Games nowadays are super productions that need hundreds of people working for years...

Games nowadays are super productions that need hundreds of people working for years. So to guarantee all that investent doesnt go to waste they try to pander to everyone, including people that are literally retarded.

What if one of these games droped the pandering, and was really , really hardcore, which is a very niche group nowadays, not even places like Holla Forums have many of those players, a lot of posers here.

Would people actually pay like 600$ on a single game?

Fuck no, and thats why gaming will never stoping sucking ever again.

No, most of a game's budget is blown on voice acting (emphasis on acting - those whiny cucks think they're full-blown actors because they can talk into a microphone and deserve stunt pay), marketing, and licensing fees from NOTVIDYA companies (like sports teams, having gun likenesses, etc)

What is Bloodborne?

it could happen every now and then, but not too often, I mean even Dark Souls is 'too hard' to even try to some people I know, they don't even want to try, because they're afraid of the failure so much, I keep telling it's actually not hard, but I guess they think I'm bragging

I'm a super fucking cheapskate, and I'd still pay more than full price for a game I knew was excellent, from a group I could respect, and came with the promise of more to come. Especially if it was in a dead/niche genre like mecha or quality 3D beat em ups. I'd also be willing to pick up merch, since I typically like that stuff anyway.

Like
Okay you like puzzle games or whatever, sure. But people that don't play entire games or genres because there's a chacne they might lose? Disgusting

Your strawman is shit.

...

>He doesn't remember the controversy last year where VAs wanted stunt pay for talking into a mic

Welcome to the indie game industry

A good game still needs to have a good story, of course the focus would be on the gameplay but im not talking about some indie shit game that is decent on one single thing but SHIT on every other aspect. Im talking about a game reaching for excellence in every aspect, yet not pandering to casuals at all.


I'll bite this bait. Nobody actually bought that console just for that game(which already had a following and is pretty casual), the naive fuckers thought it would have more games. Even then it was less than 400$, i was being optmistic with the $600 figure, thats assuming about 300000 people are real hardcore gamers with that kind money for games.

What is Train Simulator

It's why the profit motive is killing all art and technology.

Any figures for that?

A lot of games do that. Flight sims, grand strategies, racing games, some RTS games (not as many these days), and some big fighting games. It depends heavily on the genre. Adventure games, puzzle games, shooters, and story games are the only ones that haven't had a real hardcore entry in a while (unless Dark Souls counts. I've never played a Souls game).

And you've lost me. What the fuck are you talking about now? Who's spending $600 on any single game?

What the industry needs now is AA devs and publishers. Like THQ. Not as large or expensive as AAA, but because there's less of a loss to be made, the devs can do cool-yet-risky shit.

The bigger they get, the harder it is to keep their rate of profit increasing, and the more likely they are to appeal to a wider audience. Look at SFV compared to KOFXIV. SNK have started from a lower point than capcom, and aren't forced to widen their audience as desperately, although they aim for it.

Why are games super productions now? Technological progression? Games were expensive for a long time, I remember paying 60 bucks for N64.

I guess its the inevitable consolidation of the market by corporations. That doesn't explain the boring formula they use, because their boring shit still sells, and many people know its boring and stupid, so you'd think if they actually tried it would sell better.

yep. Especially for me because I hate multiplayer now. I think this is the big problem: no one writes worth a shit. And when you tell people to write well, they regurgitate contemporary narratives about social justice to make it "realistic" and relevant. That's not what we mean by good writing.

Oh yeah what happened with that stupid movement, did it just crash and burn?

The opposite is also true. Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Subnautica are my most played games these days. There's a LOT of indie shit but there's some goodies.

No. Story is the least important aspect of games, unless it's a genre like cRPG.

Not really. Story is key to many games.

And then, how do you even separate story (aesthetic vision) from gameplay… see Hotline Miami.

I used to believe this as well, but it always seems to ends up that the AA guys are striving to become AAA by aping their design methodologies and marketing tactics but on a lesser scale, because most people who make video games, even those who aren't souless suits, are cowardly little men with no real vision or competency. At this point in our civilization it's cargo cult thinking all the way down, except for those few freak occurrences, so you just have to sift the shit for the gold.

This. And sometimes, you'll get AAA devs take over an A franchise (Mafia)… or they'll revive a property that had cred and corporatize it (Doom, Deus Ex, Thief)

It's become like films. Either some mega capeshit piece of over-marketed crap… or low budget indie.

Devolver Digital
Focus Home
Bamco
Koei
Falcom
Mohebia Interactive
CodeMasters
Non Sonic Sega games

They're still around

Yes.

shit you beat me to it

It's not voice acting, it's not sacrificing gameplay for graphics, it's never any of that. It's always marketing. Always.

If that game was as autistically in-depth and had all the crazy shit I wanted in my dream game, I'd happily fork over $600

Yep.
Game development is completely fucked in how they waste money.

then they would be pandering to a niche

i always wonder why people point fingers at voice acting of all things. i mean i know why they do it, i just dont understand how they can say it with a straight face.

