Games Journalism General

[TheHarbinger]

Does anyone besides game journalists give a shit about game awards at this point?

With things like E3 becoming dead you will see more and more awards shows becoming nothing but PR and hype machines for major studios. So you give out the awards to the companies looking to promote stuff and then they buy advertising space or announce a new game at the show which gets more eyeballs. No major studio wants journalists to control the big awards shows they want to have control themselves. They are pretty much already there at this point anyways.

 

[Judge Dredd]

With things like E3 becoming dead you will see more and more awards shows becoming nothing but PR and hype machines for major studios.

And even minor studios. The whole Indie-cade drama during GamerGate showed that much.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

That's interesting. I wonder if we're going to see more AAA developers setting up shell indie companies and getting away with it by having pixel art that's ugly enough to avoid attention.

I doubt it. I don't think this was actually done maliciously. I think the people that picked it legitimately didn't know it wasn't an indie title, and I also think that the big names (outside Sony maybe) *really* don't give a shit about these awards. They care about sales.

At this point, the biggest thing is that nobody wants to admit they made a mistake or wrong. They just want to double down like the dumb fuck nigger journalists they are. If this was done intentionally, I don't think they'll get away with doing it again without major calls of there being a bias. Ori was excluded from previous independent categories for being funded by Microsoft, so imagine how shitty it will get when Death Stranding 2 gets an independent nomination when it's funded by Sony. (since Geoff felt the need to specifically list Kojima Productions as an example of *actually* being an independent studio)

Honestly, the game journalists who vote should have their picks publicly stated after the show. If anyone had any actual integrity they would do this themselves.

 

[ChefKiss]

Pompous cockgoblin tries to defend including a game from a AAA publisher in the indie category for The Game Awards.

The TL;DR is "shut up, it's up to our hand-picked jury of industry insiders".

This is the trans sports debacle all over. If you can't win on your own merits, compete against someone who is never going to be in the same tier as you.

So their defence is that they're incompetent, incapable of doing the minimum research, even a google search, not that they're corrupt?
That's sad but hilarious, they knew it was believable that they're just retarded.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Pompous cockgoblin tries to defend including a game from a AAA publisher in the indie category for The Game Awards.

The TL;DR is "shut up, it's up to our hand-picked jury of industry insiders".

This is the trans sports debacle all over. If you can't win on your own merits, compete against someone who is never going to be in the same tier as you.

The Game Awards of today is relegated towards participatory trophies that give the impression that you’re only awarding these kinds of things as an excuse to accept low expectations.

The worst part is that not even the participatory trophies are not worth it.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

That's interesting. I wonder if we're going to see more AAA developers setting up shell indie companies and getting away with it by having pixel art that's ugly enough to avoid attention.

Indirectly, isn't this partially what we've been wanting the big studios to do for years now? Stop trying to make every single thing a massive AAA blockbuster shitshow, spin up more small teams and studios to make more mid sized projects. We get more games, and there's more room for variety in them as they don't need to appeal to six million people just to break even, so they can do stuff that isn't hero extraction shooters with skin monetization.

They won't actually do this, of course, Dave the Diver is just an industry anomaly at this point. Nobody wants to do that because if a 10m game can make 40m, but a 100m game can make 500m dollars, then they'd prefer to make the one megagame rather than the ten mid games, even if the odds of making more money than you spent are greater in the ten individual games. They can't see past the odds of being the one a year blockbuster game, to see that ten smaller games can saturate the market much better, and have more chances to go viral and become a blowout hit. You make ten Valheims, one of them might explode like the namesake game, but the other nine will do pretty well at that budget regardless, lots of healthy games in that space.

ReedPop seeks buyer for Eurogamer, GI, VG247, Rock Paper Shotgun and more

Good, fuck them. RPS was dead to me the moment they fired the flare path guy for political reasons, and the site became a shitheap of gaming twitter reposts rather than actually having anything of substance to say. Never seen a single piece of actual breaking news from VG247, and Eurogamer was always just an ancillary floater than I thought was a PCGamer spinoff in all honesty.

Most of these sites were never journalistic in nature, or stopped being so long ago. Now they're just a glorified RSS reader with some salty editorial content shuffled into them.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Indirectly, isn't this partially what we've been wanting the big studios to do for years now? Stop trying to make every single thing a massive AAA blockbuster shitshow, spin up more small teams and studios to make more mid sized projects.

Mid-sized is the key word(s with a hyphen) there.

This isn't AAA putting their vast technology and talent into the next mid-tier project. As much as I dislike Double Fine, their Amnesia Weekend where they had an internal game jam every year, and turned the good ones into XBLA games, was a good idea.

