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Studio
Jan 15, 2008



VelociBacon posted:

I once shifted the paradigm to an agile model while pivoting to disrupt novel sectors in the web 3.0 space

Find a couple ex-riot/blizzard employees to join you and you'll get seed money and a pointless article about your company forming

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Dinurth
Aug 6, 2004

?
We've been in heavy hiring all through the pandemic and especially now, and poo poo is crazy. Salaries are skyrocketing (a needed correction in games). We've lost some people to Blizzard/Riot because they are just straight up offering people double their current salary. It's hard to compete as an indie studio with the big dogs when they can throw money around like that.

We've had a lot of success with people out of college, but senior roles (especially programmers) is extremely difficult.

more falafel please
Feb 26, 2005

forums poster

Yeah, we went from ~150 to ~250 over the pandemic so far, and that's with a decent amount of turnover (especially in the new hires). I'm not sure how salaries have moved, though.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

We doubled in size over the pandemic, but we're tiny and we were already a fully remote company, so that wasn't too difficult.

DancingMachine
Aug 12, 2004

He's a dancing machine!

Hughlander posted:

Competent Seniors are very hard to find. Mids are getting 50+ resumes per opening.

Really? I am finding it hard to get many applicants even for the mid-level engineer positions. Finding folks with C++ experience or any relevant core game system is especially hard. General web service back end type folks are a little easier to find but still in short supply.

IIRC you are at bungie and just went wide-open for remote work right? Did that make a huge difference in candidate volume (I assume it would)? We are still pretty focused on hiring around our west coast office locations even though we actually work from home 95% of the time.

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008
The reason why I was asking about the Job market is that I saw an advertisement for a database engineer position at a big famous game developer. I have been working for a smaller game developer as a database engineer for about a year, after working for the government for 7 years. So i'm wondering if it's worth a try.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

The reason why I was asking about the Job market is that I saw an advertisement for a database engineer position at a big famous game developer. I have been working for a smaller game developer as a database engineer for about a year, after working for the government for 7 years. So i'm wondering if it's worth a try.

Never be not interviewing. Never don't negotiate.

In my experience the AAA game studios pay is very low. But that's not universally the case. And depending on how small a company you're working with, it's probable you aren't making FAANG money right now anyway..

MJBuddy
Sep 22, 2008

Now I do not know whether I was then a head coach dreaming I was a Saints fan, or whether I am now a Saints fan, dreaming I am a head coach.

leper khan posted:

Never be not interviewing. Never don't negotiate.

In my experience the AAA game studios pay is very low. But that's not universally the case. And depending on how small a company you're working with, it's probable you aren't making FAANG money right now anyway..

Yeah I'd probably estimate that I'm at about 80-90% of easy market rate, at when I started and had 4 offers in hand and the gaming one was the lowest.

If you want to move to FAANG eventually, gaming isn't horrible as a path ironically because I get recruiters constantly for Amazon and Facebook. If I ever don't like my job it's an easy offramp into more salary, and that does put some upward pressure on the smarter companies for salaries and whatnot.

E: and just as a point, those places would have never bothered me before this. I wasn't an obvious candidate but now I am.

DancingMachine
Aug 12, 2004

He's a dancing machine!

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

The reason why I was asking about the Job market is that I saw an advertisement for a database engineer position at a big famous game developer. I have been working for a smaller game developer as a database engineer for about a year, after working for the government for 7 years. So i'm wondering if it's worth a try.

As I was saying in the post above yours, good engineers don't grow on trees. If you have the skills they are looking for they should want to talk to you. That definitely doesn't sound like the kind of job where having game-specific experience is going to be very important.

Big K of Justice
Nov 27, 2005

Anyone seen my ball joints?
Yeah, always be checking jobs and feeling things out, even if things are going good at your current job.

I just wrapped another title here in Texas, and decided to put a few feelers out, I wasn't interested in changing jobs. One of my friends jumped from VFX to games like myself, and wound up at an FAANG/MANGA company and wound up doubling his pay, finishing that project then changed to another tech company then doubling his Total comp again.

He's still doing games/VR/AR stuff but getting paid Software engineering Tech bro money for it and moved back to LA. He pushed me to try to apply at a few places...

