I hope you enjoyed the video, and that you're enjoying some great video games. These games have always been there, but we're getting more and more of them, and they deserve to be celebrated. If I spot any corrections in the comments, I'll edit this to reflect them! Oh, and liking the video is always appreciated, since I forgot to say that until the last minute of the video. May you live microtransaction free.
I have a request. Would you do a review on certain video game communities that cause games to die or lose buyers purely because of their "toxicity" or poor design from their customers. I'm talking about Elden Ring and a certain person from it's community that caused a game that they play tested which failed. The game that I'm referring to is lords of the fallen, and why did it fail when it supposedly was an improvement from Elden Ring and its multiplayer?
Make a niche game in 8 years or make a game in half that time but with mass appeal while selling 10 times more copies? Seems like a pretty damn obvious choice to me.
@@Relhio Well, if you look at the sales numbers of most games that cater to the oh so big modern audience, it's the "anomalies" that make the money. While stuff like Starfield, Outlaws, Concord, K. the Justice League... range between "complete disasters that the the studio closed" and very disappointing" While the "niche" games sell very good or even extremly well. Quite a lot changed in the gaming industry in the last 1-2 years. Gamers are waking up and are less and less inclined to buy "modern games". However, one thing is for sure, the most money you make with stuff like mobile games and ingame shops. That's still a sad reality.
They aren't anomalies, they're real games in a market full of products. They remind us of what AAA lost when they went full corporate. Hopefully the upcoming AAA crash will reset expectations and the entire industry gets back to making games instead of products!
Get this idea of a market crash out of your head. It will never happen. The industry is far too large and far too profitable for that to ever happen like it did in the 80s. And even if it did happen, the only ones it would affect would be small and mid size indie devs and publishers. Corporate games publishers like EA and Activision would easily weather the storm. Most publishers make their money from mobile games and consider console and PC games to be an afterthought.
Devs have bosses they must obey. Game companies(most) real clients are shareholders, not the consumers. Any company that trades in stock- all of then customers are closer to 'crops' like in farming, as the source of the goods and profit, and their job is delivering the juiciest yeld per crop to their actual clients. The real clients want more. Mobile games do more for less dont they? Lootboxes do crazy more right? Their job is making money
But if you don't use the right fertilizer, weather conditions, water regularly, etc. the crop will fail. If you don't make games that your consumers want the consumers will reject you and then what will you sell to your actual clients?
And, you know, the games make money. Kind of important to longevity that. I might not like 'em, but the Jimquisition put it well "It's not enough to be making money, it's about making ALL THE money."
@@olwiz that's a lame excuse and I hope consumer protection laws will eventually protect children from the predatory behaviors being foisted upon them. They should not be spending their money on digital goods being aggressively advertised to them. Those titles need to carry a higher ESRB rating if they contain the predatory whale centric microtransactions and retention (addiction) mechanics. Parents need to do better in educating/prohibiting the scams these kids are up against. Most popular games are milk machines and it should not be that way. The kids are addicted to being predated upon... exactly as designed. These game companies need to go back to making video game-ass video games. Their current practices are unacceptable and have been for a decade at this point...
the problem is that execs assume that the entire community of gamers collectively wants one thing at any given time, and thats just never the case. currently theyve convinced themselves that people want games to be easy, so every game holds your hand and its incredibly frustrating to people who want a challenge, so they gravitate towards the only games left that challenge you: souls likes which market themselves on being difficult
Turn-based fans were starved for so long that we won’t leave the buffet. I continue to cling onto XCOM 2, I don’t even put it on a plate, I took the whole steam tray back to my table.
It irritates me how many journalists and big game devs use the term Anomaly for these great games. When they say "Anomaly" they pretty much mean "Original idea for a game we hate that we wish didn't exist and would rather you buy our stuff and not ask us to raise the bar. Like with Ubisoft and Elden Ring or a few companies and Baldur's Gate. Remember back in the early 2000s up till when the PS4 was finishing its life cycle all the chugged out esoteric stuff we got? The PS2/Gamecube and sometimes the original Xbox was filled with rough diamonds and just all around experimental weird games that slowly became cult classics. Phantom Dust, Chibi Robo, Oz Over Zenith, the original Demon's Souls, Zill Ol, Magna Carta, Eternal Sonata, Baroque, etc. The stuff that barely, if ever, got media attention. What happened to that time of experimentation? You mainly only see it nowadays on Steam, but the saturation rate is too high. Also many miss that polish that some of those games would occasionally display, like in a good if not campy cutscene or surprising voice acting. I miss low and middle market experiments, the things that made the great franchises we have now.
All of the Armored Cores were like this. They were rough, but they were experimental and had a Sci-fi flavor entirely their own. I really love Armored Core 6, but it is far less experimental and interesting than the earlier games in the franchise. You can FEEL Fromsoft's Soulslike DNA in it, and you can't help but notice everything that got lost over the franchise's ten year hiatus. A less esoteric, and arguably less experimental one? The earlier Assassin's Creed games were love letters to human freedom and innovation, but they slowly became safe and synonymous with Ubisoft's game design ethos as they unified said ethos across all the games in their catalogue. Those games became the opposite of the values they espoused. I have a couple games in recent memory that have scratched this itch: Rapid, an action shooter that is being built by a guy here on YT (it's not out yet, but it looks like the experimental stuff I used to love playing), and Kenshi. I don't think Kenshi really needs an introduction; it's the right amount of rough edges, the right amount of ambition, and you can feel the passion and vision bleeding through every inch of it.
@@JLM-y5g I agree with you. The earlier Armored Cores were really rough gameplay wise till they fixed the camera/right stick issue in 3 or 4 I believe, but even then the purposeful clunkiness and brutal nature felt great with the setting and story. And yeah AC has tanked miserably. I know this may be a bit blasphemous to say, but I didn't enjoy 2, it's great but I didn't like it as much as 1 and 3. 1 had a mystique to it, an atmosphere surrounded by a mystery that permeated that game I loved. And 3 was just brilliant gameplay wise (after bug fixes) and had a pretty good story. Only thing I appreciate about the others after 3 were just being in that area in their given time period and just felt like "Far Cry with a new skin and no guns again...awesome." With other minute changes, but none that were very innovative and became really serialized later. I know Kenshi well, I want to love that game but I've played for hours and cannot remember or keep up with or understand its controls. I've watched video after video and I just cannot keep up with that game mentally hahaha. And thanks for the recommendation, I'll check out Rapid.
@@Locaneo The dev has some dev logs out on Rapid, his channel name is Lev Ornstein. My favorite AC to date is Silent Line. I just really found the idea by itself really evocative: "What is that?" "That's the 'Silent Line', those who venture past it do not return." "Cool, let's try to venture past it." "Did you NOT hear a word I just said?"
Felt like the golden age for gaming was between 1990 to 2000 somewhere. Than it started to go down hill, but the effects was not really seen untill like 2015. After that it has been a decade of slop.
I didn't know that making effort in game development instead of money laundering or selling the garbage with 9000+ "micro"transactions calls "the anomaly" nowadays
The real anomaly was how games got to this point where a good game is seen as the anomaly and not the other way around. We used to get so many good games all the time with mediocre games once in a while
And the mediocre games still had some measure of soul to them too it's the difference between ambition outstripping ability and just being more corporate content from the assembly line, the end result of both is mediocrity but they are still very different types of mediocrity.
Nothing abnormal - video games become big enough to evolve from hobby to a pure commerce. Big companies in the industry are not game making companies but money making companies. Stock holders are not interested in anything but quick profits.
@@tsorevitch2409 Even other profit based ventures usually took time for enshittification to occur with gaming it was practically overnight like the very instant it overtook films in total profits everything went to hell, that's still kind of an anomollay considering films and music took years if not decades for Mephistopheles to collect on their faustian bargains with corporatization. And despite being emprically superior to films gaming still can't get over it's damned inferiority complex to them, hence the whole oscarbait/movie game phenomenon which is still going and getting worse. Maybe other mediums go through something similar I know older generations always dismiss new hotness initially but I don't really recall new hotness ever letting it get to them like gaming has to the point of even after establishing itself and even surpassing it's predeccessors it still goes "notice me senpai" constantly, so that's another abnormality.
@@GodOfOrphans it took gaming industry 15-20 years to become the way it is now and its decent period for such change. The clusterduck :-) we see now started waaay back at ~2005.
@@tsorevitch2409 I know but that was still comparatively faster than previous media, TV was pretty corproate from the get go and it didn't start going to crap until the mid 00's, same with film, so why did gaming speedrun the cycle so quickly, twice even if you count the original gaming crash.
"Good games are an anomaly. Please don't try to normalize this. That's dangerous for our income l. Keep buying slop please. Let us tell you what to like or we generalize everyone as istophob." Journalist XYZ from SlopGaming
That’s why I’m so thankful games like Lies of P found an audience and it has been confirmed to be getting a DLC and a sequel. It’s a game that made me so happy, so emotional, and after I finished it it felt like how it feels after you eat a full hearty meal. I felt full, felt complete, and that’s why I love video games so much, that’s what indie games are giving me more of, same with double A.
I'm not a player of the Soulslike genre, but for the time I've played lies of P, it's very good and has a lot of affection from the devs responsible for the game.
@@WiillPlay Elden Ring got me into souls games, not really enough to finish, but Lies of P had me so engrossed I finished the game 6 times and got a platinum trophy. I see why some didn’t finish it, though I wish some would ever since all those nerfs came out.
@@squangleproductions1382 You're not missing much, truth be told. Elden Ring was just an absolute slog of a video game. I came away from it wondering "Why did I play this for this long?" I definitely think ER is the weakest Soulslike in Fromsoft's catalogue, and it's not even close.
@@squangleproductions1382 If you're up for a game that's only partially soulslike and for the rest its own thing, i can very warmly recommend Clash: Artifacts of Chaos. It's a game that did for me what you described: Leaving me full and complete, even amid the sadness that the story brought.
I bought a Playstation 5 because I heard armored core was coming back. This was the same year elden ring dropped, so I picked it up and was even more excited for AC6. Then along came lies of p, people said it was the best souls like, ER was the first of the genre since I got back into gaming so it only made sense that I pick it up after beating ER 7 times over. Oh man, the game is easily every bit as good as people said it was. I only wish more people played it and ac6
I dont need every game be the most amazing ever. Ok games are, well, ok. But shouldnt the developers be the ones WANTING to make the most amazing game ever?
The DEVELOPERS do want to make the best possible games they can. It's the COMPANIES that employ them that don't care, and the company has final say on what games get made and what games get trashed. The dev's have zero power over what games they make. They have to make what the company tells them, no matter what.
