Huge gaming studios churning out reskinned versions of the same franchises that have been running for a decade+ with no real original content? $70+. Indie gaming studio putting out original content? $25.
Arguably Team Cherry is much, much leaner/more efficient. They don’t have to pay starving managers and CEOs industry standard salaries so they can feed their families 😁
Once again the parasite class ruins things.
Arizona Tea is thinking about raising the price of their tea from $1 to $1.29 for the first time in 30+ years, but the fourth Call of Duty game to come out this year needs a 15% price hike.
Let that sink in.
Hollow Knight seems like mainstream game industry shit to me. Solid game, massive hype, lots of sales. And I wouldn’t even remember it in a couple months if not for other people.
It’s like how Shovel Knight is a really good platformer but then you play it and it’s… just a good platformer. An indie gem! But also, something you’ve played before.
You know what AAA companies didn’t do 20 years ago? Dwarf Fortress.
Shovel Knight is actually fantastic though. You have AAA industry vets failing to meet its standard. Hell, compare SK to Mighty No. 9. Even Megaman can’t make a megaman as good as that anymore. Plus it isn’t just Shovel Knight, it has the Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King of Cards sequels which are all genuinely great retro platformers.
No argument about DF though, and I still need to pick that up now that it has an actual UI.
What games do you find memorable, out of curiosity? (It’s likely this is a ‘you’ thing; HK and SK are very memorable to a lot of people, and certainly weren’t cookie cutter industry shit. Just curious what does float your boat, though, if not them.)
Not him but:
Risk of rain (returns) Hades 1/2 Nebulous fleet command Star sector Homeworld 1, cataclysm (emergence), 2 Battletech (!!!) Spaz 1 (not 2!) Mechwarrior 2 Mechwarrior 5 mercs/clans Terraria FTL Steamworld games (all) Cortex command (interesting pile of shit) Kerbal Etc… So much.
More or less mainstream games: Helldivers2 (!!!) Xcom (ufo: enemy unknown) Xcom Xcom 2 Civilisation Etc…
With Games, like with all art, it’s impossible to point to 1 or two which are the best. I’ve read many books, watched many films, series, plays, listened to music and played a lot of games… i can’t just pick one or two which where “the best”. I can name a bunch which where great though.
Are they still nerfing the fun out of Helldivers 2 every patch?
In Markdown, you should add two spaces at the end of the line, to break it into the next line.
Tell me you never properly played Hollow Knight without telling me you never properly played Hollow Knight ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
yaRrr the $70 games
High budget triple A vs indie. Lets not pretend these games are targeting the same audience. There’s always been a division between small games with small dev teams and small budgets and triple A (whatever that may mean). Once you see the line, you can’t really compare the two anymore. I agree that the lines are sometimes blurred (what even is indie? what is AA? what is AAA?) but I think its clear Silksong was never going to be marketed next to Monster Hunter. A fair(er) comparison would be Hades 2 and the price difference is non longer so extreme.
Or… you know… we can add Vampire Survivors to the mix…I don’t care about Hollow Knight or Terraria or Blasphemous. I am not interested in souls-likes, platformers, or metroidvanias.
How I feel since last few years.
OK, that’s a valid opinion and your personal taste. People should not judge that or think it weird, but it’s nothing special either…
I mean, frankly, I agree with you … but there are tons of other games in other genres of style and gameplay…that are also under $70 bucks, at or close to that $20 mark, that are pretty damn good.
They may not be as meteorically popular as Silksong…
But the point of the OP image is that… you do not in fact need a AAA production budget and AAA ‘graphics quality’ and MTX and FOMO and alo that garbage… to be able to have a successful game.
That you can in fact have a more modest yet also more focused approach, and create a break-out hit.
The point here is not ‘Silksong popular!’
The point is ‘Silksong proves that AAA development paradigms and business practices are ludicrously wasteful and not mandatory; there will always be other ways to be a successful game creator.’
Ok?
Is that not a relevant thing to say?
Not OP, so I don’t necessarily feel this way about skong, but have you ever had your feed filled with discussion of something that you just don’t care about? And then you go talk to your friends and they’re also talking about it? Then you talk to a relative and they’re asking you what all the fuss is about? All while you give 0 shits about it?