I missed California and gave it a go, built a powerpoint deck instead of a demo reel and wound up with two tech company job offers within 3 weeks.

So yeah, now I'm moving back to LA.. yay... :)

WFH changed the dynamic where studios in low cost of living cities are going to have to compete with wages from high cost of living cities since many* studios in expensive cities is willing to pay the same rates for WFH.

*-Meta was adjusting based on the county you lived in.. I'm not sure what the max variance is but comparing California/Washington/Texas counties it seemed to be around 0-16% TC variation.

**- Some tech companies have comparable rates split into software engineers and individual contributors [eg. artists/non programmers] .. comparable to levels.fyi, BUT some places have their games division is "on a different comp scale" which is all over the place. I mean if you do UI/xml/etc for games would you go work for a FAANG owned game studio for 1/2 or 1/3 what you would make at the App Mothership... ?

But yeah wages are moving up after talking to a few peers at other places.


Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 09:23 on May 28, 2022

DrunkPanda
Apr 24, 2005
I am trolling you, CineD

28 Days Later is actually a great movie

fuck starcraft

I have a question for game devs in general:

Why do games suck so much these days? It seems like the only decent games that come out now are remakes/remasters of old games that were actually good

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

DrunkPanda posted:

I have a question for game devs in general:

Why do games suck so much these days? It seems like the only decent games that come out now are remakes/remasters of old games that were actually good

You're playing the wrong games. Big budgets eliminate appetite for risk.

chglcu
May 17, 2007

I'm so bored with the USA.

DrunkPanda posted:

I have a question for game devs in general:

Why do games suck so much these days? It seems like the only decent games that come out now are remakes/remasters of old games that were actually good

You don’t actually like games anymore and haven’t yet accepted it. The old ones only seem good due to nostalgia.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s where I’m at these days.

VelociBacon
Dec 8, 2009

DrunkPanda posted:

I have a question for game devs in general:

Why do games suck so much these days? It seems like the only decent games that come out now are remakes/remasters of old games that were actually good

I'm not in game dev but wanted to offer my guess which is that it's the same reason movies are trash - a lot of these companies have gone public and are beholden to shareholders. The willingness to take risks is hugely down because they realize they can just churn out the same poo poo as always with flavour of the week variations (battle royale, loot boxes, crafting, survival) and make a garunteed return. Think Fallout 4.

I think another big thing would be the way that marketing and PR control decision-making. They're always going to want to minimize risk and maximize return and I'm guessing very few of them care much about the games. We've all heard the budgets for these AAA titles are 50% marketing so I'm sure they get quite an elevated seat at the table if they aren't directly beside the decision makers with their filthy loving rasputin mouths up to the queen's ear.

Good games are out there! Just getting harder to stumble across as everything gets pigeonholed into genre bins. Curious if the actual game devs will tell me I'm wrong, I hope so.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

VelociBacon posted:

I'm not in game dev but wanted to offer my guess which is that it's the same reason movies are trash - a lot of these companies have gone public and are beholden to shareholders. The willingness to take risks is hugely down because they realize they can just churn out the same poo poo as always with flavour of the week variations (battle royale, loot boxes, crafting, survival) and make a garunteed return. Think Fallout 4.

I think another big thing would be the way that marketing and PR control decision-making. They're always going to want to minimize risk and maximize return and I'm guessing very few of them care much about the games. We've all heard the budgets for these AAA titles are 50% marketing so I'm sure they get quite an elevated seat at the table if they aren't directly beside the decision makers with their filthy loving rasputin mouths up to the queen's ear.

Good games are out there! Just getting harder to stumble across as everything gets pigeonholed into genre bins. Curious if the actual game devs will tell me I'm wrong, I hope so.

You're not wrong.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
None of the genres you love have disappeared. People are still making interactive fiction games, for crying out loud, and they're super good, way better than Zork ever was! The problem is one of finding those games. Most of the press oxygen gets sucked up by AAA, leaving precious little for more exploratory coverage. The more niche your interests are, the harder it'll be to find games that cater to you, but that doesn't mean those games don't exist, just that they're hard to find in the giant videogames haystack.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
You may find that itch and https://buried-treasure.org/ are potentially useful resources in this regard.

