Congrats to Phil on his resume bump I guess.
Though there is the switch tax where games that are 10$ on steam are 30 on switch.
I'm hoping the Steam Deck will provide a more open portable console.
I have a 14" gaming notebook (ASUS G14 2021) that's portable enough and offers decent battery life especially for lighter games with access to my Steam library offline, and plenty of key shops to find games for uber cheap when there's no demo available for me to vet the value of a title first.
Win-wins all around!
Tencent and Microsoft have both spread a lot of money around. Perhaps for varying reasons, namely MS needs to make up for the lack of titles developed for the Xbox Series, and add titles to Game Pass to make it more a more attractive offering.
This is inaccurate.
I don't have the stats to back it up, but the power of Unity Engine and Unreal Engine have effectively created an indie game developer renaissance.
One of my favorite games at the moment, Hell Let Loose, is published by an indie studio that started in 2017 as a Kickstarter project. They launched their PC version last summer and successfully launched an Xbox port this past fall. It is objectively a better (but harder) game than COD WWII or Battlefield V, both of which are considered AAA titles and have had hundreds of millions put into them for development.
Combine that with the lower barrier to entry with the discoverability of games on Steam and Xbox marketplaces and you have a very hot market. Oh, and consumers play video games now more than ever.
There's so many platforms to build for, and on some (xbox/ps5) a high(er) barrier to entry, vs. low on the PC, or mobile. I'm not surprised that there's much indie action on the xbox/ps5.
Have you looked at Steam recently? Indie studios are doing just fine, and new indie studios are popping up all the time. I'd argue the indie market is stronger than ever.
Hollow Knight was great; if I hadn't nearly fully completed it at the time I probably would have started another playthrough already.
Indie studios have produced a lot of games with varied mechanics that are just a huge breath of fresh air for me, personally.
You'd never see a AAA studio making Factorio or Satisfactory, for instance. Probably unlikely to see them make a game like Darkest Dungeon, or Don't Starve, or Stardew Valley or Terraria or Starbound or.. the list goes on. You just might have to look a bit deeper to dig through the roguelikes and platformers.
* Puzzle (The Witness, Baba is You, Antichamber, Manifold Garden, ...)
* Survival/open-world (Minecraft, Terraria, Don't Starve, Subnautica, The Long Dark, ...)
* Horror (Amnesia, Outlast, Layers of Fear, Five Nights at Freddy's ...)
* Management/simulation (Factorio, Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program, ...)
* Metroidvanias (Cave Story, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, ...)
* "Walking simulators" (The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Firewatch, ...)
Some of these maybe you'd disagree with (Are Metroidvanias just platformers? Can Minecraft still be put on a list of indie games?), but I personally think it's a crime to omit at least puzzle games and survival games. The offerings from the AAA space for those is not very impressive compared to the indie space.
Do we count mods? DotA and CS would be indie if so, but are now quite commercial.
e.g. Annapurna Interactive has been publishing AAA-quality titles from indie devs for a long time. And most of those games don't fall into the roguelike or platformer vertical.
But yeah, not many games between AAA and indie. :(
Yeah, but from TFA:
>> Upon close, Microsoft will have 30 internal game development studios, along with additional publishing and esports production capabilities.
I don't see a need for this and agree with the notion that companies should not buy companies. There are cases where it makes sense, but I think another mechanism needs to be created because buying and selling companies is often too much like buying and selling people in addition to being anti-competitive.
https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Indie/#p=0&tab=TopRat...
There is quite a Nintendo tax on indie games though.
We already know that Bethesda is keeping their autonomy to make the same great games we love from them, and Starfield is a chance to prove it. The only downside being: Playstation owners losing out on playing what may end up being among the most popular titles in the next 5-10 years if Starfield and TES6 are a success.
Activision Blizzard already competed with Sony, which is why people think the market is more healthy prior to this acquisition.
In your comment you point out that Bethesda still has their autonomy. So why is it good again for MS to be acquiring these studios? They continue to make the same product in more or less the same way, but now have to appease their MS gods, all while generating more profit for MS to the benefit of not really anyone, except MS.
My last comments were more in the shoes of Microsoft.
Which is also a bad thing!!!
But I agree the concentration is still a problem in itself, even if the owners are OK.
Gaming is not a human right.
Apple is not obligated to invest into building Apple Music app on Android or Windows. Just because Apple tied Apple Music into their own ecosystem, doesn't mean you are owed anything.
yes, because what would he do without.