@jupitersnoot4915 That's not true at all. Look at Dustborn or concord. DEI infested from top to bottom, and no one cared about making a good game just pushing a narrative.
@@cirescythe if old af CEO says to the Devs known for good singleplayer campaigns to make a multiplayer life-service they have have to obey. Those Tweets you mention are parts of the process of Duel
For real. Two of the best games I've played were "Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons", and "No Way Out". There's been plenty of other cheap little games. That were much more entertaining. Than most of the big blockbusters
What i miss most is games having cheat codes built in. Starting up a playthrough with big head mode was so stupid and great. Now you have to buy the cheat codes or hack them into the game yourself.
Even Grand Strategy Games are starting to make the console more tedious to get to. I remember in old Paradox games, you just needed to press one button to get the console command at any time and you could then remove it just as easily but in their latest games, to access the console you need to purposefully set the game to Debug mode in the launcher and it's honestly visually disgusting whilst playing to have all of this extra text all over the place due to being forced to play in Debug Strategy games is one of the last bastions of the old ways when it comes to cheats and even there it's starting to get taken away and I don't get it, if I want to make silly things with the console, why slowly start to take it away from me ? You already can't access it in Multi-player and using it disables achievements so I really don't get it
@@sephikong8323 Spot on. You just take choices away from players, choices that ONLY benefits player and hurt nobody. If somebody wants to get more stuff at the start in stuff like Civ or Stellaris or whatever - who cares? Let him do it.
I loved the big head cheat code in I-Ninja, since the protagonist's head is already big to begin with. I also like the cheat code that replaces your wrench with a double-bladed lightsaber in Ratchet in Clank: Up Your Arsenal, mostly because it looked cool.
I think one of the big problems around video games influence, public perception and marketing nowadays s game journalism. Game journalists have never, throughout their history, been perfect, sure. From their inception they have had plenty of bias, corruption and inexperience. But in the last years we have reached a new point where the journalists have actually become hostile to gaming. Promoting anti-consumer games and ideas, shielding game companies from criticism and painting a villifying and ungrateful image of the people who play games. In my mind, this is important because still to this day, game critics are of big influence on what games people choose to play as well as the public perception of gaming.
i did not like how the industry reacted to those games, instead of the devs/publishers taking them as a wake up call they just doubled down on their bullshit, called them anomalies and admitted that they will continue trying to push their slop down our throats and oh boy, dont u dare complain! Tbh I'll continue playing those great games, I'd rather replay Elden ring for the 10th time than the newest cod or whatever open world ubisoft released in the past year.
The way the Pokémon company reacted to Palworld is one that made me disappointed, so far. It should be yet another wakeup call for them, along with the many fan games that have mechanics that the fans want in the main games or worse want back, but the Pokemon company seems to just ignore it all.
Thank you for the small games "just quietly existing and finding their fanbase are all stepping stones" thing. Really meant a lot. I've been trying to make a game for years at this point, failing over and over and restarting so many times for so many reasons. One of my dreams is to be able to make games I can be proud of, that are fun and artistic and engaging. Thanks for the boost of motivation! 😅
I think large publishers should have "concept" shows. Where they reveal concept art, and/or vertical slices, and/or cinematics for ideas they have... and do a show with the rough drafts of concepts so they can judge public response and have a better idea of which ideas to pursue. Something like this was never needed until now. They've gotten so out of touch, tgat if they want to make any money, they need to run it by us first.
I feel like even if they Did and got genuinely good feedback and criticism. It only takes one exec that would just Veto and say "We know what gamers want" and completely waste all the effort.
They don't care anymore. They are only trying to insert agendas these days like movies. And also the live service crap so they have the control of the game in their servers you paid for and can ban you whenever they want (If you don't follow their ideology disguised as their policies) or remove the game altogether and you won't have access to it anymore. "You will own nothing and be happy"
I'm perfectly fine to play only "anomalies", since i only have time to play roughly one NEW game per 12-24 months. The rest of the time i'm busy replaying my favorite "anomalies" from the last 2 decades of gaming history.
When you play a game, it's apparent within the first hour whether the game had heart and soul poured into it with passion and the intent to share art, and when it was heartlessly manufactured to make money and nickel and dime people.
I'm a certified gacha addict, so yes, these are anomalies. I have played Wukong, Stellar Blade, Lies of P, and currently Shin Megami Tensei 4, and all of these were able to break me out from my gacha sphere. The experience of playing a complete game is wonderful, and the satisfaction you get from beating it is refreshing. I still like HSR and Nikke, but the constant updates and the far off end get exhausting. This is also why I fully support Wukong, Lies of P, and Stellar Blade because successful console games from those regions will push for even more games like them. Also, major props to Shift Up for taking the risk to make Stellar Blade without microtransactions really won my respect for them as game developers.
Im not gonna lie, i also used to be an gacha player, but ive gotten tired of that type of game and now i barely ever play those games anymore (still have them installed bcuz i might wanna play em someday).
Point number 5 really resonates with me as a fighting game fan. Hearing some of the discourse around SF6 talking about how “there’s not enough incentive to play” and “sparse updates” really touched a nerve of mine. Since when do you need to get some battle pass points or other useless virtual item to incentivize playing the game? I play SF6 a lot because I like the game and playing the game is fun. Getting better is really fun and it is the core reason as to why I keep coming back. I feel a bit sad when I see people talking about games as if they need to be rewarded or “get something out of it” because I really dislike that sort of treadmill “carrot on a stick” design. The game should be fun enough on its own. If you get tired of the game, that’s fine. I take breaks from fighting games all the time. It’s ok to leave a game and do something else. You should play a game because you want to, not because of FOMO or battle pas rewards. This still applies to games where collecting stuff is part of the game (RPGs). The problem isn’t that getting rewarded is bad, the problem is when getting rewarded is the only “good” part of the experience. Am I excited when I get a cool new weapon in BG3? Of course. But I also enjoyed the process of working towards that reward and, the most important part, it’s clear that the reward is meant to *reward* good play and not to *keep the player on a treadmill*. I think intent matters a lot. Battle pass rewards are just soulless incentives to keep grinding a game, even if you get tired of it. Real rewards in a game should symbolize a real accomplishment for a player and encourage them to engage with the game in fun and/or interesting ways.
Have you heard of Microsoft Reward Quests? (or something like that?) You have kids logging into their xbox and playing 1 game, then turning it off, just to keep a streak up and earn rewards for playing. They are addicted to making pennies. Addiction mechanisms are baked RIGHT INTO THE XBOX CONSOLE. And I have no idea why more people do not have a problem w that. Xbox console should be rated M for mature. The retention (addiction) mechanics are unacceptable to put in a product as they currently exist. (that's been going on since Xbone and still exists today...)
To be fair the sparse updates comment could be about balancing. Before the first EVO they basically did no balancing after the first month or two after launch. Ken ruled with an iron fist (no tekken here, lol)
I agree with 99%, but... "GTA 6 couldn't make it's money with just base sales" Yes it could, ABSOLUTELY. Wukong is already at a BILLION dollars, in a month. GTA 6 will outsell Wukong 10x. It's going to be the biggest game of all time, and could make INSANE profit without a single Microtransaction. But it just wouldn't make ALL the money, and all they want.
And actually GTA 6 can make it's money continually unlike 98% of other games because GTA is STILL consistently in the top sellers eleven YEARS later. If GTA is 75% as good as V(or hopefully better) it's going to continually sell for another decade, and I absolutely think it'll crush GTA Vs sales in every metric.
@@addidaswguyyea kinda. Thing with gaming is, that they take forever to make and need to be the focus of hundreds of people. And other than other products, they do not make a single cent for the entirety of the production cycle. So basically you dont pay for gta 6. You pay for gta 6, for the next RDR and gta 7 and the alterations to the game engines AND for a potential failure. Its a huge gamble.
@@cirescythe ehh, Not with GTA, not anymore. Unless they fail and deliver a trash product. But yeah in general, but if a game costs 300 million, and it makes 600 million, it's profitable and that should be enough for gaming companies. I think game companies being publicly traded is the worst thing they ever happened to gaming. Because instead of just needing to be a great company with great games and being profitable, a LOT of these companies are pushing to make the next quarter be more profitable than the last by ANY means, even if it ruins the company perception, or is awful for the customer, or is just scummy.
@@addidaswguyyes i agree. Dont get me wrong. Just saying that with videogames you cant think in the lines of "ok this game cost 200mill and earned 300mill so 100mill pure profits". Its more like costs 200mill, earns 300, so thats 100 towards the next project in hopes that that one is profitable as well. Thats the reason so many HAVE to sell their soul to the likes of blackrock. If game 1 makes 100 mill profit, thats not 100 mill plus. Its 200 mill minus towards making game 2. Thats when devs turn to investors.
You're making the mistake thinking that Rockstar would just be satisfied with making a game that *only* makes bank. They want a game that prints money.
Stellar Blade is the most pleasantly surprised I've ever been with a game, after playing the demo before release it captured me instantly and quickly became one of my favourite games ever
All i know is we need a really good ninja/kunoichi game with awesome stealth mechanics and a lot of gore, and a good looking kunoichi like Eve from Stellar Blade
or microtransactions should affect a game's ESRB rating, or there needs to be a requirement to be able to completely disable the cosmetics component of games by parental lock. These kids are addicted to wasting their money due to the predatory nature of many of the top gaming companies. Something needs to change, and parents really need to do better. But CHILDREN should not be heavily advertised to and coerced into spending money on MTX, and the addiction mechanics they face are not acceptable at all, ESPECIALLY when many grown adults cannot even handle them responsibly. These companies practices are predatory. I wish we had a govt that would stop that, and I hate the government, but we are headed to a bad place... These kids' addiction to buying digital goods really scares me. The new generation doesn't know the value of a hard good, and hasn't experienced the value of their digital goods being taken away or fading into nothing yet. IMO, Children should not be subjected these predatory monetization models. Also, Gaming as a whole would be in a much better place if microtransactions were completely removed from the space. Just my two cents.
Souls like games stellar blade, black myth wukong are successful due to it being single player games. These are korean, chinese developers....because they understand gamers. They dont focus on trying to milk gamers with BS.
Anything by Mihoyo, all manner of gacha games and First Descendant are all exactly that. Japan, Korea and China are just as guilty if not moreso of those horrible practices.
The thing i notice is that you only get this oassion from nerds. Fromsoft and Lareon for example are full of nerds, and we love how that made those games amazing.
