Expedition 33 is a game I finished a couple weeks ago and have continued to be obsessed with since. Not really patientgamers material seeing as it’s pretty recent, but I’m so glad I made an exception for it.
Funnily enough the lyrics for that menu music is basically a plot synopsis that spoils the whole story in poetry, but it’s fine because it’s in a mutated medieval french. A lot of the game’s music is like that, actually.
I would agree if we were in a Hollow Knight or metroidvania community, but as it appears to me this thread visited TheBat just as much as they visited this thread.
What could they have done to not see this thread? Keyword blocking won’t work, because skong is only referenced in the image, unfollowing / blocking the community has a huge blast radius because it’s the highly generic /c/memes. Etc.
At some point you just exhasperatedly blurt out that you don’t care as much as people are assuming you do. I agree that it’s annoying to hear that too, it’s a bit hipsterish, and it’s mostly unwarranted given the low stakes. But I sympathize with it.
Is that not a relevant thing to say?
Not OP, so I don’t necessarily feel this way about skong, but have you ever had your feed filled with discussion of something that you just don’t care about? And then you go talk to your friends and they’re also talking about it? Then you talk to a relative and they’re asking you what all the fuss is about? All while you give 0 shits about it?
I’ve been there, and it’s easy to just get plain annoyed at the subject coming up, even if innocuously. It’s the real life equivalent of squidward tuning into boxing because it’s not about cardboard boxes, only to be greeted with 2 cardboard boxes going at it.
And if you’re somehow in doubt that skong has satuarated discussion everywhere
One of the most annoying parts of online dating is the fact that there are a ton of profles that treat the textboxes as though their ordering pizza (mataphorically). Like they’ll use the first box to say that you must like cats, the second to say that you should have a moustache and the third to say you need to be adventurous, as if the point is to type in your ideal mate and have them materialize at a local park for you to meet.
Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.
Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.
You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.