They are taking style and techniques bedroom programmers use out of necessity or interest, and are using them to save a few quid. I'm also willing to bet they put money and connections with the games press to work to promote the game as well.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Indirectly, isn't this partially what we've been wanting the big studios to do for years now? Stop trying to make every single thing a massive AAA blockbuster shitshow, spin up more small teams and studios to make more mid sized projects. We get more games, and there's more room for variety in them as they don't need to appeal to six million people just to break even, so they can do stuff that isn't hero extraction shooters with skin monetization.

Sure. And there have been some games that were made as smaller budget games by big studios that turned out good.

But you don't get to call them indie games.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

Sure. And there have been some games that were made as smaller budget games by big studios that turned out good.

But you don't get to call them indie games.

To be honest, I don't give a shit what they call them. Using the Indie label as an excuse for inadequacies has always been stupid anyway. I just want to call things good games or bad games at a given price point. A $20 fun game is a fun game whether it was made by a dude in his basement in six weeks or by 500 ubisoft slaves over six years - The finances, company operation and structure are all fucking irrelevant to that point. If Activision Blizzard grabbed a bunch of developer/artist pairs and started making shit like Song of Styx and releasing them in that price point, I'd be happy as fuck.

All the indie label does these days is provide some weird self imposed class stratification, and some moral obligation to everyone to treat something with kids gloves because its just a wee little guy, even when they want your money all the same. I just want people to like my games on the merit, and to value my games on the pricepoint, not the content creation process. Whole things become some weird extended parasocial relationship where we pressure our communities to treat it like sports leagues, cheering on teams even if the games shit because you like them.

 

[TheHarbinger]

All the indie label does these days is provide some weird self imposed class stratification, and some moral obligation to everyone to treat something with kids gloves because its just a wee little guy, even when they want your money all the same.

"Indie" doesn't mean anything anymore because there was no tight restriction upon its usage. It's been used in so many different ways at this point that it has hundreds of contradictory usages in media and no concrete definition anymore. And all of the major publishers have played word games or deceptively marketed or advertised certain games as being "independent" when half or more of their budgets came from a major publisher.

No Man's Sky had SONY ridiculously cover their marketing budget which was probably ten times the development cost of that game and it was still heavily promoted as being "independent" from some small studio. Some tiny little studio where its producers are appearing nightly on network television talk shows and twice a day on newscasts and gaming sites have the game plastered on the front page. Amazing how some unknown studio run by weirdo reddit tier fags have world class international backing from the media for their shovelware space exploration game.

It's the same with buzzwords in gaming marketing like "open world" or "role playing mechanics". Where Capcom is marketing Marvel vs Capcom Infinite (a game that failed disastrously) by borrowing marketing lingo from every possible genre. Or how when you go into a place like Steam practically every developer or publisher wants their game listed with every single genre or tag to get it cross promoted more. So every game is listed as "strategy, fighting, action, adventure, role playing" and nothing is properly curated or categorized anymore.

I just want people to like my games on the merit, and to value my games on the pricepoint, not the content creation process. Whole things become some weird extended parasocial relationship where we pressure our communities to treat it like sports leagues, cheering on teams even if the games shit because you like them.

This is why No Man's Sky was so hilarious. SONY was a parading the team all over social media and getting them on every possible talk show at the time. And you had these foaming at the mouth social media junkies raging that the game was not being astroturfed and was just natural marketing of the newest incredible breakthrough in technology. "Procedurally generated worlds and content". Which became another buzzword to promote garbage like Starfield.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Quote bug but complete agreement. "Indie" just seems to be a style now rather than a company descriptor.

If you want to see some ridiculous "indie" bullshit getting marketed to the moon and back, check out the backdrop of https://isthereanydeal.com/ at any given time.

Pizza Possum is the last one I can remember being up there (and several other places) and it's a 7$ dead simple Unity game you could throw together in a week for a game jam. It doesn't make it a bad game, but that's an awful lot of advertising for something that's probably netting the developer and publisher <4$ a sale and likely being refunded by many who buy it due to it being a game where you can see the entirety of the content in under an hour.

 

[Markass the Worst]

Quote bug but complete agreement.

Not a bug, too long posts are intentionally made unquotable in full. To quote, highlight text.