I’ve been there, and it’s easy to just get plain annoyed at the subject coming up, even if innocuously. It’s the real life equivalent of squidward tuning into boxing because it’s not about cardboard boxes, only to be greeted with 2 cardboard boxes going at it.
And if you’re somehow in doubt that skong has satuarated discussion everywhere
There’s a difference between what you’re saying, and intentionally visiting threads about a thing you supposedly care so little about that you have to announce it for everyone.
Freedom of Speech depicts a scene of a 1942 Arlington town meeting in which Jim Edgerton, the lone dissenter to the town selectmen’s announced plans to build a new school, as the old one had burned down,[9] was accorded the floor as a matter of protocol.[10] Edgerton supported the rebuilding process but was concerned about the tax burden of the proposal, as his family farm had been ravaged by disease.[11] A memory of this scene struck Rockwell as an excellent fit for illustrating “freedom of speech”, and inspired him to use his Vermont neighbors as models for the entire Four Freedoms series.[12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)
For anyone curious about the source of OP’s image.
May I suggest Satisfactory or perhaps Plan B: Terraform?
You’re not alone. But we can’t deny that there is a market for them. And if you’re honest with us and yourself I’m sure you have an exception. Mine is Remnant. Loved From the Ashes and I put in a lot of time in the second one as well.
But have you played Ori and the Blind Forest?
No
You should try it. If a jaw-dropping, tear-jerking masterpiece like that can’t pull you in then you are revenant and your soul has already left you.
I agree, I think they’re overhyped, low budget kiddie games. Like if I got charged more than $30 for silksong, I’d feel ripped off.
EA releasing the same game each year for like $80
But the players have new haircuts!
🤡🤡🤡
Don’t feed the ragebaiters/trolls LOL
(Good rage bait though, if intended as such :p)
What a dreadful take.
We have thousands of games that cost even less. You should stop behaving like that Silksong’s price is somehow outstanding.
It’s not that the price in and of itself is outstanding, it’s that it’s one of if not the most anticipated game of the decade and they could easily have charged twice that and still sold millions of copies, but they chose not to. They doubtless would have made more money if they’d came in at a higher price point, but rather than putting profit above all else, they elected to make their game affordable.
Is it uncommon for people to make games for fun, not to get as much money as possible?
Why would they even need more money?
If nothing else, to sustain themselves. The more they profit off one game, the longer they can develop their next project without worrying.
Say one of them has an idea for an awesome 3D Soulslike, but they’d have to triple their team size to make it in a reasonable time frame. They could afford that with more money.
It’s not uncommon for people to make games for fun and to not get as much money as possible from them. It’s less common for companies and studios to not try to get as much money as possible from games, even less common for them to make games purely for fun.
Because generating fun doesn’t pay bills.
Its a really small company
Not wanting to make as much money as possible doesnt mean not wanting to make money at all
one of if not the most anticipated game of the decade
That’s one of, if not the biggest, exaggerations of the decade.
It was literally the most wishlisted game on Steam, beating out all of the AAA titles. And it’s been being hyped for 7 years. If that doesn’t make it one of the most anticipated games of the decade, I’m really not sure what metrics you’re looking for for that statistic.
Hyped for 7 years with basically no action or advertising from the devs, too. They didn’t need to stoke the hype at all.
Hm. Ok. These numbers are rather unexpected for me. It looks like you’re right.
It crashed all major gaming store fronts for several minutes. No other game this decade has done that, and theoretically it should get harder each day as systems scale to handle more traffic. The fact that it wasn’t just one store or half of them is incredible to me and shows how anticipated this game was.
Minutes? Damn near 2.5 hours for me on Steam, and I was seriously trying lol
Because it couldn’t be preordered. Surge capacity’s always lower than sustained.
It’s one of the very few games ive been anticipating.
Isn’t silksong an indie game not an AAA game developed by hundreds of people? The 20€ pricetag for few people team seems very fitting, nothing special.
I think the reason the corporations are mad is because the £20 game is better than their £100 game. If too many people realise that you can buy good games at lower prices they will stop buying piles of shit for £100.
Well, of course smaller studios can charge less for their product in order to make a profit. Their expenditures has to be a lot less, and hence they need to make less money to make a profit.
Large studios could make smaller games. Fund 10 games for the price of 1 big one. Expect at least one or two to be absolute gangbusters.