Is it pandering if you make something as authentic as possible? I think not.

And thanks to people who think the same like you, we can't have decent voice actors and we have to suffer cringey and awful delivered lines from retards who doesn't know how to even sound like a normal person remember SH HD Collection?

Good job, faggot

id say its pandering unless its what you as the developer want to make. but im just mincing words as an autist

because the "big name" voice actors now demand salaries that are enormous, and are setting a precedent for other up and coming voice actors to just expect tremendous amounts of money for a job that really isn't that hard. i actually grew up with the guy that did the voice of Leonid in whatever Star Ocean he was in and he needed no experience, was given no direction, was allowed to basically just talk however he wanted and in my opinion did a truly terrible job because of it and still made close to $40,000 US for two months of reading a script in a booth, and he was one of the lower-paid actors on staff

Art is worth it. More so the art-direction/style rather than chasing uber gfx. Marketing is a cancer but that's a result of our pleb society, so who can you blame?

whoever it is that decided its about huge numbers and that a game cutting even at first but making a steady profit over a few years is a failure.

Games don't need a billion dollar budget if you know what you're doing. Fuck off.

Shh. All of those are taboo in Holla Forums.

OP, better go suck some cocks if your mouth isn't full already. Games are fucking profitable, the graphics are actually worse than it was years before even though you can now use more filters, graphical features and other shit which make it easier to make good graphics with same amount of work, there are a whole bunch of game engines, much larger audience and saturated market full of clones, if anything videogames is the way to make money now, so go back to your cocks, imbecile.

These aren't games, user. They're just called this way.

The "full-blown" actors are the problem. Professional voice actors can actually do a good job bringing life and personality to a character. Burning a boatload of money on "real" actors gets you Peter Dinklage sucking ass in Destiny, but hey, at least you get to name drop him every chance you get so people know your shit's legit.

So the natural progression of capitalism?

Welcome to Holla Forums

But what do you personally define as really hardcore?

Punishing 2D shit?
Things from Fromsoft in recent years?
Things with perma-death?
What do you think is missing?
What was a good non-pandering game from before they were pandering?

Without those to narrow it down it makes it harder to answer your question

I then have to insinuate things.
Means like most you yearn for the days before mainstreaming took hold.
Chances are there are games you love and would like to see more of but don't.
That is what posting this thread means.
Whatever games those are one of 2 things happened to them:
1. The IPs died and were forgotten
or
2. Later iterations were made more casually pleasing.

Perhaps you want to see new IPs of the same quality or greater with a similar style of play.
But you aren't going to because it wouldn't be as profitable as casually pleasing games.

You want to know what would happen if a game you would define as good dropped?
A pre-mainstreaming quality game.
It wouldn't sell very well because it wouldn't appeal to casuals.

You then insinuate a game priced at $600 as if to say a game that you feel would be worth $600 and then question if people would buy it?
An original IP tailored to your specifications in an attempt to make up for the higher amount of effort put into it.
No
Doesn't matter what the price is.
The extra decimal bringing the current niche group's monetary vote to the 10th power assuming all of them would care isn't enough to offset the jagoffs and their flat-billed hats buying franchise shooter 2016 and 3rd person QTE cinematic experiences.

Majority rule is like that.

Marketing. We're so inundated with content that very little can actually punch through and what does make it only gets talked about for a week, if it's lucky. Putting all their eggs in one basket means they can plow more money into paying everyone off to talk about it a little more for a little longer.

That's retarded. The reason they spend so much in marketing and appealing things like professional voice acting and licensed content is BECAUSE they want to make sure they'll recover the money they spent making the rest of the game. It's not the other way around. Without worrying that much about graphics, they could reduce the budget considerably

completely, thanks in part to other VAs who promptly recognized that they pitch in jackall of effort compared to the people actually making the games

I don't even need a good story (not every game type at least) but things are so pandering in a way that's insulting to players nowadays. Like in the 90s
Today
The pandering to a small vocal group is real. I mean yes, its most prevalant with indie games, but take a look at the marketplace there's an absurd number of these things now. Pandering, bad ideas, and just shit thinking the industry is heading downhill. And there's really no saving it at this point.

Retards at least buy the games.
Holla Forums just pirates them.

Who do you think they're going to choose to pander to?

This, if they just picked someone they knew locally or actually worked on the game to voice act then they could pay considerably less and it would still sound good if they picked right

That's the problem, though. Retards buy terrible games and support the gaming industry no matter how terrible it gets. That's why you still have people sucking the cocks of Assassin's Creed and Fallout and other fallen franchises, and why they insist on preordering because 'I know it's going to be good!!!'
If more of these people pirated before realizing their game is shit, we wouldn't have the issue we do.

Piracy saved video games.