Instead of throwing millions of dollars into graphics...

Graphics don't cost jackshit compared to a decade ago. Any indieautist can make Crysis 3-tier graphics on a budget of electricity, drinks and pizza. Could even skip the electricity bill if you live with your parents.
What costs money is being an autist publisher who wastes billions on marketing and worthless developers who think of themselves as artists n' shieeeeet.

Because publishers and Triple A game developers hate video games and love money.

Because then normalfags and youtubers won't buy it.

Is Jade even still there? All those bitches look the same.

Okay, so nearly EVERY arts college signs you up to a union to get contracted work with certain studios whatever, this is usually bare minimum artmonkey bullshit, none of the artists that actually do concept shit, basically the oversees inbetweeners for animation, but for voiceacting, music, and texturing
Now imagine ALL THE ART MONKEYS EVER, are forced into this union right, or you are blacklisted from the industry
And the leaders of this Union, use Art Monkey collateral as a threat to any big studio that needs art monkeys to texture bush 1-244809
You piss off the union
No art monkeys to fill in all the gaps, game development goes on like 5x as long, price to pay main artists go up, provided you're lucky enough to not get Union concept artists, entire budget is fucked and you can't develop the game presentably, and they aren't only limited to a host company.
It's like publishers on steroids.

Because it's harder to effectively market gameplay through words and pictures than it is to market appearances and story through words and pictures.

Because failure is too expensive. You can either do the thing that everyone else does and make the same money as everyone else, or you could try a different thing. That different thing might perform worse, it might perform better, it might perform the same, who knows. The question is: can you afford failure?

The AAA industry is playing with stakes so high that they simply cannot afford failure, and I'm sure they wouldn't even want to. Doing the same thing as everyone else feels comfy and it means that you can move between companies using the same skillset everywhere.

You have a bunch of large corporations all competing over the same kind of market. They would rather fight over what small resources there are than venture out and look for new resources because that is risky.

It wouldn't be so risky if they didn't invest so much into marketing.

really makes you think

Money can't buy good encounter design. It can buy fancy bells and whistles, though.

I wanna fuck that critic.

Because normalfags don't want challenging or complex gameplay or a real well written storyline. They want pretty graphics, explosions, faggots, easy super guides to get past those super duper hard levels, cinematic bullshit and stories filled with nothing but memes and moronically convoluted bullshit that pretends to be deep and complex to give the illusion that they're playing something artsy. FFXIII in a nutshell.

Pretty much this.

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Come the fuck on, man. Think for five seconds.

>it actually got less diverse
Do they not see this?

This, aside of the heavy normalfag shilling, why do you faggots think shit like TLOU and Uncharted always nearly get 10/10 scores? Because these "games" are movies with a few QTEs, choices and movement to generate a false sense of action to trick normalfags into thinking gameplay has evolved, same with Call Of Duty.

The Japs are pretty good at not investing everything in graphics.

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That means they're using Tor, newfag.

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or proper pc dev or non anime weebshit

Oh, you're just one of those unfunny trolls who pretends to not know what it looks like. You got me, brah! Ebin troll! XD

shhh, dont break the based japan narrative

posting from Tor. what's my ID faggot?

ventilate yourself, mongoloid

Because then there'd be no money left for advertising, and that's where you REALLY get peoples' attention.

Fuck off

Can they ever run out of marketing money? Can there be too much money throw at marketing? I often wonder this. When will there be too much money on marketing that it hurts sales? The only way I know too see the answer is for the GTA series to continue, nothing got marketed like GTAV.

uh oh, babby's mad he got BTFO

No narrative here, just saying that the Japanese Triple A industry doesn't care for graphics as much as the west does.

Triple Trips, holy fuck.

Uh, you guys are the ones who are wrong, and yet you continue to btfo and embarrass yourselves. Learn to cut your losses.

They don't understand what "diverse" means.

clientsfromhell.net/post/29427398732/

Reminds me of the time I got sick ID digits myself. You better not be the same guy from before

KEK

What are you on about?

It stands to reason that I would have a hard time fitting in with the redditors in this thread.

TOR IDs are a generic sequence of 000000 under all circumstances, not any ID sequence with repeating digits. You have no idea what you're talking about or are cringily pretending to be retarded. Please refrain and leave gracefully, you tremendous inhuman autist.

There is no way this post isn't reverse bait

You and the other losers in this thread will learn to play the game someday.

...

There's definitely a sense of wrongness when a game's marketing budget is so overblown that it reaches of is above the game's actual development budget.

I'd like to imagine there's at the very least a point where money spent on further awareness stops increasing sales because they've already hit as many people as they're likely to get interested in their product, but I think some ascribe the "let's keep going" policy. Combined with how much money gets dumped into games, especially marketing, you can wind up with games selling millions and still getting considered failures to make much profit, or in some case break even on the money invested.

It reminds of me of a picture. It has a black student goofing off with toy/model rocket. The photo is focusing on that one student.

Yet you can clearly see an Asian school boy busting his ass off in the foreground.

I'm so angry. I lost the image due to bad HDD.

found it

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wat

Is the game about being a subhuman retard? I think you've driven all the competition away to be honest seeing as you're so good at it.

I'm pretty sure I'm speaking to that Jewish accountant user from another thread, but if we really are being overrun with troglodytes and this isn't really just the work of one fastidious autist, we're in for a world of shit until hopefully the end of summer.

why do we have this same thread up every day

Because nobody will buy it. Or won't even pirate it.
Same goes for you faggots.

well i usually just stick to the same few threads because every time i poke my head into the catalog its filled with garbage and politics.
shill me your game user. i never had a chance to see your recommendation.