Your channel is underrated. I appreciate your calm character/voice, analysations, content and opinion on gaming. Whish you the best to reach even more viewers
I found your channel through your “gaming is healing” video this morning so I listened to it on my way to work. Then I see this as I’m leaving. Perfect timing
Why do we never lump Nintendo into any of these conversations? So many good and fun switch games, BOTW and TOTK were a great time, Metroid Dread was fun, odyssey was addicting as hell as Luigi’s Mansion 3. Echoes of wisdom right now I’m enjoying a lot!
Found your channel a few days ago and I absolutely love the format, and your voice is very soothing as well! Looking forward to watching all your old stuff and your future videos as well
In the beginning VideoGames created the Cloud and the Web. And the Middleground was without form, and void, and disconnect was upon the face of the meat. And the spirit of gaming moved upon the face of the moist. And VideoGames said, Hello World: and there writ literature. And VideoGames saw the graphics, that it was good: and VideoGames divided the Graphics from the Text.... "I form the graphics, and create text: I make ping, and create pong: I the VideoGames do all these things."
@@MMc9081 It's a really well written play on the start of Genesis from The Bible. Pretty sure that's the classic 'King James Version'. So: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Then the final quote line might be from another version, or somewhere else in the text. (It's The Bible, there's a lot of text there.) It's sure phrased like a declarative statement you'd hear from The Lord, that's for sure.
My standard has not changed from 15 years ago. These games are not "anomalies" they are the standard and people who buy bad games lower that standard for themselves and the devs. Calling good games "anomalies" or even "one off games" is people trying to keep that low standard that devs believe is okay.
Some years back Andrew Wilson of EA said " there has been a fundamental change in the marketplace" as his justification to try to make all of EA's games live service multiplayer and it backfired spectacularly with Starwars Battlefront 2 .The fans revolted and EA had to back down, When Respawn came on the scene with Vince Zampella he was given control of his own studio and EA apparently voluntarily limited their control over him so he had more freedom to do as he wanted .Likely a lesson Zampella learned from Bobby Kotick firing him and his partner from Activision several years ago. So EA backed off and Wilson learned his ability to force multiplayers on the fans and it be successful was limited. With the collapse of Concord and Sony's problems I suspect we will see a lot fewer multiplayer live service games. I don't know if you buy into the culture war but I believe it exists. A lot of games are tanking because of the counter politics between conservatives /traditionalists on one side and liberal activists on the other and so we see a lot of games fail/are failing/or will fail because of this war. Add to that some of the activists are trying to cancel their online critics. Get them deplatformed/ banned from youtube for example and that just exacerbates things/ramps up the controversies and ill feeling. Now we come to the "give the fans what they want" not what your studio wants as part of an agenda. Not what an outside consultancy says you as a developer should do. Not what the investors want. A game that is well made that gives what the fans want sells.
Those are some crucial points you listed to keep in mind. I need them written down and reference them when I decide on whether I really want to play a game.
I really love how game developers who haven't made a Space Marine 2 or a Stellar Blade, or people who really like the ball sweat of those developers get super mad whenever these high quality games get praised. It happened with elden ring and that's what started me off noticing that the live service microtransaction battle pass season pass hell is addictive and draining my sanity when I'm supposed to be relaxing and having fun.
One that I think almost fits into the 'anomaly' category is Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. There was actually very few bugs on release. Mainly one of the classes being op if I recall correctly. It did get 4 dlcs, plus a new class. All within the first two months of release. (They were bad, especially for the price, except for the new class) and did not receive further updates. It's far from a perfect game, and the flaws are hard to miss, but it feels good to play.
@@sketchywest1176 I will forever wait for a remaster. I wouldn't be mad if they added a difficulty slider though. Keep everything else the same but give me that slider. Also maybe a way to win the tournament through some outrageous grinding.
Amen to that! To be honest i havent noticed this emerging positive trend the way you presented it, i saw it more as a divide between publicly traded big video game companies, and indie studios. I saw them as separate markets for different people. I like your explanation more, i hope you are right about the industry. I really like the things you have to say, i long awaited for a channel like this. Im glad i found it.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to call certain games anomalies, in the sense that no other company should even try to duplicate it because there is no way they can iterate the game better than it’s original creator. No one can make a From game like From. No one can make a Larian game like Larian. Parts of each game could be taken and used to great effect in a new game, but absolutely no one should be trying to be the next Elden Ring or next Baldur’s Gate 3. Sometimes a concept is iterated to its maximum value and those are the anomalies. A game or a game genre iterated to be so overwhelmingly good at what it does that it should not be emulated by anyone but the originator.
my favorite game since 2020 is Scarlet Nexus and that was Bamco's seat warmer before Tales of Alright came out a few months later (totally not salty about that nope)
Reminded of my 2 favorite games, Re4 & Gears of War 1. Both are feature rich, complete, cool, experimental for their time, and kept me coming back for DAYS.
SMT V and Unicorn Overlord. My favorite series (a series where friends eventually kill each other) and VanillaWare, my favorite developer, I'd play anything from those guys.
As somebody who plays 0 multiplayer, I do understand the focus on multiplayer games. Sure games like Elden Ring and Wukong are extremely praised and have great sales, but they also take a very long cycle of development and investment of money to create. Compare that to Diablo Immortal, which has minimal development and monetary investment and considered a bad game, it still managed to rake in $100M. Another example would be Titanfall 2, regarded as having one of the best single player experiences. If they had put more effort into developing that campaign to make it longer, it still probably would've flopped against Call of Duty and Battlefield. Unless you're shitting the bed like Concord, multi-player is the logical path
Fighting games by design need to be "live", but since they lack any leveling or gearing mechanic, and since their stories are by nature incomplete, they simply avoid all this crap. Tekken 8, Granblue Rising or SF6 can offer you all the battle passes of the world, and none of them will give you fomo. At most they will irk you a bit. Any new character DLC is guaranteed to change the game big time, yet you don't have to buy them if you don't want to play that specific char. You'll fight against them anyway. Any other type DLC can be totally ignored, because it will not change the game at all. Go play fighting games, they let you level up yourself, for a change. Great stuff.
I tried playing fighting games, and even after tons of practice, I still just can't wrap my mind around combos. I can pull off some very basic ones, but anything beyond that and I look like an untrained monkey slapping buttons on the controller just hoping the thing I want to do actually works. I will fully admit that Smash Bros. has totally sabotaged my ability to play complex fighters, although I can still admire them from a distance.
One thing that fighting games doing DLC characters need to make universal is allowing people to lab against them. Not play them vs people, just work with them in practice/training/name it mode so they can do the whole 'get gud' loop. This will increase engagement because it means people who won't buy the character still provide matches to those who do. (and via practical exposure, may change their mind.)
Love this video your on point with everything! Your one of my new favorite video game news channels. I now check with you Yongyea and Bellular to get all my news cause you guys tell it how it is! Keep up the great work please!
Great video.. I subscribed to your channel because I agree with your assessments. I really also appreciate a RUclipsr that has smart commentary about gaming that doesn’t feel like it’s necessary to have to cuss every 25 seconds to get their point across. Thanks for that!!
29:22 These days hearing the mainstream gaming press say I should hate a game is my indication that it might be something to try. Especially when it's a predominantly single player game.
Man I saw your reference the other day on Pentiment. It was on sale and I bought it... The game is great. I true adventure in the spirit of a lost era of video gaming. The proof that you can create a fantastic adventure game without spending millions uppon millions.... Thank you.
Youve been growing fast, every vid you drop your subs have gone up by like 1k. Really hope you make it bigger and bigger its been nice watching this channel grow. I think i started around a year ago with the lies of p review when you were still in the 10k range. Best of luck
I hope LD does a reaction to this video, or asmongold. The more people that see this the better, s tier man. Im so glad im subbed to this channel. I hope we can really start getting back to this type of content, it's not about the rage bait of either side: it's about the love of gaming. If the "sides" want to tear eachother apart that's whatever, I just wanna be with all the normal people when the dust settles
Well, your videos started to pop up on recommendations, jfyk. I believe that’s because I’ve started to watch more essays on gaming topic. So I believe you are getting your momentum now! Keep going! I’m sure you get your silver button really soon. And thanks for this particular essay. I’m not a big comment poster, but when you said that getting 50k subs will be a while, I’ve decided to send this note. Good luck!
Good points in that video.I really agree with you that gaming is slowly healing. Gamers are increasingly realizing they have the power in the end and had it, in fact, all along. It's just that some actors made their best to make them forget that simple fact.
Unfortunately man i remember playing mario galaxy as a kid and i loved it like you said games were so much simpler back then i hope we can go back to that.
Nice video dude, I enjoy your thoughtful stuff. Problem with videogame industry summed up: modern (late-stage capitalism) corporate culture. The industry grew so big that it attracted people who only care about money, not the product or what it means. The big studios are now run by these people, they only exist to squeeze more out of the employees and maximize short term profit for shareholders, green line must go up. It takes small to medium size studios who are vision driven to create the good games. Sven Vincke from Larian (BG3), dude took a loan on his house at some point to keep making fantasy RPGs when things weren't going so well. It's so amazing to get to see people like this succeed.
late stage capitalism you say is really corporatism also known as fascism(the merger of corporate and government powers)......capitalism is the best form of government ever created by people since it allows for upward mobility unlike communism that has no upward mobility only peasants and oligarchs...companies have just gotten so big they have unbelievable power and its broken capitalism apart and given us fascism....I just wish more people could see it and understand it so it could be fixed(our rulers wouldnt want it fixed though since they profit off it)
@@timsmith5014 The irony about people who complain about "muh late stage capitalism" is that they don't realize the only reason it exists is because capitalism combined with the liberal principles and warrior cultures of the West is such a good system that people become decadent and complacent with how good their lives have become as a result. People forget the reasons traditional principles exist and begin to abandon them, giving rise to socially destructive degeneracy. Basically, capitalism is so good God had to nerf it. Yes, it's true that infinite expansion is impossible. But that's not at all what capitalism expects. It expects recessions, wars, and population crises to cull our expansion and force us to start anew. That's why war is inevitable and utopia is impossible. As for these game companies, their unsustainable practices are fueled by deep state funding through BlackRock and other massive investment companies with a massive revolving door with tons of feds involved. Without them - hell, even with them, it's inevitable that the free market will correct itself. It's already happening as we speak even as the feds do their artificial funding. With the other industries it's most often the lobbying (which as you mention is the merger of government and corporate power). If not for lobbying, market forces would keep their greed in check. I'd argue the separation of market and state is more important than that of church and state.