That might not quite be true. You can’t have 1000 people make Hollow Knight overnight. It’s like the old adage of 9 mothers making a baby in one month.
The closest thing would be to split the studio internally into 10 small teams, and have them each make a game over a long period of time; maybe that’s what you were implying.
Well, yeah, that’s how you do it. No reason to have one AAA sized team for ten small games.
I don’t think a flood of low effort games is the solution you think it is…
The latest Call of Duty game, Blacks Ops 6, is estimated to have a budget between $450,000,000 and $700,000,000. 1/10th of that budget ($45M to $70M) is still more than the entire development budget for The Witcher 3 at $35,000,000. The only thing they would likely need to cut back on is their marketing budget of $35,000,000.
You could probably make a hell of a lot of AAA games for the same price as GTA 6.
It’s what indie games already are. Following Sturgeon’s law, 90% of indie games are garbage. We venerate the 10% that aren’t.
This is an interesting point. With the decline in AAA game quality over the past… 5 (?) years, i wonder what percentage of them are garbage vs not. Because IMO, I’ve seen very very few that even twinkle, let alone shine, and i love blockbusters (though 2025 is shaping up wonderfully)
I have to assume that also, it’s a game that is definitely not for everyone, and the price reflects that. If I only got as far as I have in 5 hours and decided to give up, I’d have been sore about $40. As it is I’m going to spend a lot more time with it and I’m already happy with how much entertainment I’ve got for my money.
This is me too. I took a bit longer than expected to get back into the flow of HK (sequels amirite?), but once I did… I’m obsessed lol
I can’t understand these complaints, honestly. It’s not like games are some kind of vital necessity. What’s more, I’d say they are luxury goods. So, either you pay for them or just pirate them (or ignore them altogether). Complaining makes no sense.
Exactly. The alternative to most companies setting prices dictated by what they can get away with charging is some kind of state involvement in setting prices, or even in production - you can imagine that in a communist state, there might be a government-run game studio, for example, and it would put out games at a certain price point calculated to be acceptable to the government’s goals and ideals.
I think this could actually work just fine, and think it’d be a great way to solve the problem of copyright. But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves: the government isn’t going to take vast amounts of money it could allocate to healthcare, transport, etc and allocate it to non-essential entertainment like video games. Look at government expenditure on the arts nowadays. So there would be fewer video games coming out in that system, and fewer opportunities for a Hollow Knight to come out of it all.
Given the current administration, bold of you to assume that they would spend a penny more than the absolute, bare minimum on healthcare, transport, etc
Hopefully it’s obvious that when I talk about a communist state or other state initiating huge state-run enterprises like game studios, the current US adminstration is not of much interest.
Not to mention it’s a smaller game. And people will point to that it took 6 Years to make. It really shouldn’t have taken 6 years to make it. What were they doing, working one guy to death on it?
Well considering only 4 people work on the game, and one of them only does the music, probably, yeah.
In my experience, most people who complain about the length of time it took to develop something like a game have no experience in relevant fields and don’t understand how long it really takes to do the bare minimum for even a 30 hour game experience, much less to make it a quality experience.
I could hammer out a “game” with dozens of hours of “content” in a week that perhaps a single digit number of people will buy before immediately requesting a refund. Making something good is what takes time. It involves a lot of steps of going back, seeing what works and what doesn’t, revising, and reiterating.
Breath of the Wild by comparison also took about 6 years to make with a team of 300 people. Silksong apparently was developed by a team of 3. While I doubt they were living the high life the entire 6 years, I also have doubts they were working each other like slaves. Therefore I believe they were likely working at a more normal pace for game development, and it simply takes that long to make a quality experience.
There are 4, already wealthy guys, doing it as a passion product.
So to be clear, you think every dev should give up their payday?
Why? How do you come to such conclusion?
They could easily push the price and accumulate even more wealth and peeps would still buy it.
in the gaming industry (doesn’t apply to indie games) devs get paid regularly before any game releases, and they maybe get a nice bonus if the game does well. and from then on all profits go to the production company, the devs see nothing of the millions the game they created makes
You’re just describing employment in pretty much any industry, not just gaming. Employees trade the insecurity of potential revenue down the line for a guaranteed fixed payout in advance.
I make software for pharmaceutical machines, my labour alone has literally enabled billions of revenue over the past decade, I’m not seeing any of that either.
