. Not necessarily absolutely bad, but compared to what the people working there could get elsewhere.)
That was it. I was openly showing management displeasure and they found a reason to fire me soon thereafter. I went into VFX and never looked back.
As far as a future for the games industry - they need a whole #I_was_enslaved_too movement. I won't even get into the difficultly in getting anyone in the game industry to recognize the need for better industry ethics across the board - in every aspect, every nook and every cranny of the industry it is corrupted pretty extreme.
It's so sad to hear these stories. Game development has such great potential to be a stimulating workplace in the mix of tech, storytelling and art. On paper it is a fantastic blend. Alas, everyone I've spoken to that's been in the industry has similar horror stories to share. The workforce seems to be regarded as expendable. Investments dictates strategy that ends up being anti-consumer. Maybe this is the same thing that happens in TV or music, when you have big money combined with an endless supply of dreamers that wants to be part of it no matter what?
For someone who is interested in making games (like yours truly), the only viable way forward appears to be the hobbyist/indie route. To ever get discovered without a herculean effort and a massive dollop of luck seems quite unlikely though.
Whenever I browse the Google Play Store, it is an unplessant experience. It is hard to find out which games are "real" games without the very exploitive mechancis (of course, it is a spectrum, so it's not always easy to tell). It is hard to find out which features the games have: Singelplayer, multiplayer, offline playable, gamepad support?
Especially the last part annoyed me when I tried out a new android controller but couldn't figure out which game would actually work with it.
But there are good games available on mobile. They are just burried under a lot of unpleasent ones.
Long story short, I started developing my own, gamepad optimized game launcher for android which offers more of a console-like experience. Should I ever invest way more time in it, I'll add my own search and filter overlay for the play store…
;)
I think parent poster means that there are no other places to put the app/launcher.
It was painful to observe that people from countries with difficult economies can spend so much money to hunt for pixels. This is their choice, of course, but at the same time it's a proactive work to keep them hooked.
After I realized what I was getting myself into, I completed the existing tasks and left the company. It's not for me.
Edit: formatting
I left myself wondering what would I have done in his place. It's really hard to reject a huge financial offer, even though you're well aware of the societal damage your work is doing. Sincere kudos to you for acknowledging it and getting out of the industry.
Like FAANG level money [0], more?
I'm from Eastern Europe, so it was "really, really well" compared to local IT salaries (which are not low, mind you, at least compared to European standards). Said friend ended up working for a local FAANG entity after that experience, for lower salary.
A few choice examples:
- Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players
- EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible
- Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime
*not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo
I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!
(I have no affiliation with Nintendo or any other game developers or publishers.)
If Android didn't allow blocking notifications, then any app that does this would get the boot. Youtube, HN and eBay is stressful enough to follow, I don't need more of this in my life.
Apps are almost as bad as websites in terms of my willingness to let them send notifications at this point.
It's a nontrivial amount of work. Most people predictably aren't going to do it (otherwise the market would eliminate abusive practices on its own). Hell, most HNers ain't gonna do it. Myself, I wasn't doing it, despite complaining about games a lot.
Fortunately, HN's StavrosK did the research, and created this: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/. I'm forever grateful to him for that.
EDIT: Hey, do you want to become a curator? It's very low-volume and would help keep the site more up to date.
If you can, please also tell me what exactly does curating this list entail, either here or privately.
The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded.
The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.
This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.
- Pretty flashing lights and bings? Check
- Keep feeding it money to be entertained at a constant rate? Check (or else it will taper off to nothing/degrade down to "not fun")
I would make a more complete comment, but I can't be bothered to spend the time at the moment. This comment would get so little points this deep in the thread tree. Wait, that almost sounds familiar...
Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.
A Genshin Impact that cost full price but had no 'original resin' garbage, no running the same boss a dozen times (but only 4 times a day unless you pay!) to 'ascend' a character, that didn't gate most of the actually effective characters behind gacha pulls, might actually be a decent game. Probably wouldn't have made as much money though.
It's a perfectly fine game for the first quite-a-few-hours and then suddenly turns into an appalling grindfest (and yes, the 'quality' is clearly front-loaded, the game drops off a cliff once you get to Liyue)
Anecdotally All of my friends who play games hate microtransactions and loot boxes. Some don't care if it's only cosmetic though.
It's a different mode of accessing gameplay that is random, and just like in a game that abuses this mechanic to keep people playing for hundreds of hours (roguelites), these mobile games also do that, except with the possibility of paying real life money.
I can even make the same argument you made instead about roguelites: "What you described is planned dopamine release you have to wait for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have RNG, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for nefarious reasons such as extending the amount of time people play your game for."
Yet roguelites are not seen as morally wrong at all. Why? They're both using the same mechanic, except one lets you pay to skip the RNG-gating.