@@McCaroni_Sup It's not a nerf, it's a natural cycle of boom and bust on a civilizational level. That said, your spot on. Physics always wins, no matter how long you maintain the dam, eventually it wears down or a flood happens that breaks through. Messing with that cycle instead of trying to keep it's most wild bounds from going runaway chain reaction was the hubristic mistake of governments and 'private interests' who think they can defy physics and causality with enough determination and money.
@@timsmith5014 It seems we agree, just use different words? I'm not anti free-market, I actually agree with it when working as it should, allows me to support a game company like Larian or Neowiz by buying their game. It's just that capitalism alone, unchecked, tends to lead to accumulation of said capital to few hands. End result being robber barons or megacorps in essentially monopoly positions. Same trend started happening in gaming industry early 2000's when there really started to be money in the business, big companies bought and ate lot of smaller ones, and we ended up with way less diversity. Capitalism works for people doing the work only if the nasty side of it is blunted with social policy. No unchecked growth, less incentive to only squeeze money from stock price etc.
@@Sorain1 I say it's a "nerf" in the sense that if it wasn't for the limiting factor of human nature and the fact that we're stuck with the relatively limited resources on Earth, capitalism would have ushered in a utopia. But because those limiting factors exist (the nerf) utopia remains impossible. And frankly I think it will always be impossible. I fully agree with your assessment that it's a cycle of nature, though. That was exactly my point. Humans playing God never ends well.
When a game has no agenda, but characters in it are diverse, when a game has no stupid monetization because it is sold at full price, when developers actually make good gameplay that is pleasant and interesting to master - all this is truly an anomaly. The gar\bage that "Modern developers" release today, for the "modern audience" deserves only two thing - a refund and oblivion.
Why do gamers never stop finding a way to complain about “woke” games that don’t exist? Why are conservatives so cringe? So many questions will be left unanswered.
@@rotisseueryubro. Did you read some actual tweets of developers? There are plenty openly stating that they are woke and have an agenda. Literally. Not even vailed. Word by word.
If these games are “anomalies”, they are anomalies by choice. This isn’t like the 360/ps3 days where hardware limitations stopped games from reaching their max potential. The developers complaining about how much content baldurs gate 3 had is a huge self report. They CHOOSE to not have as much content or quality because otherwise they’d just be rocking the boat for everyone else doing the exact same thing, lord forbid anyone makes a game that raises the standard and sets expectations for every other developer. If gamers as a community stopped financially supporting these low quality half baked incomplete games maybe we’d get back to getting the quality AND quantity we got back in the day like with mk9, bo2, halo reach etc
Balatro and Vampire survivors are THE smash hits of this and last year ... Single person or very small team developers, hundreds of thousands of copies (if not millions) sold, highly acclaimed and influencial on their genre AND an entertainment value of fractions of a cent per hour
I agree with your statement and opinions here except that GTA 6 won't make profit off of initial sales. I think it will because if GTA 5 did it in 2015 with 40 million units at $60 and a smaller starting base. GTA 6 will overshoot those numbers now, with a larger starting base and a higher price tag (hopefully just $70, not that they need to raise the price). Great videos so far. I'm glad I was fed your channel via the algorithm.
Reason 5 is a fascinatingly simple concept: "The Means IS The End." The act itself is the reward for the act being taken. That's what 'play' ultimately means if you strip away everything not universal from the concept. Do thing because it is Fun, because you wish to have fun, and doing thing is fun, 20 go to 10. A good gameplay loop doesn't need anything else around it. We build more around it for things that enhance enjoyment. 30 seconds of Halo shooting is good shooting, everything else was built around that loop and it showed. The entire 4x genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.) is ultimately enormously simple, yet look at how much feeds into and go's around that in Stellaris or Sins of a Solar Empire 1/2.
I downloaded a [redacted] specifically to play Unicorn Overlord. The formula needs some refinement (Like a bigger boards for more Units in one Squad) but that game is still the most fun I had with an Fire Emblem-Esque since Symphony of War, which you should totally play if you like those kind of games.
Astro's Playroom, a free game that came with the PS5, gave us a good game and DLC that was free. The DLC let you take the characters you unlocked to the new game.
Had a pretty long post written here, only for my computer to just shut off in the middle of writing it...I guess that's a sign my posts on youtube are always too long for the average user but man, never had that happen before. Really kills my motivation to discuss everything I wanted to. :/ At least I'll say this was an interesting watch and had given a lot of food for thought, anyway. Suppose one major one to bring up would be Deadly Premonition and its sequel. Not my favorite game ever but pretty special. I have to wonder how many people were introduced to the first one in what ways, but for me, as soon as I saw Matt and Pat play it, when they first see the squirrel that makes the monkey sounds, I think that's when I was sold on trying it for myself. Not a big horror fan, and the section this game oddly starts out with is kind of a drag, but it's definitely a game that gives back the more you put in. Have played many versions of it now, and I really feel like you'd be missing out if you only do what you absolutely have to, because while it's sold as horror, I feel you can really tell time was spent on it more as a sort of puzzle adventure sim and that the super jank silent hill sections were added later on in development at the behest of publishers. In stark contrast, and i'll preface this by saying I still very much enjoy the sequel, it is simply a far smaller experience with much less of the gameplay elements I found so fascinating about the first game. More focus was put on enemies and stats and some weird sort of almost MMO-like quest design, even though it has no online elements or really a reason to keep you playing for its much shorter runtime. I don't think these choices were necessarily made in the same vein as live service slop, but they are just simply baffling to me. Perhaps the budget just didn't allow for most sidequests to be as engaging (there are still a handful that are more character driven at least) or perhaps they tried to find a solution to complaints that some quests were simply too obtuse in the first game, but I really miss having more detailed npc schedules or going into their homes and whatnot. Even then, it makes even less sense when they add days of the week just to manage very few elements that seem almost inconsequential, or how there's an easy place you can get out of bounds and see much of an outside world that you will never see during normal gameplay - where most other devs simply don't design anything past their worlds' borders. Many of these are smaller nitpicks for me, even as I imagine how much better the game could have been, because I feel like Swery and his team are still very earnest and that they probably simply faced a lot of difficulties or they would have fleshed things out to where they are at least more understandable. Just something that comes with the territory of mostly being a fan of underdog developers outside of Nintendo.
Whenever a game is released with a "Season pass" I always wait at least until there's a bundle for the original price of the "base" game. Why would I pay for an incomplete product just to maybe play a bit earlier? 🤔
Wasn't expecting the rumbleverse reference. That game was honestly spectacular. It's so unfair to me that Fortnite can consistently log 1 million players a day and we couldn't get a couple thousand to play rumbleverse. It was such a fresh, innovative and fun game .
You know, I remember couple years back when we first heard the phrase "vote with your wallet" in video game context. And oh boy, the harvest sure is looking ripe
There is this thing. Many big companies became arrogant, greedy, ego filled and complacent so they arent even tryign anymore and would rather boast graphics and other high budget nonsense than making a game taht is entertaining. But while some titans are falling, there are others rising. I just find some of the controversies genuinely ludicrous and for me it feelslike some people are so full of cynicism and seeing the bad things in life, that they cant accept a game that is genuienly good made and cling onto any flaw to bring the mood down.
One thing not alot of people think about is what a good game is to the consumer vs what a good game is to a big company, consumers want enjoyable games, big companies want to make good profits, some choose to makes good games that sell alot of copies because its a enjoyable while others make bad to decent games loaded with dlcs and microtransactions.
I hope you enjoyed the video, and that you're enjoying some great video games. These games have always been there, but we're getting more and more of them, and they deserve to be celebrated. If I spot any corrections in the comments, I'll edit this to reflect them! Oh, and liking the video is always appreciated, since I forgot to say that until the last minute of the video. May you live microtransaction free.
I think about Death By Degrees almost daily.
Remnant 2 seems to always get the shaft, it deserves way more attention, it belongs in the list with Lies of P, Space Marines etc.
@@wterry2801 the reason you don't hear of Remnant 2 is because the people who know of it are busy..... praying Remnant 2
I have a request. Would you do a review on certain video game communities that cause games to die or lose buyers purely because of their "toxicity" or poor design from their customers.
I'm talking about Elden Ring and a certain person from it's community that caused a game that they play tested which failed. The game that I'm referring to is lords of the fallen, and why did it fail when it supposedly was an improvement from Elden Ring and its multiplayer?
+ Remanant II, Armored Core 6
Anomaly = the game devs actually cared and wanted to make a good game beyond just making money
Which is actually the best way to make money 😂
Make a niche game in 8 years or make a game in half that time but with mass appeal while selling 10 times more copies? Seems like a pretty damn obvious choice to me.
In regards to AA and AAA games, it's more likely the publisher making that call than the developer.
Oh they definitely want that money, the difference is the approach. They correctly identified that the better the game, the more money they'd make.
@@Relhio Well, if you look at the sales numbers of most games that cater to the oh so big modern audience, it's the "anomalies" that make the money.
While stuff like Starfield, Outlaws, Concord, K. the Justice League... range between "complete disasters that the the studio closed" and very disappointing"
While the "niche" games sell very good or even extremly well.
Quite a lot changed in the gaming industry in the last 1-2 years.
Gamers are waking up and are less and less inclined to buy "modern games".
However, one thing is for sure, the most money you make with stuff like mobile games and ingame shops.
That's still a sad reality.
They aren't anomalies, they're real games in a market full of products. They remind us of what AAA lost when they went full corporate. Hopefully the upcoming AAA crash will reset expectations and the entire industry gets back to making games instead of products!
Perfect description
Get this idea of a market crash out of your head. It will never happen. The industry is far too large and far too profitable for that to ever happen like it did in the 80s. And even if it did happen, the only ones it would affect would be small and mid size indie devs and publishers. Corporate games publishers like EA and Activision would easily weather the storm. Most publishers make their money from mobile games and consider console and PC games to be an afterthought.
You just explained exactly what makes them an “anomaly,” but I understand your message😅
Did you just not watch the video and decided to comment?
@@qu1253Yeah man. And the banks were "too big to fail" too.
"You don't understand, it's so hard for us to make good games even though everyone is telling us what to do and when we do it the games are good."
Or you could not listen to less than 5% of your buyers with their outlandish expectations and just make a generic game that will sell anyway.
Devs have bosses they must obey. Game companies(most) real clients are shareholders, not the consumers. Any company that trades in stock- all of then customers are closer to 'crops' like in farming, as the source of the goods and profit, and their job is delivering the juiciest yeld per crop to their actual clients.
The real clients want more. Mobile games do more for less dont they? Lootboxes do crazy more right?
Their job is making money
But if you don't use the right fertilizer, weather conditions, water regularly, etc. the crop will fail.
If you don't make games that your consumers want the consumers will reject you and then what will you sell to your actual clients?