Yeah but then after they make all those billys they go on to bribe the government to make everyone’s life worse, and for what? More greed.
Team Cherry is four people and they knew for a fact they were guaranteed to sell millions of copies.
Most games have teams orders of magnitud larger and can’t guarantee how well they’ll sell.
If Expedition 33, which is from a mid-sized studio and punching above its weight for how few people they have, had set its price on a per-developer basis to match Silksong, it would have cost 200 bucks. Baldur’s Gate 3 would have been 2500.
This is a bad take.
Hi-fi Rush launch price: $30
Tango Gameworks employees count: around 100 (in 2024)
Based on your take, Hi-Fi Rush should cost: $500
Reversing that, Silksong should cost: $1.20.
Stardew Valley should cost: $0.30
Idk the meth does checks out.
I’m not arguing that’s what games should cost. I’m giving context on why Silksong can afford to be 20 bucks but other games cannot.
I’m a bit confused about your math, though. How do you get 30 cents? Even assuming a single dev (which is not strictly the case) starting from Silksong you get five bucks instead.
Are you starting from Hi-fi Rush? If so it’s probably worth clarifying that the very next thing that happened to that team is they got shut down by Microsoft on the back of Hi-Fi Rush not doing that well (I’d argue for reasons unrelated to the game itself) and only got to keep running because Krafton bought them out.
So definitely a case against “games should be cheaper”.
It had 3 millions players in just a few months, which include GamePass download, which again is a very good result considering it’s an entirely new IP and without any marketing. If it’s purely purchased, 3 million copies is $90 millions in sales, guess what cannibalised the success.
Microsoft shut down studio for less, “not doing well” definitely isn’t why Tango is shut.
Yeah, and it wasn’t enough to keep the lights on.
That’s the entire point.
MS thought writing them off was a better choice than continuing to make that much money out of their investment.
I agree that MS a) marketed that game poorly, b) priced it incorrectly and c) tangled it too deeply with their GamePass dumping fiasco. It’s also true I don’t think that game would have gotten that many players even with that low up front price if it wasn’t given away to subscribers.
Oh, and for the record, 3 million copies at 30 bucks is not 90 million at all. After tax and whatever cut the store keeps it’s more or less half that, which then gets split between the dev and the publisher based on whatever agreement they have in place. So those 100 people plus all other dev costs, even as an indie studio with a publishing deal would have had to be paid from anywhere between 10 and 30 mill. The average gamedev salary has historically been somewhere in the 100K range per year, so you do that math.
Making games is expensive, you guys. It’s great if you can just noodle around with your friends for years because you made a fantastic hit with a skeleton crew and that’ll keep you going indefinitely, but you can’t build an industry on the assumption that everything you do will be a Hollow Knight-sized hit unless you’re Team Cherry.
This guy believe m$ close studio because a successful game “didn’t do well enough.”
Maybe that’s why m$ also shut down multiple game project and fired shit tons of people because "it didn’t do well enough.
I get your point, but man, it must be tiring defending multibillion corporations.
This guy believe MS like money.
This guy believe MS don’t give money away.
So if MS though that keeping something would make more money than not keeping it in the long run, MS don’t not keep it.
That’s what this guy believe.
M$ have the history of killing golden goose they just bought, we can believe what we want but that doesn’t mean M$ know what they’re doing.
And if they like money, they wouldn’t shoot their own foot.
But i digress, there’s no reason game should cost $70 is the original topic.
This is a bad take.
Yours sure is.
At least they had a take, unlike you.
Well, I don’t have to have a take as my opinion is reflected in this meme. If I have to attack the top half of it, we would be here all day, so I don’t want to bother anyone with it.
OP here had a response to the opinion expressed in the meme. All you did was say “I disagree”.
You don’t have to have a take but if you’re going to go to the point of writing something, not having anything to contribute is annoying and that’s what I’m complaining about. Understand?
Good, now go back to downvoting everything you disagree with, like everyone else does.
Good, now go back to downvoting everything you disagree with, like everyone else does.
I don’t know who you are talking about.
Do you understand why your original comment was annoying?
Did I explained afterwards my stance on this, yes. Did I downvote everyone whom I disagree with on this? no. Who is annoyed by that practice, you and only you.
I’ll forgive the zero content response because, frankly, it was right there and we all had to get it out of our systems early.