 

[BScCollateral]

Never cared about awards, but I agree the "Indie vs. Mainstream" distinction is meaningless. I'd prefer some sort of elimination contest, where the games are paired off, and the "better" ones voted on by people who have played both of them. Steam might be uniquely capable of this sort of thing, deciding if Starfield is better than Baldur's Gate 3 based on votes from people who have x hours in each.
But of course, that would reflect the opinions of gamers instead of picking the most progressivist game of all.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

All the indie label does these days is provide some weird self imposed class stratification, and some moral obligation to everyone to treat something with kids gloves because its just a wee little guy, even when they want your money all the same.

For a lot of people it's "I prefer to give money to smaller developers rather than feed one of the <Dwindling Number Of> Games Companies of the Apocalypse.

 

[BScCollateral]

For a lot of people it's "I prefer to give money to smaller developers rather than feed one of the <Dwindling Number Of> Games Companies of the Apocalypse.

Right, the Hipster Delusion.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Right, the Hipster Delusion.

By all means, get back to complaining about the latest Call of Tacticool, bitching about changes to your chosen Online Lifestyle Game, or buying DLC and micro-transactions for a 70 dollar game that ends up costing you several hundred dollars or more by the time everything is said and done.

I don't have any delusion I can change anything. To the extent I'm anything, I'd classify myself less as a hipster and more as a videogame doomposter. But my entertainment budget is mine to spend on things I enjoy, and I don't enjoy... <points up one paragraph> that.

Not that the indie world is roses, chocolate and blowjobs all the time... I'm sick of asset flip garbage, and streamer bait games, and janky games made by people who should not be making games, and all that shit other shit, too. But at least it feels more like gaming used to be when I was younger, in the 80s, 90s, even the early 2000s... games are different sometimes.

From each other, I mean. You pick up a new game, and often times you had no idea what to expect, because devs still experimented. They had ideas and they went with them, and sometimes they were disasters, but sometimes they were wonderful, too. It wasn't just putting the small handful of proven formulaic game templates into the mill and turning the crank until a theoretically "good" and "safe" game pops out. It feels like "adequacy" is the goal. Sort of like with Hollywood these days.

I mean, hey, you do you, though.

 

[Tanner Glass]

From each other, I mean. You pick up a new game, and often times you had no idea what to expect, because devs still experimented. They had ideas and they went with them, and sometimes they were disasters, but sometimes they were wonderful, too. It wasn't just putting the small handful of proven formulaic game templates into the mill and turning the crank until a theoretically "good" and "safe" game pops out. It feels like "adequacy" is the goal. Sort of like with Hollywood these days.

I think @BScCollateral 's point was more about who cares where an actual game comes from.

If a small "real" indie studio put out Dave the Diver or if it's a small experimental studio attached to a larger studio (like Nexon, Square, ABK, etc) - it really doesn't matter as long as the game is good.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

I think @BScCollateral 's point was more about who cares where an actual game comes from.

If a small "real" indie studio put out Dave the Diver or if it's a small experimental studio attached to a larger studio (like Nexon, Square, ABK, etc) - it really doesn't matter as long as the game is good.

Just preference. If I can get the same enjoyment by supporting an actual indie developer, I'd rather do that.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Just preference. If I can get the same enjoyment by supporting an actual indie developer, I'd rather do that.

That's fair - but it's also fair to suggest for every "Undertale" there's a huge pile of "Depression Quest"s in the indie scene.

The best thing the indie scene has done was to get larger devs to make smaller teams and smaller scale games - a mix of smaller ideas and some level of professionalism.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

That's fair - but it's also fair to suggest for every "Undertale" there's a huge pile of "Depression Quest"s in the indie scene.

The best thing the indie scene has done was to get larger devs to make smaller teams and smaller scale games - a mix of smaller ideas and some level of professionalism.

Like I said, I know the indie scene is filled with crap. I'm not suggesting people buy games because they are indie games and no other reason, or something. It's certainly a case of sifting for the gems in a big pile of broken glass.

The difference for me between that and the AAA market is that sure, some AAA are still fun. But how often do you get something original? From the persistent recycling of IPs that can never be let die, to gameplay being based on very similar, formulaic concepts, it just feels like even when I have a game I enjoy - For example, I really had fun with Far Cry 5, and thought the setting was very well done, I loved Witcher 3, and hell, I'm on record as defending Cyberpunk 2077 - it doesn't really feel like I'm getting anything I haven't played many, many times before. It's just a case of better and worse examples of the same basic thing.

It feels, to me, like with indie games I still get new ideas, or at least new and fresh spins on existing ideas.

Eh. My two cents as I freeze my ass off.

(Edit: And yes, I know, there are some people who try to make the argument CDProject Red is "indie", because they self publish, but that's a hair I'm not willing to split.)