Lemming
Apr 21, 2008

chglcu posted:

You don’t actually like games anymore and haven’t yet accepted it. The old ones only seem good due to nostalgia.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s where I’m at these days.

Old games often seem more interesting because they were trying out new things before people had learned all the bullshit "rules" that make sure new games all feel samey and stale. If you didn't have a huge amount of stuff to copy from, sometimes you'd have to create something new, but now most games are just mixes and rehashes of stuff that's already been done

Of course, that doesn't make all old games good, but that's why they can feel fresher than stuff that just came out sometimes

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

I disagree with the premise that "games suck now" and "movies suck now". Have you PLAYED the vast majority of retro games? Have you watched most movies from the 90s and 80s? Nostalgia and getting older are powerful drugs, my friend, but you are an idiot if you think either of the above quoted phrases are objectively true.

MJBuddy
Sep 22, 2008

Now I do not know whether I was then a head coach dreaming I was a Saints fan, or whether I am now a Saints fan, dreaming I am a head coach.
Your memory of the past is selection bias, and you're ignoring the mountains of poor games that existed.

more falafel please
Feb 26, 2005

forums poster

AAA games used to shoot for selling a million copies. The problem is, AAA games used to cost $5-10 million to make and sold for $60, about $20-25 of which would go to the publisher.

Now, AAA games can easily cost over $100 million to make, and they still sell for $60. More of that goes to the publisher now, because of digital distribution, but it doesn't come close to making up the difference. This is where DLC, MTX, loot boxes, and GaaS comes from.

On the surface, there's not a huge amount of gameplay difference between say, Borderlands and Destiny, but the difference in what the developers are going to prioritize is huge, since one of them wants you to have a good time playing it for 20 hours (and maybe replay it a couple times) so that you'll buy the next game, while Destiny wants you to play forever and ever.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

more falafel please posted:

AAA games used to shoot for selling a million copies. The problem is, AAA games used to cost $5-10 million to make and sold for $60, about $20-25 of which would go to the publisher.

Now, AAA games can easily cost over $100 million to make, and they still sell for $60. More of that goes to the publisher now, because of digital distribution, but it doesn't come close to making up the difference. This is where DLC, MTX, loot boxes, and GaaS comes from.

On the surface, there's not a huge amount of gameplay difference between say, Borderlands and Destiny, but the difference in what the developers are going to prioritize is huge, since one of them wants you to have a good time playing it for 20 hours (and maybe replay it a couple times) so that you'll buy the next game, while Destiny wants you to play forever and ever.

I still like games with a $5 mil budget. But that money doesn't go anywhere near as far as most people think.

more falafel please
Feb 26, 2005

forums poster

leper khan posted:

I still like games with a $5 mil budget. But that money doesn't go anywhere near as far as most people think.

$5 mil doesn't get a AAA studio a lease for a year. Studios are soooo much bigger than they were when I started in this racket. And they need to be, because everything is a hundred times more complex than it was when I started in this racket.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!
There are two other factors I can think of:

1.) Technological innovation as an enabler of new gameplay possibilities has stalled out since the 2000's or so. There have been major changes in what games are capable of getting to market with the advent of digital distribution, but hardware as an enabler of new gameplay possibilities hasn't really been much of a thing since like the PlayStation 2.

2.) The indie -> AAA ripoff pipeline. Why take risks with huge budgets when you can just rip off a successful indie phenomenon and take over their market by outspending them?

I don't think that really means games are getting worse, but the role of the AAA segment has definitely become less about innovation than refinement.

Ironically, the advent of commodity game engines has shifted things MORE in that direction, because now it's easier than ever to make a game exist, but not any easier to overcome a massive budget disadvantage.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jun 9, 2022

rojay
Sep 2, 2000

Maybe I'm just lucky that my preferred genre is crpgs, but it's a loving golden age right now as far as I'm concerned. I started playing games on the computer in the early 1980s and if tiny me could see what's possible now, tiny me would be amazed.

I don't know what you're on about where "games suck these days" is concerned, but maybe have some tea and a nap and revisit the whole thing tomorrow?

