I gotta. The Rogue-like genre being the classic example of the indie game

Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero

I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.

I think one thing that really gave Blizzard titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.

I’m sure that plays a role. But it might also be worth noting that the market is absolutely saturated. You don’t need to go out and get The Latest New Game to enjoy yourself. There are titles that are 20 years old and can stand up to anything the AAA titles will put out next week.

The marketing budget is what’s driving a lot of the prices of these bigger titles. You see a Superbowl Ad for the new Call of Duty or GTA game? That’s $5 of the sticker price right there. Sometimes firms are spending 50-100% of the actual production cost of the game to tell you to buy the game. Other times they’re just going out to the gaming mags/influencer groups and leading you with “The game is coming!!!” news articles for years at a time, hoping to build a critical mass of pre-orders to fund the next title in the pipe.

Once the game is out, though, its done. Anything you can flip it for is free money for the owner of the property. So why not re-sell the SquareEnix back catalog for $10/ea? Tune up the graphics a bit, maybe spring for a few new cut scenes. You can take a title that landed on shelves in the mid-90s and turn it into another eight-figure release just by hyping it back up again.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

I feel like I’m looking at a scene from The Reanimator.

No they aren’t. Games flop all the time and the companies don’t quit this bullshit. No business executive has ever walked out of a tense call with their investors and re-committed themselves to being nicer to the staff. You’re delusional if you think people not buying a game results in the quality of life of that game’s staff improving.

What improves the lives of game developers is going indie and doing well. What improves the odds of doing well as an indie developer is producing games that can compete with the GTAs absent the absurd marketing budgets. That requires a symbiosis between indie games media, indie developers, and early adopters. But the gooner gamer is at the end of the line in any event. They don’t even know the game exists until it gets a splash ad on the Steam Store.

Your retail consumer market is a consequence of industry practices, not a cause.

people are actually looking forward to a game

Hype around a game is directly related to the marketing budget. If people are looking forward to the next edition in a franchise, it is inevitably because they’ve been bombarded with “NEW THING! NEW THING! NEW THING!” radio/TV/streaming ad reels for months prior.

All that aside, yeah our countries hate unions and hate workers and everyone in power hates you and wants you to die.

We’re going to replace all the working class schlubs with AI, haven’t you heard?

why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy

It’s not like they’re plastering “We Busted A Union To Get This Game Out Six Months Late” on the packaging. The overwhelming majority of retail customers have no idea how the sausage is made. Those that are curious enough to ask typically aren’t the ones going in on the “Rape And Loot Simulator” franchise to begin with.

Gotta get off this hobby horse of blaming the anonymous gooner gamer at the bottom of the food chain for decisions made in a smoke-filled board room long beforehand.

Delaying the game another six months cost the company a full 3% on their market cap and god knows how much in long term costs.

Employers seem ready to slit their wrists if it’ll get blood on a union organizer.

Freckles AND a jawline? Unplayable.

The degree to which people will idolize God of War’s Kratos and shit all over Horizon’s Aloy is crazy, given how these are functionally the same character.

I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.

She didn’t look like the silhouette on a truck’s mudflaps. So she’s hideous by default. But then nobody seems to qualify as “hot enough” anymore. Sidney Sweeny isn’t hot enough. Taylor Swift isn’t hot enough. Ciri from the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Freya Allan from the TV Show of the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Fucking Jessica Rabbit isn’t hot enough.

Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.

Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.

Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box

That’s just social media in a nutshell. You’re either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.

Instantly diagnoses your technical problem, but not before calling you a dipshit and popping a fist full of vicodin.

They’re just gonna lay them off.

And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.

Ugh. QA. Quality Assurance. Reflexively jamming that & because I am a bad AI.

Regardless, digital simulated users are going to be able to test faster, more exhaustively, and with more detailed diagnostics, than manual end users.

I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.

Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.

You don’t let AI check your work

From a game dev perspective, user Q&A QA is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.

I wouldn’t be shy about getting into Remake or Rebirth now. They both stand up as their own games (concise start/ending, somewhat distinct mechanics, each one is easily 40+ hours of gameplay). And with Part 3 targeted for 2027 release, I suspect this kind of overhaul would be outside their dev cycle to implement.

Part 2 is already using the engine from Part 1 with minor adjustments. I suspect most of Part 3 development is cinematics and world building.

I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.

Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.

Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.

Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.