Has anyone gotten far enough to have a report on the colonization tropes? The writing?
Maybe I should wait until people have finished it and have the bigger picture.
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PC Gaming ERA | September 2019 - The Girls Are Back In Town
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Maybe I should wait until people have finished it and have the bigger picture.
Today's lunchtime viewing, a video essay on the legacy of the haunted house in video games. Mild spoilers for Control and an itch.io game called ANATOMY which looks pretty cool.
Incidentally, House of Leaves is incredible. Also mild spoilers for that.
Incidentally, House of Leaves is incredible. Also mild spoilers for that.
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I think it will be a more broader analysis from him and not just for the games he published. At least if I understood his older tweets correctly. He is behind the indie publisher No More Robots which published Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw and most recently Nowhere Prophet.
Thank you, EGS, for making PC gaming better by finally teaching us NOT to pre-order
What're folks thoughts on this? I've been pre-ordering games less and less, but it's more to do with the fact I'm brassic than the EGS. I can see the stuff like the Metro Exodus stuff putting people off, although pre-orders were still given the game.
What're folks thoughts on this? I've been pre-ordering games less and less, but it's more to do with the fact I'm brassic than the EGS. I can see the stuff like the Metro Exodus stuff putting people off, although pre-orders were still given the game.
Anti pre-order attitudes have been around since the PS3 era. I remember the threads.
Pre oredering comes down to the consumer.
Personally I blind pre-order what I like that is well priced and most of the time the game delivers.
I just don't bother with preorders at all on PC. I can eventually get them waaaaaay cheaper, and it's not like they are going to run out of copies like on retail, so I don't see the point, I have enough games to keep playing and control the hype I may have for a game.
Only exceptions are retail games that I think they're niche enough to run out of copies soon, special editions I might be interested on, and some Nintendo games, because they won't get a price cut in ages, so might as well if I really want to play them.
Very true, games go on sale like a month after release a lot of the time too
Someone needs to hear about counfounding variables. And possibly outliers too.
Yep, I only buy games on sale. If it's a expensive game/game I really want to play, until it doesn't hit ~10€ I don't buy it, for cheap games or games I don't care that much, ~5€ is the price I get them for. Only a few exceptions are bought around the 15€ mark.
Every week my inbox is bombarded by offers of discounted games from GOG, Humble, Fanatical, GMG. Occasionally, Steam itself
At work, I also get daily indieGala reminders about bundles popping up.
Backlogs are a thing. Developers need to stop releasing games for like 5 years to give people time to catch up on maybe 1/10th of that.
At work, I also get daily indieGala reminders about bundles popping up.
Backlogs are a thing. Developers need to stop releasing games for like 5 years to give people time to catch up on maybe 1/10th of that.
Unless it's a game which I 100% gonna buy no matter what the review is, I never pre order. Then again even if you pre order, you can always refund before 2 hours limit is up (assuming it's on Steam).
Which subscription service does that?! I cant find any of their games in a normal subscription service.
Huh, we had the conversation some time ago about how some subscription services seemed to go that way (payment for time played) but we could not find any "mainstream" service at the time that did it (as all the services we knew of paid in bulk first). I think this is an interesting thing that could be posted as a separate topic, as it looks like the confirmation of (at least one) services going through that model.
Re: thread. Maybe it's not worth outing a dev like that if it's true? I bet the terms are under NDA. I dunno. Outing is maybe not the right word but you get the idea.
It is good that Mike Rose focuses on the top games, but I believe it would make more sense to study the top N games rather than the top x%.
How many games were released last year, compared to this year?
If the top 20% consisted of 600 games last year, and 6,000 games this year, shouldn't this distort the comparison?
The audience cannot be multiplied by 10 in a year, and neither can the amount spent. Of course, the average and median should dramatically decrease, no?
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People should really click through to Mike Rose's google doc; it's not just a spreadsheet of values, it's a 10 page power point presentation on how the data was calculated.
Let's say....it's interesting.
- He only is tracking data from games released in July of this year.
- He doesn't count AAA games.
- There was 900 games released in that time period. He cuts out the bottom 700 games. He then removes the top 15 and bottom 15 games from the remaining 200 games to account for outliers.
- The revenue from these games is garnered from publicly available player counts and review counts and "years of experience selling games on Steam" (lol).