BallisticClipboard
Feb 18, 2013

Such a good worker!


How did you guys get past the anxiety of applying to a company? I'm fresh out of college with a game design degree and 3 awful game projects on my itch. I never focused in any role while in school so I feel so very unprepared for any job. My friends in my game dev are basically telling me to shoot my shot but I am terrified of flaming out spectacularly in any interview. What did you guys do to feel ready?

Canine Blues Arooo
Jan 7, 2008

when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with

Grimey Drawer

mutata posted:

I disagree with the premise that "games suck now" and "movies suck now". Have you PLAYED the vast majority of retro games? Have you watched most movies from the 90s and 80s? Nostalgia and getting older are powerful drugs, my friend, but you are an idiot if you think either of the above quoted phrases are objectively true.

I think I'd modify this to "AAA games suck now" and you are at least butting up against the truth. AAA games really do suck these days, and I could probably write a ton of words about why that is, but it largely boils down to business reasons (as well as general incompetence). That doesn't forgive the state of the games though at all. Diablo Immortal just came out, and I'd rather play Diablo 2 at 640 x 480 and I have no nostalgia for that at all (I'd also rather cut my dick off then play Diablo Immortal...maybe this is a bad comparison). I'd probably put the 'golden era' of AAA development somewhere around the PS2 era, and give the SNES honorable mention. The average game was still pretty loving bad, but the number of really quality releases we were seeing per unit of time was very high.

All that said, the Indie and AA space is absolutely lighting it up the last decade or so. I could construct a list of outstanding A/AA games released in just the last 18 months and it'd be huge. I actually think the best games we've seen in the last 5 are almost all Indie titles with but a few exceptions.

So yeah, the AAA space is getting worse, but the A/AA space is getting really loving good.

Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jun 9, 2022

Hyper Crab Tank
Feb 10, 2014

The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

BallisticClipboard posted:

How did you guys get past the anxiety of applying to a company? I'm fresh out of college with a game design degree and 3 awful game projects on my itch. I never focused in any role while in school so I feel so very unprepared for any job. My friends in my game dev are basically telling me to shoot my shot but I am terrified of flaming out spectacularly in any interview. What did you guys do to feel ready?

I mean, I figured I didn't really have much a choice. After university I knew I didn't want to get into academics - I was tired of school, then - and I wanted money. You know, as you do. I needed to apply somewhere, and why not companies I actually wanted to work at? (Now, it turns out the company wasn't one I wanted to work for a few years down the line, but that's another story.) The only way to get hired is to apply, it's just not happening any other way, especially when you're freshly graduated. If the company is interested in hiring juniors to begin with, they know what to expect and they're not going to demand you know the inside and out of every part of your job. There's always a transition period, you'll have plenty of time to learn on the job. And, you know, having any projects on itch.io or github is already a step beyond what a lot of applicants have to show for themselves.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

I think I'd modify this to "AAA games suck now" and you are at least butting up against the truth. AAA games really do suck these days, and I could probably write a ton of words about why that is, but it largely boils down to business reasons (as well as general incompetence).

I'd like to push back at least a little bit here, though, although it might depend on your definition of "AAA". The past few years have seen titles like Elden Ring, Monster Hunter Rise, Tales of Arise, the Final Fantasy VII remake, Ghost of Tsushima, Psychonauts 2, that new Ratchet and Clank game, Yakuza 7 and Last of Us Part II off the top of my head, all of which I think can be said to be pretty good games, and I would classify most or all of them as AAA. And I'm sure there are plenty I'm just not thinking of or that flew under my radar. So I don't think it's so much that "AAA sucks" as there's a particular but very prominent sliver of games that are horrendously bad for reasons that have nothing to do with production quality, but everything to do with badly aligned incentives and financial decisions, and some of these are AAA - but there are lower tier games that have the same shortcomings, too.

Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Jun 9, 2022

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

BallisticClipboard posted:

How did you guys get past the anxiety of applying to a company? I'm fresh out of college with a game design degree and 3 awful game projects on my itch. I never focused in any role while in school so I feel so very unprepared for any job. My friends in my game dev are basically telling me to shoot my shot but I am terrified of flaming out spectacularly in any interview. What did you guys do to feel ready?

