the state of games these days

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2012
Posts
8,341
is it just me, or does it seem to be that these days the way the games industry works is as follows:

1. indie dev comes up with a fantastic game concept (eg dayz, minecraft or subnautica)
2. game gets popular- for good reason
3. literally every man and his dog starts copying this general premise
4. steam gets filled up with a million copycat games that are all a mild twist on the original formula only not as good
5. ???
6. no profit, because now my steam queue is filled with terrible copies of what i already have played just because of the tags "early access" "survival" and "sandbox" are involved.

is this just the way it's gonna be?
 
This is not new there were "Doom clones" and "GTA clones" over the past 25 and 15 years ago respectively! However I agree that some genres, particularly the survival genre is over saturated and most of the games are a bit rubbish (I've played quite a few). I would be interested to see how many actually get finished - as in, not just out of Early Access, but no more patches for fixes or non-additional content. E.g. PUBG is going out of EA this autumn but I seriously doubt this will be when the game is 'finished' and only additional content is provided.

indeed, it seems to be the in thing these days to do early access as an excuse not to finish a game properly.

don't get me wrong there's a few titles who've really been dedicated to maintaining updates and additional features that actually make the game better on top of fixing bugs (kerbal space program for example is leagues ahead of when i first started playing it)

it's just rarely do i see a game and think "wow i really need to buy this"
 
Everyone praises Minecraft yet forgets it was essentially early access to, I was playing it early in alpha, it was happily charging years before release.

that's why i used it as one of my examples of the rare time an early access title really delivers.

tbf though, vanilla minecraft was never that great, it relied on the community of modders and map makers descending upon it to produce the bulk of the excellent content available. it too was victim to a plague of copycat games that never really took on the original.

i suppose dayz would be the exception given it started as a mod rather than an actual game.
 
Well at least two of your example games are heavily influenced by/homages of other earlier games. Mincraft is (at least in it's early days) hugely influenced by Infiniminer, and that is something that Notch has freely admitted to. Subnautice is heavily influenced by FarSky. I'm not putting either game down, they've taken the influence, improved and expanded upon it and created their own slant. But to say that those were original games is ignoring what came before. nanos gigantum humeris insidentes (yep, only got by googling, don't know that off the top of my head)

and that's the important bit that's distinct to the rest.

at the end of the day there's nothing really new under the sun, and everything draws its influences from somewhere, but it's the difference between being a good band in your own right or just another terrible tribute act.
 
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