Citation needed. Old rougelikes/rougelites are designed to optimise for subjective fun, which naturally translates to more time spent. If something is fun, it's obvious that people will keep playing for longer. What's wrong is using dirty psychological tricks to bypass that and go directly for increasing the time spent on the game.
Also, I've not come across many roguelites which have a strong RNG component in their progression path. Roguelites are inherently random but their progression mechanics are generally quite regular on any given playthrough. All the ones I've played you progress quite linearly just by playing the game, not grinding for a chance to process. The worst I've heard of is one FTL's ship unlocks which involves getting two or three good rolls in a playthrough, which players (mostly 100% speedrunners) do complain about. Certainly nothing to the level of what is very common in lootboxes (where a massive grind for a less than 1 in 100 chance is common).
Games with RNG-gated content have a strong incentive to make progressing take as much time as possible, because the more time it takes the more people play the game, and the more people play the game the more they'll naturally advertise it to their friends.
>Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).
Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.
They have an incentive to make the path where you're paying as interesting as possible, and make the path where you're not as painful/boring as possible (while dangling the idea of the interesting bits in front of you)
Roguelites are designed for huge replayability so of course there's an element of randomness and difficulty in place of pure linear progression. Personally I don't see exploitative gambling/addiction mechanics in a game like Spelunky or Risk of Rain or Dead Cells.
It's utterly disingenuous to put these on the same level of cynical mobile titles that rub their exploitation in your face and continually blueball you with arrays of counters, timeout mechanics, fake currencies (backed by real money), and loot boxes. It's absurd to draw equivalence to the practice of exploiting 'whales' and young children, to squeeze as much money out of them as possible.
If Spelunky or some other roguelite had a mobile version that monetized every element of gameplay and made it 'freemium' then it would be another scummy mobile game, and would warrant the comparison. But not until then.
I don't have a problem with roguelikes, but I do have a problem with mobile games.
One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun, the other one is to extract as much money as humanly possible from their users.
The fact that they might use some of the same building blocks doesn't mean that end result is similar.
Just like playing poker and uno might use some similar mechanics (cards) that doesn't make them equal games. One is regulated the other one isnt.
Or you throwing dice in monopoly and craps
It's not though, it's RNG-gating content and therefore not really optimize to provide gameplay experience and fun, it's hiding gameplay behind RNG, just like it happens with lootboxes. You happen to not be bothered by this fact because you enjoy the good feelings that come with finding new and unexpected items, but understand that the same feeling exists with the lootbox system, it just asks for money instead of time (which you have to spend to explore all the content when a game is RNG-gated).
Your dislike of one over the other is arbitrary and unreasonable, which is fine. But if you're going to ascribe moral value to things I'm not going to take you seriously because it's clear you haven't thought about it enough.
Saying that "time" is a currency sounds good on paper, but in this case it doesn't work. Those whales that spend tens of thousands of dollars on loot boxes would not have spent an equal amount of time otherwise.
It's predatory, and it's bad.
It just means that most of your runs will be different. And will enable you to do different things (maybe you get staff of freezing and freeze the lake, or maybe levitating boots and walk on water .)
Non of that gates you, just provides flavor, and different runs.
Sure some things are better and some things are worse, but my fondest memories is getting a win with hilariously bad drops.
In mobile games you cant proceed, until you buy crystals, or wait down the increasingly long timer, or simply can't kill a boss without a powerup from cash store.
You're right, console and desktop games that do that are also a problem.
I am pretty sure that I have seen no such thing in Nethack, nor would I expect to see it in Rogue - the "rogue" part of "roguelike". Lootboxing roguelikes/lites are a subset of the genre, so it's not fair to use the entire genre as a defense of this practice.
If you love real games, don't work on mobile gaming.
Don't be an *ist.
(My favorite -ist construction is "wingism", the stereotyping of people of the other political persuasion- I think it's just as destructive to a society as other *ist's)
2. The joke makes fun of those practices.
3. The joke also punches down mobile games and casual players
You say "these people" (ie. the developers of said predatory applications) paint themselves as oppressed and offended [where?], but as far as I know the joke is being mostly criticized because of point 3 (I am not related to the game business).
It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. Or China using feminism to pacify, if not outright genocide Uyghurs[0], for the same reasons.
I really doubt this, The only communist game devs I know are ZA/UM (Disco Elysium (amazing game)) and they are as far from being exploitative game devs as you can get.
That would be more like the kind of wake-washing that "you people" (what's the equivalent of marxist? Adam Smith), you Smithes also dislike?
> Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
It's from his book "On the Jewish Question". If I didn't knew any better, I'd say that it was written by a Strasserist or something like that.
And I'd imagine that most left-wing people would strongly object to this.
It was only a matter of time before they did this, tbh, I doubt it will be painted as a social justice issue.
To have these people paint themselves as oppressed and offended... is exactly what I've come to expect after every online social justice controversy I've witnessed so far.
And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!