I need to eat and pay rent.

Whatever social and professional anxiety I had/have gets to gently caress right off when looking at a real possibility of not being able to do either of those.

Just send out applications. Don't start with your dream gig, talk to them after you've had a few interviews. I've used LinkedIn to find roles in companies I'm not familiar with. If you have a good network, asking people you know is better (usually gets you a free pass through the resume screen).

Not directly related to where you are in your job search, but I recommend reading through the the negotiation thread. I realize it's a book at this point, but it's a very good resource. It will give you more money, both in the short and long term.


Speaking as an interviewer, I've seen people flame out very badly. I remember some of their experiences, but generally none of the people. It's obviously devastating to them in the moment. Some of them I'm reasonably sure were having a bad day and managed to get through somewhere else later. Others I doubt ever managed to find a position. I couldn't point out any of them on the street.

IMO, failing an interview isn't the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is for everything to go well, you like the manager and the team, you like the product, but the compensation doesn't line up for things to make sense.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

I mean, I figured I didn't really have much a choice. After university I knew I didn't want to get into academics - I was tired of school, then - and I wanted money. You know, as you do. I needed to apply somewhere, and why not companies I actually wanted to work at? (Now, it turns out the company wasn't one I wanted to work for a few years down the line, but that's another story.) The only way to get hired is to apply, it's just not happening any other way, especially when you're freshly graduated. If the company is interested in hiring juniors to begin with, they know what to expect and they're not going to demand you know the inside and out of every part of your job. There's always a transition period, you'll have plenty of time to learn on the job. And, you know, having any projects on itch.io or github is already a step beyond what a lot of applicants have to show for themselves.

I'd like to push back at least a little bit here, though, although it might depend on your definition of "AAA". The past few years have seen titles like Elden Ring, Monster Hunter Rise, Tales of Arise, the Final Fantasy VII remake, Ghost of Tsushima, Psychonauts 2, that new Ratchet and Clank game, Yakuza 7 and Last of Us Part II off the top of my head, all of which I think can be said to be pretty good games, and I would classify most or all of them as AAA. And I'm sure there are plenty I'm just not thinking of or that flew under my radar. So I don't think it's so much that "AAA sucks" as there's a particular but very prominent sliver of games that are horrendously bad for reasons that have nothing to do with production quality, but everything to do with badly aligned incentives and financial decisions, and some of these are AAA - but there are lower tier games that have the same shortcomings, too.

Now compare with 1997

Hyper Crab Tank
Feb 10, 2014

The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

leper khan posted:

Now compare with 1997

I'm not sure what to compare. "AAA games" was barely a concept in 1997. Final Fantasy VII came out that year, that's a pretty early game to arguably be called AAA, but it wasn't typical. Even something like the first Diablo game, also released that year, was famously made on a shoestring budget and can't really be called AAA.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

BallisticClipboard posted:

How did you guys get past the anxiety of applying to a company? I'm fresh out of college with a game design degree and 3 awful game projects on my itch. I never focused in any role while in school so I feel so very unprepared for any job. My friends in my game dev are basically telling me to shoot my shot but I am terrified of flaming out spectacularly in any interview. What did you guys do to feel ready?

Like other people are saying, sheer necessity can be a motivator. It may also help to learn that even if you completely bomb an interview, you haven't ruined your chances with anyone, not even with that company. Sometimes you just have a bad interview, everyone knows this. They'll give you another shot in a few months to a year if you're still available. The only reason I know of that companies will banlist an interviewee is if they're personally terrible, like, blatantly racist/sexist, or horrible personal hygiene.

Interviewing is a skill, and takes practice to get good at. You can read up on the theory of how to interview well, but ultimately the way to succeed at interviewing is to interview a lot. A bunch of those interviews are gonna be unsuccessful, but the practice will improve your skill and improve your familiarity with the process, which can help a lot with anxiety.

Also, for what it's worth, I never expected a fresh college grad to have any particular specialization. Y'all're unformed babies as far as I'm concerned. When you get hired, your job is to be slotted in where the more senior employees think you'll do well, and work there for long enough to develop your own skills and opinions.