And, you know, the games make money. Kind of important to longevity that. I might not like 'em, but the Jimquisition put it well "It's not enough to be making money, it's about making ALL THE money."
@@olwiz that's a lame excuse and I hope consumer protection laws will eventually protect children from the predatory behaviors being foisted upon them. They should not be spending their money on digital goods being aggressively advertised to them. Those titles need to carry a higher ESRB rating if they contain the predatory whale centric microtransactions and retention (addiction) mechanics. Parents need to do better in educating/prohibiting the scams these kids are up against. Most popular games are milk machines and it should not be that way. The kids are addicted to being predated upon... exactly as designed.
These game companies need to go back to making video game-ass video games. Their current practices are unacceptable and have been for a decade at this point...
It's funny. Ppl said hard games and turned based games are out dated yet they are winning awards and selling like hotcakes.
I mean, If those niche games are the only ones left with great quality, scope and staying ture to what works it really isn't much of a surprise
@@guntere1004Millions of units sold isn't exactly "niche" haha
the problem is that execs assume that the entire community of gamers collectively wants one thing at any given time, and thats just never the case. currently theyve convinced themselves that people want games to be easy, so every game holds your hand and its incredibly frustrating to people who want a challenge, so they gravitate towards the only games left that challenge you: souls likes which market themselves on being difficult
Turn-based fans were starved for so long that we won’t leave the buffet. I continue to cling onto XCOM 2, I don’t even put it on a plate, I took the whole steam tray back to my table.
@@AuUntaris fuckin love that game
It irritates me how many journalists and big game devs use the term Anomaly for these great games. When they say "Anomaly" they pretty much mean "Original idea for a game we hate that we wish didn't exist and would rather you buy our stuff and not ask us to raise the bar. Like with Ubisoft and Elden Ring or a few companies and Baldur's Gate.
Remember back in the early 2000s up till when the PS4 was finishing its life cycle all the chugged out esoteric stuff we got? The PS2/Gamecube and sometimes the original Xbox was filled with rough diamonds and just all around experimental weird games that slowly became cult classics. Phantom Dust, Chibi Robo, Oz Over Zenith, the original Demon's Souls, Zill Ol, Magna Carta, Eternal Sonata, Baroque, etc. The stuff that barely, if ever, got media attention. What happened to that time of experimentation? You mainly only see it nowadays on Steam, but the saturation rate is too high. Also many miss that polish that some of those games would occasionally display, like in a good if not campy cutscene or surprising voice acting.
I miss low and middle market experiments, the things that made the great franchises we have now.
All of the Armored Cores were like this. They were rough, but they were experimental and had a Sci-fi flavor entirely their own. I really love Armored Core 6, but it is far less experimental and interesting than the earlier games in the franchise. You can FEEL Fromsoft's Soulslike DNA in it, and you can't help but notice everything that got lost over the franchise's ten year hiatus.
A less esoteric, and arguably less experimental one? The earlier Assassin's Creed games were love letters to human freedom and innovation, but they slowly became safe and synonymous with Ubisoft's game design ethos as they unified said ethos across all the games in their catalogue. Those games became the opposite of the values they espoused.
I have a couple games in recent memory that have scratched this itch: Rapid, an action shooter that is being built by a guy here on YT (it's not out yet, but it looks like the experimental stuff I used to love playing), and Kenshi. I don't think Kenshi really needs an introduction; it's the right amount of rough edges, the right amount of ambition, and you can feel the passion and vision bleeding through every inch of it.
@@JLM-y5g I agree with you. The earlier Armored Cores were really rough gameplay wise till they fixed the camera/right stick issue in 3 or 4 I believe, but even then the purposeful clunkiness and brutal nature felt great with the setting and story.
And yeah AC has tanked miserably. I know this may be a bit blasphemous to say, but I didn't enjoy 2, it's great but I didn't like it as much as 1 and 3. 1 had a mystique to it, an atmosphere surrounded by a mystery that permeated that game I loved. And 3 was just brilliant gameplay wise (after bug fixes) and had a pretty good story. Only thing I appreciate about the others after 3 were just being in that area in their given time period and just felt like "Far Cry with a new skin and no guns again...awesome." With other minute changes, but none that were very innovative and became really serialized later.
I know Kenshi well, I want to love that game but I've played for hours and cannot remember or keep up with or understand its controls. I've watched video after video and I just cannot keep up with that game mentally hahaha. And thanks for the recommendation, I'll check out Rapid.
@@Locaneo The dev has some dev logs out on Rapid, his channel name is Lev Ornstein.
My favorite AC to date is Silent Line. I just really found the idea by itself really evocative:
"What is that?"
"That's the 'Silent Line', those who venture past it do not return."
"Cool, let's try to venture past it."
"Did you NOT hear a word I just said?"
Journalists are cucks. Their opinions never mattered.
Felt like the golden age for gaming was between 1990 to 2000 somewhere. Than it started to go down hill, but the effects was not really seen untill like 2015. After that it has been a decade of slop.
I didn't know that making effort in game development instead of money laundering or selling the garbage with 9000+ "micro"transactions calls "the anomaly" nowadays
In my mind, money laundering is the definitive answer to "How do these $100m+ movie/game failures keep getting made?"
The real anomaly was how games got to this point where a good game is seen as the anomaly and not the other way around. We used to get so many good games all the time with mediocre games once in a while
And the mediocre games still had some measure of soul to them too it's the difference between ambition outstripping ability and just being more corporate content from the assembly line, the end result of both is mediocrity but they are still very different types of mediocrity.
Nothing abnormal - video games become big enough to evolve from hobby to a pure commerce.
Big companies in the industry are not game making companies but money making companies. Stock holders are not interested in anything but quick profits.
@@tsorevitch2409 Even other profit based ventures usually took time for enshittification to occur with gaming it was practically overnight like the very instant it overtook films in total profits everything went to hell, that's still kind of an anomollay considering films and music took years if not decades for Mephistopheles to collect on their faustian bargains with corporatization. And despite being emprically superior to films gaming still can't get over it's damned inferiority complex to them, hence the whole oscarbait/movie game phenomenon which is still going and getting worse. Maybe other mediums go through something similar I know older generations always dismiss new hotness initially but I don't really recall new hotness ever letting it get to them like gaming has to the point of even after establishing itself and even surpassing it's predeccessors it still goes "notice me senpai" constantly, so that's another abnormality.
@@GodOfOrphans it took gaming industry 15-20 years to become the way it is now and its decent period for such change.
The clusterduck :-) we see now started waaay back at ~2005.
@@tsorevitch2409 I know but that was still comparatively faster than previous media, TV was pretty corproate from the get go and it didn't start going to crap until the mid 00's, same with film, so why did gaming speedrun the cycle so quickly, twice even if you count the original gaming crash.
"Good games are an anomaly. Please don't try to normalize this. That's dangerous for our income l. Keep buying slop please. Let us tell you what to like or we generalize everyone as istophob." Journalist XYZ from SlopGaming
"Quit having standards, because having any at all would mean you stop buying our nonsense!"
@@a_lost_one consume product then move on to next product........or we will call you a racist POS
Time for a game "Anomaly" be a right of Passage for Game Devs
That’s why I’m so thankful games like Lies of P found an audience and it has been confirmed to be getting a DLC and a sequel. It’s a game that made me so happy, so emotional, and after I finished it it felt like how it feels after you eat a full hearty meal. I felt full, felt complete, and that’s why I love video games so much, that’s what indie games are giving me more of, same with double A.
I'm not a player of the Soulslike genre, but for the time I've played lies of P, it's very good and has a lot of affection from the devs responsible for the game.
@@WiillPlay Elden Ring got me into souls games, not really enough to finish, but Lies of P had me so engrossed I finished the game 6 times and got a platinum trophy. I see why some didn’t finish it, though I wish some would ever since all those nerfs came out.
@@squangleproductions1382 You're not missing much, truth be told. Elden Ring was just an absolute slog of a video game. I came away from it wondering "Why did I play this for this long?"
I definitely think ER is the weakest Soulslike in Fromsoft's catalogue, and it's not even close.
@@squangleproductions1382 If you're up for a game that's only partially soulslike and for the rest its own thing, i can very warmly recommend Clash: Artifacts of Chaos. It's a game that did for me what you described: Leaving me full and complete, even amid the sadness that the story brought.
I bought a Playstation 5 because I heard armored core was coming back. This was the same year elden ring dropped, so I picked it up and was even more excited for AC6. Then along came lies of p, people said it was the best souls like, ER was the first of the genre since I got back into gaming so it only made sense that I pick it up after beating ER 7 times over. Oh man, the game is easily every bit as good as people said it was. I only wish more people played it and ac6
I dont need every game be the most amazing ever. Ok games are, well, ok. But shouldnt the developers be the ones WANTING to make the most amazing game ever?
The DEVELOPERS do want to make the best possible games they can. It's the COMPANIES that employ them that don't care, and the company has final say on what games get made and what games get trashed.
The dev's have zero power over what games they make. They have to make what the company tells them, no matter what.
@jupitersnoot4915 That's not true at all. Look at Dustborn or concord. DEI infested from top to bottom, and no one cared about making a good game just pushing a narrative.
@@jupitersnoot4915 not true unfortunately. Just read some tweets of developers of many of the recent failures.
@@cirescythe if old af CEO says to the Devs known for good singleplayer campaigns to make a multiplayer life-service they have have to obey.
Those Tweets you mention are parts of the process of Duel
For real. Two of the best games I've played were "Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons", and "No Way Out".
There's been plenty of other cheap little games. That were much more entertaining. Than most of the big blockbusters
What i miss most is games having cheat codes built in. Starting up a playthrough with big head mode was so stupid and great. Now you have to buy the cheat codes or hack them into the game yourself.
Even Grand Strategy Games are starting to make the console more tedious to get to.
I remember in old Paradox games, you just needed to press one button to get the console command at any time and you could then remove it just as easily but in their latest games, to access the console you need to purposefully set the game to Debug mode in the launcher and it's honestly visually disgusting whilst playing to have all of this extra text all over the place due to being forced to play in Debug
Strategy games is one of the last bastions of the old ways when it comes to cheats and even there it's starting to get taken away and I don't get it, if I want to make silly things with the console, why slowly start to take it away from me ? You already can't access it in Multi-player and using it disables achievements so I really don't get it
@@sephikong8323 Spot on.
You just take choices away from players, choices that ONLY benefits player and hurt nobody.
If somebody wants to get more stuff at the start in stuff like Civ or Stellaris or whatever - who cares? Let him do it.
