It’s not one you should rely on. People don’t stare at their Steam page every day.
This should have been promoted through the usual YouTube and Twitch channels. Find all of the YouTubers that review indie games and start sending emails.
I think NRFTW is fantastic, and it’s exactly what I was expecting it to be. However, people saw it at the same “style” as Diablo or Path of Exile and expected the game to be like those… except they’re not. And for those that do realize that, you have the other idiots that refuse to accept that it’s an EA game that still has a long roadmap until completion and bitch about the lack of an “endgame.”
Honestly, I think trying to compete with Diablo and PoE2 is already too much, even if it’s trying to say it’s not those. Those games are huge, with long-running, dedicated fanbases, and they do enough to oversaturate the market just fighting amongst themselves.
This was the wrong type of game to be trying to dive into the first time they cut themselves off from Microsoft’s financial cushion.
It’s always lack of advertising. The unfortunate fact of life is that 99.99% of indie studios have no clue how to market their game. They think they just have to make a good game, and boom, people will flock to it.
Steam is there to make sure users have a platform to download their game. It’s not there to market it. Marketing is just an occasional side effect.
At this point, I’m just calling this an excuse.
I mean, fuck Japanese IP laws, but also fuck Nintendo for trying to gaslight us into pretending everything is normal and standard. Nintendo of America is not in fucking Japan. They play by American rules with American audiences, and Americans will bitch about their practices.
You don’t sell a Chevy Nova in Mexico and call it a Nova. Adapt to the region you sell to.
Those assholes don’t give a shit about “freedom of art” when video games like Wolfenstien can’t get released in Germany.
Sooo, American Gods?
you see in Yeezus that he’s kinda bringing the experiments of groups like CLPPNG and Death Grips to the mainstream.
You mean this Yeezus merch? This was the same timeframe. (Sorry, different concert. This was later.) He wanted people to buy this shit as a bundle with a concert ticket.
Also, Death Grips was already mainstream. They didn’t need some insane motherfucker to sample their work to get popular.
Good luck finding D programmers.
It’s written in Brainfuck, but it’s really really good. Trust me, bro!
Are we remaking Attack on Titan?
Absolutely this.
If we’re going to take a Metroidvania as an example of this lesson, let’s take Environmental Station Alpha. The game has a ton of potential as a good Metroidvania that is buried in a thick armor of speedrunner-level difficulty. I have never seen a Metroidvania be so stingy about health tanks, and this game desperately needs all of the health tanks you can get. It stinks of a developer team playtesting the hell out of their own game, and making difficulty decisions based on years of their own self-testing experience.
When you release a game with a Normal difficulty, no Hard difficulty, and then are forced to create a Easy difficulty after release, you know you’ve fucked up.
Here’s how you do it: You can playtest your own game, but that one gets the “Hard” label. If you playtest for a Normal difficulty and you can’t imagine how to create a Hard difficulty, the difficulty range is completely off. And Hard doesn’t mean “only people in the double-digits can beat it”. That’s not even a scale, or just reserve that for some “Impossible” difficulty, if you want to get to 5-6 levels, like Doom does.
Normal should be some reasonable setting based on how others playtest the game. Get some expectations from your playtest audience in terms of the kinds of games they’ve played and beat before. Are they complete noobs to any sort of fast-paced gameplay, or have they beaten other Metroidvanias or games like Cuphead? Based on that, figure out whether the advice they give you applies to an Easy or Normal difficulty curve.
You can’t just, independently, as a single person, “have your own game engine”. It has to be designed for a specific type of game, with a specific style. You don’t have the time or resources to develop one that is an omnibus toolbox.
Even then, people should be using Godot now, especially indie developers. Spend the time and resources enriching an existing open-source game engine.
They have to kick off kids from their game, legally, and nearly all mobile and online games that have any way to spend real money will be doing the same within the next year.
Good. Gambling is illegal for minors under the age of 18.
Governments generally do their best to avoid that, because people would start holding off on purchases expecting lower prices next week, month, quarter,… and it would tank the economy.
That’s not how human nature works. If people need groceries, they aren’t going to hold off purchases until the prices go down.
I don’t think even IGN has much of any critical/cultural/marketing value anymore so good luck to any other website
IGN, the EA of games “journalism”.
that somehow instead of a yes/no is instead an article of 20 paragraphs saying nothing
That we’ll later summarize with another LLM.
Konami is no longer a video games company any more. They lost that title when they kicked Kojima out and decided to fully embrace pachinko games.
So, weak, boring, and used by many others?
Good job, reporter! You’ve done your work to signal boost an AAA game for corporate profits without managing to actually add any new information!
Games “Journalism” 2025!
Old, but still relevant:
Here’s your damn nuance: “In Germany, we’ve removed all Nazi symbols and references. Unlike films and other works of art, video games in Germany are forbidden to use such symbols and references as they are classified in Germany as toys and not media art.”
Toys? Sorry, I’m not going to call The New Order a toy, nor most of the other story-centric video games I play.