BallisticClipboard
Feb 18, 2013

Such a good worker!


This is a nice reality check. I'm couch surfing so my feet aren't immediately against the fire.

It's a a little reassuring that companies aren't expecting the world. I was always paralyzed by non-senior roles asking for shipped games or several years experience and an asterisk next to a portfolio link.

SerthVarnee
Mar 13, 2011

It has been two zero days since last incident.
Big Super Slapstick Hunk
Don't pay too much attention to that insane list of demands the corporations put up for advanced titles such as:
Apprentice janitor, third class.
Assistant bag holder.
Coffee cup handler, second class.
Dust collection inspector, probationary part time.

Those requirements are born of HR attempts to reduce their own workload by simply filtering out 95% of all the applications. Their requirements are very often demanding 5 years of experience with a coding language that has existed for 2-4 years.
No one can fill out those requirements (and even if they did, the entry level positions would NOT be what they were applying for).

Send in your applications to as many companies as you can find that you think you'd do well in/be willing to work for in exchange for money/would be able to use as a springboard to a company you actually want to work for.

Chernabog
Apr 16, 2007



Also, if you are getting interviews you are already past the hardest part. It means that at least on paper you are ready or else they wouldn't be wasting their time with you.

On the other topic, I'm gonna say AAA in general don't suck. You'll always have both good and bad games and IMO it hasn't really gone in either direction recently.

Lemming
Apr 21, 2008

Chernabog posted:

Also, if you are getting interviews you are already past the hardest part. It means that at least on paper you are ready or else they wouldn't be wasting their time with you.

On the other topic, I'm gonna say AAA in general don't suck. You'll always have both good and bad games and IMO it hasn't really gone in either direction recently.

They're local maximum versions of games that have been iterated on for decades, polished to a mirror shine and completely bereft of any new ideas. They aren't bad games, but they're not fresh or interesting

My opinion of the current state of games (or at least, primarily AAA games), is pretty much summed up in this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOQzTtsr3AQ

rojay
Sep 2, 2000

I think that video may say more about the state of the gaming press than the state of games.

It's very difficult to review anything without referencing something else. When the purpose of your article/video is to give people a way to assess whether they will like a thing, the easiest way to do it is to compare that thing to other things that your readers/viewers already know/understand. I don't write about games, but I do write about food and if I'm trying to describe the taste of something like yuzu I'm going to have a hard time not making a comparison to other citrus fruit.

I would be very interested to know what developers think about the people who review their games. Do you see a significant difference between "mainstream" coverage in the press and bloggers/vloggers or "influencers"? I'm only talking about people who review a game in good faith - meaning they're transparent about how they got it, whether the version they played was complete and how long they played. Obviously anyone reviewing anything has to disclose whether they are being compensated for the review or, if they provide a link to purchase the game, whether they get a cut.

And where do things like Steam reviews factor in? I read them when I'm not familiar with a game that may interest me, but it's a lot of work to parse out the ones that actually tell me something useful about the game and it seems like a lot of reviews have less to do with the game than some axe the writer has to grind with the developer, genre or crap like "the developer is too woke/the developer is a fascist."

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
As a small-time indie dev, it's not quite 100% accurate to say that any coverage is good coverage. But my #1 problem is getting eyeballs on my game, so my default assumption is "oh cool, I've been seen!". I've had some published reviews on gaming sites that clearly didn't really "get it", but I'm still happy that they wrote something and were engaging the game on its own terms.

As for Steam reviews: so long as you maintain a "Positive" (>80%) score, quantity matters more than quality. Like, sure it's better to be 93% positive than 82% positive, but 82% positive with 1000 reviews is better than 93% positive with 50 reviews. The algorithm rewards popularity, and having lots of reviews is a signifier of popularity.

As for the "developer is too woke" reviews you described, I've gotten a bunch of those. Usually I'm able to appeal them, and while they may remain published, they don't count against my review score. For the most part though, individual Steam reviews are pretty low-signal. What you should do if you want to glean actual information from them is read through a bunch of the positive/negative reviews and see what things come up repeatedly. If a bunch of reviews talk about bad controls or a weird camera or good writing or whatever, then you can be pretty confident that those things are actually present. Whether or not those things matter to you personally depends on your tastes and tolerances.