I loved the big head cheat code in I-Ninja, since the protagonist's head is already big to begin with. I also like the cheat code that replaces your wrench with a double-bladed lightsaber in Ratchet in Clank: Up Your Arsenal, mostly because it looked cool.
I think one of the big problems around video games influence, public perception and marketing nowadays s game journalism. Game journalists have never, throughout their history, been perfect, sure. From their inception they have had plenty of bias, corruption and inexperience.
But in the last years we have reached a new point where the journalists have actually become hostile to gaming. Promoting anti-consumer games and ideas, shielding game companies from criticism and painting a villifying and ungrateful image of the people who play games.
In my mind, this is important because still to this day, game critics are of big influence on what games people choose to play as well as the public perception of gaming.
Sign me up for some "Video Game Ass" video games.
fellow gameranx enjoyer spotted
i did not like how the industry reacted to those games, instead of the devs/publishers taking them as a wake up call they just doubled down on their bullshit, called them anomalies and admitted that they will continue trying to push their slop down our throats and oh boy, dont u dare complain! Tbh I'll continue playing those great games, I'd rather replay Elden ring for the 10th time than the newest cod or whatever open world ubisoft released in the past year.
Sad but true
The way the Pokémon company reacted to Palworld is one that made me disappointed, so far.
It should be yet another wakeup call for them, along with the many fan games that have mechanics that the fans want in the main games or worse want back, but the Pokemon company seems to just ignore it all.
Thank you for the small games "just quietly existing and finding their fanbase are all stepping stones" thing. Really meant a lot.
I've been trying to make a game for years at this point, failing over and over and restarting so many times for so many reasons. One of my dreams is to be able to make games I can be proud of, that are fun and artistic and engaging.
Thanks for the boost of motivation! 😅
The fact that they’re all games based on older formats makes it amazing to see “old” audiences do 100x the numbers.
I think large publishers should have "concept" shows. Where they reveal concept art, and/or vertical slices, and/or cinematics for ideas they have... and do a show with the rough drafts of concepts so they can judge public response and have a better idea of which ideas to pursue. Something like this was never needed until now. They've gotten so out of touch, tgat if they want to make any money, they need to run it by us first.
They used to have that. 'Member E3?
@@dassemultor6940 i thought E3 just showcased cames that were currently in development?
I feel like even if they Did and got genuinely good feedback and criticism. It only takes one exec that would just Veto and say "We know what gamers want" and completely waste all the effort.
@@robberyproductions1363 While this is true, right now there is no one trying at those companies.
They don't care anymore. They are only trying to insert agendas these days like movies. And also the live service crap so they have the control of the game in their servers you paid for and can ban you whenever they want (If you don't follow their ideology disguised as their policies) or remove the game altogether and you won't have access to it anymore. "You will own nothing and be happy"
I'm perfectly fine to play only "anomalies", since i only have time to play roughly one NEW game per 12-24 months. The rest of the time i'm busy replaying my favorite "anomalies" from the last 2 decades of gaming history.
When you play a game, it's apparent within the first hour whether the game had heart and soul poured into it with passion and the intent to share art, and when it was heartlessly manufactured to make money and nickel and dime people.
Wukong is better than I expected and I was hyped for it for the 4 years since it was announced. Absolutely beautiful and epic storytelling
I'm a certified gacha addict, so yes, these are anomalies. I have played Wukong, Stellar Blade, Lies of P, and currently Shin Megami Tensei 4, and all of these were able to break me out from my gacha sphere. The experience of playing a complete game is wonderful, and the satisfaction you get from beating it is refreshing. I still like HSR and Nikke, but the constant updates and the far off end get exhausting. This is also why I fully support Wukong, Lies of P, and Stellar Blade because successful console games from those regions will push for even more games like them. Also, major props to Shift Up for taking the risk to make Stellar Blade without microtransactions really won my respect for them as game developers.
Im not gonna lie, i also used to be an gacha player, but ive gotten tired of that type of game and now i barely ever play those games anymore (still have them installed bcuz i might wanna play em someday).
Gacha is just a different type of gaming altogether. I don't even group it in my mind with regular gaming.
Point number 5 really resonates with me as a fighting game fan. Hearing some of the discourse around SF6 talking about how “there’s not enough incentive to play” and “sparse updates” really touched a nerve of mine. Since when do you need to get some battle pass points or other useless virtual item to incentivize playing the game? I play SF6 a lot because I like the game and playing the game is fun. Getting better is really fun and it is the core reason as to why I keep coming back. I feel a bit sad when I see people talking about games as if they need to be rewarded or “get something out of it” because I really dislike that sort of treadmill “carrot on a stick” design. The game should be fun enough on its own. If you get tired of the game, that’s fine. I take breaks from fighting games all the time. It’s ok to leave a game and do something else. You should play a game because you want to, not because of FOMO or battle pas rewards.
This still applies to games where collecting stuff is part of the game (RPGs). The problem isn’t that getting rewarded is bad, the problem is when getting rewarded is the only “good” part of the experience. Am I excited when I get a cool new weapon in BG3? Of course. But I also enjoyed the process of working towards that reward and, the most important part, it’s clear that the reward is meant to *reward* good play and not to *keep the player on a treadmill*. I think intent matters a lot. Battle pass rewards are just soulless incentives to keep grinding a game, even if you get tired of it. Real rewards in a game should symbolize a real accomplishment for a player and encourage them to engage with the game in fun and/or interesting ways.
Have you heard of Microsoft Reward Quests? (or something like that?) You have kids logging into their xbox and playing 1 game, then turning it off, just to keep a streak up and earn rewards for playing. They are addicted to making pennies. Addiction mechanisms are baked RIGHT INTO THE XBOX CONSOLE. And I have no idea why more people do not have a problem w that. Xbox console should be rated M for mature. The retention (addiction) mechanics are unacceptable to put in a product as they currently exist. (that's been going on since Xbone and still exists today...)
To be fair the sparse updates comment could be about balancing. Before the first EVO they basically did no balancing after the first month or two after launch. Ken ruled with an iron fist (no tekken here, lol)
Nah, unfortunately some of the games I like weren't very successful like Klonoa or Starfy. They're still series with great games, nonetheless.
I love Klonoa!
@@Rietto, ditto. I can't get enough of the masterpieces that are within the main duology.
I agree with 99%, but...
"GTA 6 couldn't make it's money with just base sales"
Yes it could, ABSOLUTELY. Wukong is already at a BILLION dollars, in a month. GTA 6 will outsell Wukong 10x. It's going to be the biggest game of all time, and could make INSANE profit without a single Microtransaction. But it just wouldn't make ALL the money, and all they want.
And actually GTA 6 can make it's money continually unlike 98% of other games because GTA is STILL consistently in the top sellers eleven YEARS later. If GTA is 75% as good as V(or hopefully better) it's going to continually sell for another decade, and I absolutely think it'll crush GTA Vs sales in every metric.
@@addidaswguyyea kinda. Thing with gaming is, that they take forever to make and need to be the focus of hundreds of people. And other than other products, they do not make a single cent for the entirety of the production cycle. So basically you dont pay for gta 6. You pay for gta 6, for the next RDR and gta 7 and the alterations to the game engines AND for a potential failure.
Its a huge gamble.
@@cirescythe ehh, Not with GTA, not anymore. Unless they fail and deliver a trash product. But yeah in general, but if a game costs 300 million, and it makes 600 million, it's profitable and that should be enough for gaming companies. I think game companies being publicly traded is the worst thing they ever happened to gaming. Because instead of just needing to be a great company with great games and being profitable, a LOT of these companies are pushing to make the next quarter be more profitable than the last by ANY means, even if it ruins the company perception, or is awful for the customer, or is just scummy.
@@addidaswguyyes i agree. Dont get me wrong. Just saying that with videogames you cant think in the lines of "ok this game cost 200mill and earned 300mill so 100mill pure profits". Its more like costs 200mill, earns 300, so thats 100 towards the next project in hopes that that one is profitable as well.
Thats the reason so many HAVE to sell their soul to the likes of blackrock.
If game 1 makes 100 mill profit, thats not 100 mill plus. Its 200 mill minus towards making game 2. Thats when devs turn to investors.
You're making the mistake thinking that Rockstar would just be satisfied with making a game that *only* makes bank. They want a game that prints money.
Stellar Blade is the most pleasantly surprised I've ever been with a game, after playing the demo before release it captured me instantly and quickly became one of my favourite games ever
Exceptional good games were always anomalies in the history of videogames.
This guy is becoming one of my favorites. Thoughtful, honest, and intelligent. Looking forward to see you explode!
Im just now realizing how underrated this guys channel is, definitely deserves more views
"Phrasing!"
Indeed. Someone send Asmongold one of his videos. Pretty much the only way to get the spotlight.
But then he'll die
Dumbass clickbait tho
All i know is we need a really good ninja/kunoichi game with awesome stealth mechanics and a lot of gore, and a good looking kunoichi like Eve from Stellar Blade
So, another* Tenchu game basically?
*Good. Kind of an important qualifier.
@@Sorain1 Yes, basically that's it ;)
There needs to be a law:
_Only F2P games can have microtransactions_
or microtransactions should affect a game's ESRB rating, or there needs to be a requirement to be able to completely disable the cosmetics component of games by parental lock.
These kids are addicted to wasting their money due to the predatory nature of many of the top gaming companies. Something needs to change, and parents really need to do better.
But CHILDREN should not be heavily advertised to and coerced into spending money on MTX, and the addiction mechanics they face are not acceptable at all, ESPECIALLY when many grown adults cannot even handle them responsibly.
These companies practices are predatory. I wish we had a govt that would stop that, and I hate the government, but we are headed to a bad place... These kids' addiction to buying digital goods really scares me. The new generation doesn't know the value of a hard good, and hasn't experienced the value of their digital goods being taken away or fading into nothing yet. IMO, Children should not be subjected these predatory monetization models.
Also, Gaming as a whole would be in a much better place if microtransactions were completely removed from the space.
Just my two cents.
Souls like games stellar blade, black myth wukong are successful due to it being single player games. These are korean, chinese developers....because they understand gamers. They dont focus on trying to milk gamers with BS.
Space Marine 2 and BG3 devs aren't eastern tho
Genshin Impact and Black Desert Online would like to have a word with you sir.
@@onlymyself1234BG3 is gay
@@Carnefice and?
Anything by Mihoyo, all manner of gacha games and First Descendant are all exactly that. Japan, Korea and China are just as guilty if not moreso of those horrible practices.
The thing i notice is that you only get this oassion from nerds.
Fromsoft and Lareon for example are full of nerds, and we love how that made those games amazing.
Your channel is underrated. I appreciate your calm character/voice, analysations, content and opinion on gaming.