The main takeaway:
The mean revenue ($275,000) is vastly higher than the median ($30,000). This means that money (and sales) are clustered at the top end.
Like, my only take away from this is that if you are one of the 170(!) games released in the middle of summer, that are theoretically 'not-shovelware', the audience is clustering to the theoretical most interesting, best marketed, or highest quality games.
Oops, i messed that up; that was for numbers last year. This year, the median is $16,000 and the mean is $48,000, which means that the 170 games are much closer in revenue distribution. Which is bad, but depending on what was released, could be an anomaly. Would need a monthly breakdown by year to see if the trends persist.
Let's say....it's interesting.
- He only is tracking data from games released in July of this year.
- He doesn't count AAA games.
- There was 900 games released in that time period. He cuts out the bottom 700 games. He then removes the top 15 and bottom 15 games from the remaining 200 games to account for outliers.
- The revenue from these games is garnered from publicly available player counts and review counts and "years of experience selling games on Steam" (lol).
The main takeaway:
Like, my only take away from this is that if you are one of the 170(!) games released in the middle of summer, that are theoretically 'not-shovelware', the audience is clustering to the theoretical most interesting, best marketed, or highest quality games.
Oops, i messed that up; that was for numbers last year. This year, the median is $16,000 and the mean is $48,000, which means that the 170 games are much closer in revenue distribution. Which is bad, but depending on what was released, could be an anomaly. Would need a monthly breakdown by year to see if the trends persist.
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Issue then is that looking through Tizoc "curated" releases, we are already at 100+ interesting games monthly (that we know of before hand). Such a low median would make most of those games bombs (sadly). But yeah, it was never really sustainable to have more than 3 interesting games launch per day.
Yeah, see my revised analysis, it is actually pretty brutal if his numbers are actually reliable (dubious, but not unlikely).
Honestly, this just screams over-supply to me. As the supply overextends, buyers (both direct customers and distributors like Gamepass, Humble, etc.) gain the market, so price and perceived value start to drop, then drop harder and harder as users have more content both available and already owned and more suppliers (devs) take thinner and thinner deals to get by, dropping the global value more.
So basically, stop making games people.
EDIT: the one thing I really think Rose dropped the ball on is saying that devs/pubs are pricing their games too low. The issue isn't that they are pricing the games too low, it's that the market for the type of game that would be sold for $10-20 is hyper saturated (basically anything non-prestige 2D).
Taking your 2D metroidvania game where competitors are charging $15 and pricing your game at $40? I don't know about that.
I think you can be interested on this post from the topic, about possible weakness of the model due to the seasonal effect of the chosen date:
I blame... VALVE, and their stupid monthly recap!
See what you did, Gabe? You cannot help it, you have to mess things up!
More seriously, I have seen many devs stop trying to sell their games, and mark them as free on their Steam store page.
I guess their sales were so low that they gave up on the idea of earning money.
For instance, today, yesterday, and the day before:
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I mean I've bought a 100 games this year already, and 4(four) of them are new releases, and I don't take Epic's freebies out of principle and unsubbed Gamepass after a month.
The other 100+ games I'm interested in went to my wishlist and will be bought over the next few years or not at all in favor of most next years new games.
If this isn't oversupply I don't know what is.
It's nonsense logic for a reddit circlejerk. You couldn't pre-order 90 percent of the "poached" EGS games, and if you did, you got them on Steam anyway. If anything, the EGS panic probably caused MORE pre-orders for the few games you could like Anno. The OP talks about "risks" but what risks did he actually have an opportunity to pursue?
If there's anything discouraged by EGS, it'd be things like using wishlists.
Full list below, including William Chyr with Manifold Garden:
If true, I would link that to the saturation of games. Why would I pre-order a game if I cannot even keep up with the pace of releases of awesome games?
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There's games from 2016 I haven't bought because I don't have the time - and I was super looking forward to their releases. It's basically RNG at this point.
My main problem is also that I don't have enough time to play games all the games that I would like to. I have a terrible backlog, filled with excellent games. And those games are competing with movies, books, series, music and comics also. There is simply no way to sustain so many developers.
I want to use this and ask if others have also started skipping wishlisting games even if they have an interest in a game. It's nothing against the games but I started to limit my gaming related digital clutter and having this huge list of games want to get to just adds to that when I can't even keep up with the games I already have.
You should make a post with all of these collated in it. I keep forgetting to watch them >.<
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