Lemming
Apr 21, 2008

rojay posted:

I think that video may say more about the state of the gaming press than the state of games.

It's very difficult to review anything without referencing something else. When the purpose of your article/video is to give people a way to assess whether they will like a thing, the easiest way to do it is to compare that thing to other things that your readers/viewers already know/understand. I don't write about games, but I do write about food and if I'm trying to describe the taste of something like yuzu I'm going to have a hard time not making a comparison to other citrus fruit.

I agree with you in the sense that lots of things people work on are referential and build on other things, but I disagree in that I think that does apply to game devs as much as it applies to gaming press. I actually think a good example of this is Elden Ring, and how far down the dodge roll rabbit hole things have gone. The dodge roll is a mechanic that I really don't like that much, so I have some bias here, but part of it is how it's kind of fundamentally a nonsense thing to have, but it exists because of the progression of how these kinds of games have been iterated on. The entire game is based around a mechanic that only exists as a result of referencing other kinds of games that have dodge rolls, and it's such an expected part of how these games work now that all the enemies are built around that entirely. Lots of bosses come down to more or less memorization of exactly when you should dodge roll, and boss attacks and stuff have continued to evolve around that. One thing Elden Ring has a lot of (which I think is particularly nasty) are the hesitation attacks and the homing attacks of the bosses, so you really just have no positioning or reaction based (or your reactions have to be insane) alternatives, you just have to memorize the exact times to use the dodge roll

I don't think this is the kind of thing that would get created if you were designing a game without reference to other things; it's an iterative kind of mechanic, that is based on pushing things that players are already familiar with to their limit. I don't think it's inherently bad or anything (although, again, I personally don't like it), but I've already played a ton of dodge roll action games and it's not really that interesting to me. I played through Elden Ring because the rest of the game was great (the world building, first and foremost), but that part of the combat was just something to get past.

My main point is that I think that lots of games are just in local maximums where they're iterating on what's come before them, and their creation and design is entirely built on referencing things other game developers have already done. This results in a lot of games that are still good, but aren't all that innovative or different from what came before them. The huge catalogue of games that exist kind of pigeonhole new things that get made, and it seems hard for devs to break out of that (I recognize that a massive part of that is just shareholders trying to guarantee returns on their investment, which causes safe things to get made), even in the indie space these days. I dunno, I'm sure part of it is that I'm getting older too, but it really does seem like we're not seeing as many new and fresh things as you would hope

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TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

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Lemming posted:

My main point is that I think that lots of games are just in local maximums where they're iterating on what's come before them, and their creation and design is entirely built on referencing things other game developers have already done. This results in a lot of games that are still good, but aren't all that innovative or different from what came before them. The huge catalogue of games that exist kind of pigeonhole new things that get made, and it seems hard for devs to break out of that (I recognize that a massive part of that is just shareholders trying to guarantee returns on their investment, which causes safe things to get made), even in the indie space these days. I dunno, I'm sure part of it is that I'm getting older too, but it really does seem like we're not seeing as many new and fresh things as you would hope

You're not wrong about this, but I think it bears emphasizing just how loving risky it is to try new stuff. If you have a machine that prints money, why the hell would you mess with it? From Software has spent the better part of two decades refining their formula, and now are able to put out a new game every few years that will reliably be a modest success. That's goddamn amazing for gamedev; very few studios get to that point.

There's two main reasons why you see so much more experimentation in the indie space. The first is that budgets are much smaller (like, two orders of magnitude smaller!). That means that indies simply can't follow the latest formulae, which tend to have very high minimum investments to produce. You can't realistically do a good open-world game as a small indie studio, for example. The second reason is that indies are desperate to be seen, and one of the ways to do that is to make something that's different from what everyone else is doing.

Note that neither of those reasons has anything in particular to do with artistic integrity, exploring the space of what videogames are capable of, or other fuzzy concepts. That's not to say that people don't do that too, but they're generally not going to be making a business out of it, and they're not going to be getting the kind of press attention that means most people will have heard of them.

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