Whish you the best to reach even more viewers
I found your channel through your “gaming is healing” video this morning so I listened to it on my way to work. Then I see this as I’m leaving. Perfect timing
Why do we never lump Nintendo into any of these conversations? So many good and fun switch games, BOTW and TOTK were a great time, Metroid Dread was fun, odyssey was addicting as hell as Luigi’s Mansion 3. Echoes of wisdom right now I’m enjoying a lot!
Found your channel a few days ago and I absolutely love the format, and your voice is very soothing as well! Looking forward to watching all your old stuff and your future videos as well
Mug. I love your videos man. Your authenticity is what keeps me coming back. Keep up the great content, and you'll have over 100k subs in no time!
I really appreciate your perspective on games and the state of the industry, looking forward to seeing more from you!
In the beginning VideoGames created the Cloud and the Web. And the Middleground was without form, and void, and disconnect was upon the face of the meat. And the spirit of gaming moved upon the face of the moist. And VideoGames said, Hello World: and there writ literature. And VideoGames saw the graphics, that it was good: and VideoGames divided the Graphics from the Text.... "I form the graphics, and create text: I make ping, and create pong: I the VideoGames do all these things."
Ha, not sure if that is AI generated but it is interesting. It feels somehow familiar, what is it based on?
@@MMc9081 Sounds like something I'd read in a Metasploit banner ngl.
@@MMc9081 the bible, genesis specifically
@@MMc9081 It's a really well written play on the start of Genesis from The Bible. Pretty sure that's the classic 'King James Version'.
So:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Then the final quote line might be from another version, or somewhere else in the text. (It's The Bible, there's a lot of text there.) It's sure phrased like a declarative statement you'd hear from The Lord, that's for sure.
My standard has not changed from 15 years ago. These games are not "anomalies" they are the standard and people who buy bad games lower that standard for themselves and the devs. Calling good games "anomalies" or even "one off games" is people trying to keep that low standard that devs believe is okay.
Some years back Andrew Wilson of EA said " there has been a fundamental change in the marketplace" as his justification to try to make all of EA's games live service multiplayer and it backfired spectacularly with Starwars Battlefront 2 .The fans revolted and EA had to back down, When Respawn came on the scene with Vince Zampella he was given control of his own studio and EA apparently voluntarily limited their control over him so he had more freedom to do as he wanted .Likely a lesson Zampella learned from Bobby Kotick firing him and his partner from Activision several years ago. So EA backed off and Wilson learned his ability to force multiplayers on the fans and it be successful was limited.
With the collapse of Concord and Sony's problems I suspect we will see a lot fewer multiplayer live service games.
I don't know if you buy into the culture war but I believe it exists. A lot of games are tanking because of the counter politics between conservatives /traditionalists on one side and liberal activists on the other and so we see a lot of games fail/are failing/or will fail because of this war. Add to that some of the activists are trying to cancel their online critics. Get them deplatformed/ banned from youtube for example and that just exacerbates things/ramps up the controversies and ill feeling.
Now we come to the "give the fans what they want" not what your studio wants as part of an agenda. Not what an outside consultancy says you as a developer should do. Not what the investors want. A game that is well made that gives what the fans want sells.
Andrew Wilson is the only person I can think of that is evil on the outside AND the inside. Dude is a real-life James Bond villain. Just needs a scar.
youtube commenter uses the American Definition of Libe/ral part 474593759303761658
@@whentheyDbro is literally talking about America 💀
Black Myth Wukong and Stellar Blade being called anomalies by main stream journos.
Sonic Adventure 2: "First time?"
Those are some crucial points you listed to keep in mind. I need them written down and reference them when I decide on whether I really want to play a game.
I really love how game developers who haven't made a Space Marine 2 or a Stellar Blade, or people who really like the ball sweat of those developers get super mad whenever these high quality games get praised. It happened with elden ring and that's what started me off noticing that the live service microtransaction battle pass season pass hell is addictive and draining my sanity when I'm supposed to be relaxing and having fun.
One that I think almost fits into the 'anomaly' category is Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.
There was actually very few bugs on release.
Mainly one of the classes being op if I recall correctly.
It did get 4 dlcs, plus a new class. All within the first two months of release. (They were bad, especially for the price, except for the new class) and did not receive further updates.
It's far from a perfect game, and the flaws are hard to miss, but it feels good to play.
First game that really stuck with me is "The Legend of Dragoon" its old but i always find myself coming back to it.
Oh my god, someone else who knows about Legend of Dragoon.
No matter how few of us there are, we'll continue to remember what Sony has forgotten.
@@sketchywest1176 I will forever wait for a remaster. I wouldn't be mad if they added a difficulty slider though. Keep everything else the same but give me that slider. Also maybe a way to win the tournament through some outrageous grinding.
Amen to that!
To be honest i havent noticed this emerging positive trend the way you presented it, i saw it more as a divide between publicly traded big video game companies, and indie studios. I saw them as separate markets for different people. I like your explanation more, i hope you are right about the industry. I really like the things you have to say, i long awaited for a channel like this. Im glad i found it.
I love Warframe, Control, Remedy From The Ashes, Team Fortress 2, Alian Reactive drop, and Roger Company. So sad that half are dying :(
Your videos are so engaging dude. You inspire me to make longer form videos but I just can't yap for very long 😂 incredible stuff lately, keep it up
Really great video and it's a good recap on what's happening
And hey congrat for 40k! you're doing fantastic!
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to call certain games anomalies, in the sense that no other company should even try to duplicate it because there is no way they can iterate the game better than it’s original creator.
No one can make a From game like From. No one can make a Larian game like Larian. Parts of each game could be taken and used to great effect in a new game, but absolutely no one should be trying to be the next Elden Ring or next Baldur’s Gate 3.
Sometimes a concept is iterated to its maximum value and those are the anomalies. A game or a game genre iterated to be so overwhelmingly good at what it does that it should not be emulated by anyone but the originator.
my favorite game since 2020 is Scarlet Nexus and that was Bamco's seat warmer before Tales of Alright came out a few months later (totally not salty about that nope)
Reminded of my 2 favorite games, Re4 & Gears of War 1. Both are feature rich, complete, cool, experimental for their time, and kept me coming back for DAYS.
SMT V and Unicorn Overlord. My favorite series (a series where friends eventually kill each other) and VanillaWare, my favorite developer, I'd play anything from those guys.
Thanks for using Parasite Eve music, the first game was amazing and I had forgotten how much I missed it and its music.
As somebody who plays 0 multiplayer, I do understand the focus on multiplayer games. Sure games like Elden Ring and Wukong are extremely praised and have great sales, but they also take a very long cycle of development and investment of money to create. Compare that to Diablo Immortal, which has minimal development and monetary investment and considered a bad game, it still managed to rake in $100M. Another example would be Titanfall 2, regarded as having one of the best single player experiences. If they had put more effort into developing that campaign to make it longer, it still probably would've flopped against Call of Duty and Battlefield. Unless you're shitting the bed like Concord, multi-player is the logical path
Fighting games by design need to be "live", but since they lack any leveling or gearing mechanic, and since their stories are by nature incomplete, they simply avoid all this crap.
Tekken 8, Granblue Rising or SF6 can offer you all the battle passes of the world, and none of them will give you fomo. At most they will irk you a bit.
Any new character DLC is guaranteed to change the game big time, yet you don't have to buy them if you don't want to play that specific char. You'll fight against them anyway. Any other type DLC can be totally ignored, because it will not change the game at all.
Go play fighting games, they let you level up yourself, for a change. Great stuff.
I tried playing fighting games, and even after tons of practice, I still just can't wrap my mind around combos. I can pull off some very basic ones, but anything beyond that and I look like an untrained monkey slapping buttons on the controller just hoping the thing I want to do actually works. I will fully admit that Smash Bros. has totally sabotaged my ability to play complex fighters, although I can still admire them from a distance.
One thing that fighting games doing DLC characters need to make universal is allowing people to lab against them. Not play them vs people, just work with them in practice/training/name it mode so they can do the whole 'get gud' loop. This will increase engagement because it means people who won't buy the character still provide matches to those who do. (and via practical exposure, may change their mind.)
Pure class as usual, Mug. Gray is my favorite color - keep it up
Love this video your on point with everything! Your one of my new favorite video game news channels. I now check with you Yongyea and Bellular to get all my news cause you guys tell it how it is! Keep up the great work please!
YESSIR THAT WAS A PERFECT TRANSITION
Great video.. I subscribed to your channel because I agree with your assessments. I really also appreciate a RUclipsr that has smart commentary about gaming that doesn’t feel like it’s necessary to have to cuss every 25 seconds to get their point across. Thanks for that!!
Sunset overdrive my beloved I shall never see a sequel to you.
This was a dope and fascinating video to watch, keep up the great work! 💪😎
I really like listening to you talk. Even better, you know what the hell you're talking about. It's nice, respect.
29:22 These days hearing the mainstream gaming press say I should hate a game is my indication that it might be something to try. Especially when it's a predominantly single player game.
Great video. I wish we had more intelligent discussions about these topics in gaming lately.
Man I saw your reference the other day on Pentiment. It was on sale and I bought it... The game is great. I true adventure in the spirit of a lost era of video gaming. The proof that you can create a fantastic adventure game without spending millions uppon millions.... Thank you.
Youve been growing fast, every vid you drop your subs have gone up by like 1k. Really hope you make it bigger and bigger its been nice watching this channel grow. I think i started around a year ago with the lies of p review when you were still in the 10k range.
Best of luck
I hope LD does a reaction to this video, or asmongold. The more people that see this the better, s tier man. Im so glad im subbed to this channel. I hope we can really start getting back to this type of content, it's not about the rage bait of either side: it's about the love of gaming. If the "sides" want to tear eachother apart that's whatever, I just wanna be with all the normal people when the dust settles
I miss Urban Reign and Anarchy Reigns... I was so happy to see that Urban Reign clip.
Well, your videos started to pop up on recommendations, jfyk. I believe that’s because I’ve started to watch more essays on gaming topic. So I believe you are getting your momentum now! Keep going! I’m sure you get your silver button really soon.
And thanks for this particular essay. I’m not a big comment poster, but when you said that getting 50k subs will be a while, I’ve decided to send this note. Good luck!
Great video! Glad this popped up in my recommendations 😌
I have no idea why I love this channel so much.
maybe because hes so damn sexy...or maybe thats just me i dont know
Good points in that video.I really agree with you that gaming is slowly healing. Gamers are increasingly realizing they have the power in the end and had it, in fact, all along. It's just that some actors made their best to make them forget that simple fact.
"single player games is dead!"
Entire Yakuza series:
Subscribed as soon as you acknowledged unicorn overlord, i really really loved that game
Make it fun. Make your characters attractive. Thats literally enough.
You're on your way to getting that coveted silver plaque! Great videos and success is well deserved!
Unfortunately man i remember playing mario galaxy as a kid and i loved it like you said games were so much simpler back then i hope we can go back to that.
Nice video dude, I enjoy your thoughtful stuff.
Problem with videogame industry summed up: modern (late-stage capitalism) corporate culture. The industry grew so big that it attracted people who only care about money, not the product or what it means. The big studios are now run by these people, they only exist to squeeze more out of the employees and maximize short term profit for shareholders, green line must go up.
It takes small to medium size studios who are vision driven to create the good games. Sven Vincke from Larian (BG3), dude took a loan on his house at some point to keep making fantasy RPGs when things weren't going so well. It's so amazing to get to see people like this succeed.
late stage capitalism you say is really corporatism also known as fascism(the merger of corporate and government powers)......capitalism is the best form of government ever created by people since it allows for upward mobility unlike communism that has no upward mobility only peasants and oligarchs...companies have just gotten so big they have unbelievable power and its broken capitalism apart and given us fascism....I just wish more people could see it and understand it so it could be fixed(our rulers wouldnt want it fixed though since they profit off it)
@@timsmith5014 The irony about people who complain about "muh late stage capitalism" is that they don't realize the only reason it exists is because capitalism combined with the liberal principles and warrior cultures of the West is such a good system that people become decadent and complacent with how good their lives have become as a result. People forget the reasons traditional principles exist and begin to abandon them, giving rise to socially destructive degeneracy. Basically, capitalism is so good God had to nerf it.
Yes, it's true that infinite expansion is impossible. But that's not at all what capitalism expects. It expects recessions, wars, and population crises to cull our expansion and force us to start anew. That's why war is inevitable and utopia is impossible.
As for these game companies, their unsustainable practices are fueled by deep state funding through BlackRock and other massive investment companies with a massive revolving door with tons of feds involved. Without them - hell, even with them, it's inevitable that the free market will correct itself. It's already happening as we speak even as the feds do their artificial funding.
With the other industries it's most often the lobbying (which as you mention is the merger of government and corporate power). If not for lobbying, market forces would keep their greed in check. I'd argue the separation of market and state is more important than that of church and state.
@@McCaroni_Sup It's not a nerf, it's a natural cycle of boom and bust on a civilizational level. That said, your spot on. Physics always wins, no matter how long you maintain the dam, eventually it wears down or a flood happens that breaks through. Messing with that cycle instead of trying to keep it's most wild bounds from going runaway chain reaction was the hubristic mistake of governments and 'private interests' who think they can defy physics and causality with enough determination and money.
@@timsmith5014 It seems we agree, just use different words? I'm not anti free-market, I actually agree with it when working as it should, allows me to support a game company like Larian or Neowiz by buying their game. It's just that capitalism alone, unchecked, tends to lead to accumulation of said capital to few hands. End result being robber barons or megacorps in essentially monopoly positions. Same trend started happening in gaming industry early 2000's when there really started to be money in the business, big companies bought and ate lot of smaller ones, and we ended up with way less diversity.
Capitalism works for people doing the work only if the nasty side of it is blunted with social policy. No unchecked growth, less incentive to only squeeze money from stock price etc.
@@Sorain1 I say it's a "nerf" in the sense that if it wasn't for the limiting factor of human nature and the fact that we're stuck with the relatively limited resources on Earth, capitalism would have ushered in a utopia. But because those limiting factors exist (the nerf) utopia remains impossible. And frankly I think it will always be impossible.
I fully agree with your assessment that it's a cycle of nature, though. That was exactly my point. Humans playing God never ends well.
Love the video man, great work on it!
When a game has no agenda, but characters in it are diverse, when a game has no stupid monetization because it is sold at full price, when developers actually make good gameplay that is pleasant and interesting to master - all this is truly an anomaly. The gar\bage that "Modern developers" release today, for the "modern audience" deserves only two thing - a refund and oblivion.
Why’d you put a slash in the middle of Garbage?
Why do gamers never stop finding a way to complain about “woke” games that don’t exist? Why are conservatives so cringe? So many questions will be left unanswered.
@@rotisseueryubro. Did you read some actual tweets of developers? There are plenty openly stating that they are woke and have an agenda. Literally. Not even vailed. Word by word.
@@ExiletheJedi coz UT may just claim and delete comments with words like this. It happens many times with me.
@@rotisseueryu coz woke game and woke dev is a tr@sh imo
If these games are “anomalies”, they are anomalies by choice. This isn’t like the 360/ps3 days where hardware limitations stopped games from reaching their max potential. The developers complaining about how much content baldurs gate 3 had is a huge self report. They CHOOSE to not have as much content or quality because otherwise they’d just be rocking the boat for everyone else doing the exact same thing, lord forbid anyone makes a game that raises the standard and sets expectations for every other developer. If gamers as a community stopped financially supporting these low quality half baked incomplete games maybe we’d get back to getting the quality AND quantity we got back in the day like with mk9, bo2, halo reach etc
Balatro and Vampire survivors are THE smash hits of this and last year ... Single person or very small team developers, hundreds of thousands of copies (if not millions) sold, highly acclaimed and influencial on their genre AND an entertainment value of fractions of a cent per hour
I agree with your statement and opinions here except that GTA 6 won't make profit off of initial sales. I think it will because if GTA 5 did it in 2015 with 40 million units at $60 and a smaller starting base. GTA 6 will overshoot those numbers now, with a larger starting base and a higher price tag (hopefully just $70, not that they need to raise the price).
Great videos so far. I'm glad I was fed your channel via the algorithm.
Reason 5 is a fascinatingly simple concept: "The Means IS The End." The act itself is the reward for the act being taken. That's what 'play' ultimately means if you strip away everything not universal from the concept. Do thing because it is Fun, because you wish to have fun, and doing thing is fun, 20 go to 10. A good gameplay loop doesn't need anything else around it. We build more around it for things that enhance enjoyment. 30 seconds of Halo shooting is good shooting, everything else was built around that loop and it showed. The entire 4x genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.) is ultimately enormously simple, yet look at how much feeds into and go's around that in Stellaris or Sins of a Solar Empire 1/2.
I downloaded a [redacted] specifically to play Unicorn Overlord. The formula needs some refinement (Like a bigger boards for more Units in one Squad) but that game is still the most fun I had with an Fire Emblem-Esque since Symphony of War, which you should totally play if you like those kind of games.
Astro's Playroom, a free game that came with the PS5, gave us a good game and DLC that was free. The DLC let you take the characters you unlocked to the new game.
Unicorn Overlord....Its like someone looked into my brain and then made a game for it.
Had a pretty long post written here, only for my computer to just shut off in the middle of writing it...I guess that's a sign my posts on youtube are always too long for the average user but man, never had that happen before. Really kills my motivation to discuss everything I wanted to. :/ At least I'll say this was an interesting watch and had given a lot of food for thought, anyway.
Suppose one major one to bring up would be Deadly Premonition and its sequel. Not my favorite game ever but pretty special. I have to wonder how many people were introduced to the first one in what ways, but for me, as soon as I saw Matt and Pat play it, when they first see the squirrel that makes the monkey sounds, I think that's when I was sold on trying it for myself. Not a big horror fan, and the section this game oddly starts out with is kind of a drag, but it's definitely a game that gives back the more you put in. Have played many versions of it now, and I really feel like you'd be missing out if you only do what you absolutely have to, because while it's sold as horror, I feel you can really tell time was spent on it more as a sort of puzzle adventure sim and that the super jank silent hill sections were added later on in development at the behest of publishers.
In stark contrast, and i'll preface this by saying I still very much enjoy the sequel, it is simply a far smaller experience with much less of the gameplay elements I found so fascinating about the first game. More focus was put on enemies and stats and some weird sort of almost MMO-like quest design, even though it has no online elements or really a reason to keep you playing for its much shorter runtime. I don't think these choices were necessarily made in the same vein as live service slop, but they are just simply baffling to me. Perhaps the budget just didn't allow for most sidequests to be as engaging (there are still a handful that are more character driven at least) or perhaps they tried to find a solution to complaints that some quests were simply too obtuse in the first game, but I really miss having more detailed npc schedules or going into their homes and whatnot. Even then, it makes even less sense when they add days of the week just to manage very few elements that seem almost inconsequential, or how there's an easy place you can get out of bounds and see much of an outside world that you will never see during normal gameplay - where most other devs simply don't design anything past their worlds' borders. Many of these are smaller nitpicks for me, even as I imagine how much better the game could have been, because I feel like Swery and his team are still very earnest and that they probably simply faced a lot of difficulties or they would have fleshed things out to where they are at least more understandable. Just something that comes with the territory of mostly being a fan of underdog developers outside of Nintendo.
Its funny how badass games that would be considered normal ten years ago are now considered anomalies. So sad.
Whenever a game is released with a "Season pass" I always wait at least until there's a bundle for the original price of the "base" game. Why would I pay for an incomplete product just to maybe play a bit earlier? 🤔
No worries Mugthief. I was even surprised myself that i wasn`t yet subscribed (yes that was remedied immediately)
Wasn't expecting the rumbleverse reference. That game was honestly spectacular. It's so unfair to me that Fortnite can consistently log 1 million players a day and we couldn't get a couple thousand to play rumbleverse. It was such a fresh, innovative and fun game .
You know, I remember couple years back when we first heard the phrase "vote with your wallet" in video game context. And oh boy, the harvest sure is looking ripe
Well, i dunno. I love Yakuza/Like A Dragon series dearly, and it's never hit or miss, it's hit only. I love all of them
Number 5 is so important. I could play Halo Multiplayer forever, before Infinite.
There is this thing. Many big companies became arrogant, greedy, ego filled and complacent so they arent even tryign anymore and would rather boast graphics and other high budget nonsense than making a game taht is entertaining.
But while some titans are falling, there are others rising. I just find some of the controversies genuinely ludicrous and for me it feelslike some people are so full of cynicism and seeing the bad things in life, that they cant accept a game that is genuienly good made and cling onto any flaw to bring the mood down.
That Lies of P number is only going to increase once its dlc is finished especially with all the incredible concept art they've been showing
One thing not alot of people think about is what a good game is to the consumer vs what a good game is to a big company, consumers want enjoyable games, big companies want to make good profits, some choose to makes good games that sell alot of copies because its a enjoyable while others make bad to decent games loaded with dlcs and microtransactions.