If a game has no coherent style than its most likely a piece of trash either way.

That art style could well look like a fucking amiga game, it doesn't matter, but if a developer can't come up with a good presentation then it's very likely they don't give a fuck in general and everything else will also be sub par.

back to >>>Holla Forums with you

It's a good action game. With cancels, parries, launchers, that sort of shit. It also looks like ass because it was made by some chink in his spare time.
What else do you want to know?

Yeah, thanks for proving my point.

back to leftypol with you, cuckchan refugee

wat x2

well that sounds fun but id like to see a good gameplay video to get me hooked. something that makes me go "wow, i wanna do that"

id say most users here are cuckchan refugees. the ones that arent are from reddit.

Dwarf Fortress did perfectly fine with just ascii. Not even trying is a true show that you're making shovel ware or just trying to make a quick buck

Ironically enough the game you posted clearly has an artist and a clear style. But it's probably gonna get ignored because it's yet another action sidescroller like the other thousands that are released every fucking day that do absolutely nothing new.

You can't even come up with an elevator pitch when someone asks you to tell them more.
FUCKING REVOLUTIONARY GAMEPLAY
CAN'T BELIEVE EVERYBODY IS IGNORING THIS WTF

I know a Holla Forumsyp when I see one. Yuri Yuri is a Holla Forums favorite and besides that it's so reddit that not even /a/ will touch it.

That was the point of the exodus here, since half/v/ is now full of Canadian SJWs and such, and the site seems to be getting changed, probably for a takeover of half/pol/. Some of the smaller boards like /lit/ and maybe even /trash/ are good because the newfags from the election haven't found them yet.

Not a Holla Forums colony, just the anti-sjws from half/v/

Look it up user, I'm not a dedicated shill.
If you missed some good little game in your life it's your loss, not mine.
My point was stated and proven, my work is pretty much done.

It's a GOOD action game. Here's your pitch. How do you differentiate good action game from bad one? It is challenging, but without cheap bullshit, you can customize your moveset, there are alternate routes through story mode, I think there are different difficulty modes as well. It's really similar to MGR minus zandatsu gimmick.
I'm sorry I'm not trained in advertising video games.

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alright then. i was just trying to make you feel better. to know that theres people on Holla Forums who still like video games and want to play them

Already did it a hundred fucking times

You know why nobody cares? Not because it doesn't look good. Not because the gameplay is bad.
They ignore it because it's fucking bland. It's the plain toast of video games. There's hundreds of other games identical to it, many that do it in a more original way and more aesthetically pleasing way.

You know how many games are released daily? You can't just sell your game on it being "okay" anymore. If you do absolutely no effort to stand out from the crowd, be that with a cool innovation or cool art style, then your game is not worth playing.

If you really can't be fucked innovating or getting an artist, the least you can do is pick a genre that hasn't been done to death.

That's just how it is. Mediocre is the worst thing you could possibly be. Even worse than spectacularly bad.

That's really interesting, thanks

Whenever I talk to people about vidya, etc - this one interview is what I reference. It applies so well to every industry today.

Too bad for me I can't find a single one that stands out. If I ever do, it's on a console I don't have - I'm not buying an entire console just to play one game.

At this point I want a game with full fucking customization or I drop it. I'm stil playing shit like pic related for exactly that reason.

Have you heard of downwell?
It's a game that looks like shit, has three colors and was made for mobile by a chink.

You know why it succeeded? Because when people ask what it is, the guy responds

And people are automatically interested. He pitched his game in a tweet to devolver and they instantaneously decided to publish it.

It's a fucking arcade game, really by the book like the one you posted, but the dev got smart, understood that there's hundreds of other arcade games, and decided to develop it with something that would attract attention.

Wow:
1. I thought GTAV for sure marketed more. Maybe it was they marketed more to where I would notice.
2. I have a weird thought that if you market a game too much people will get sick of it and not buy it at all. Like you know the average prole has a short memory, but if you fill his head with the game so much as he can't forget it then it will piss him off like politics or quitting smoking and end up hating it.

I don't think you can name even a couple of 2D games mechanically similar to Icey, let alone being able to compete with it. Maybe Shank? But it's so fucking inferior it's not fanny.
It's far from being mediocre. Platinum games is the closest you can get, though in 3D equivalent and with good visuals to boot.

But when you're saying that it looks bland and that's why it is ignored you are correct. Holla Forums is just as full of graphics whores as the rest of the world.
Assuming gameplay is bland because game is bland without playing it is what you're doing there and that's the answer to op's question.
Just noticed he's (1) and done btw, played us like a damn fiddle again

By that logic devs should cease doing anything and everything that has been done before, and only try new shit.
I mean innovation is good, but doing something that was already done before but better is just as important.

There's plenty of shit on steam that nobody talks about because nobody actually looks for it.
My best suggestion is to take a few hours and go through the steam queue the most you can.

If you tell me what you're looking for I might have some suggestions

I tried to play Icey and it ended up feeling really clunky compared to Strider or Dust, that furry game. I dropped it pretty quickly because of it. It wasn't even as smooth as Hollow Knight or GBA games like that, especially AoS. I still own Icey but I think it's really cheap.

I've done that for a very long time and I haven't found anything that's even worth pirating. It all looks so bland to me.

If you know anything that has modding/customization capabilities, well written characters/lore, and a pretty decent soundtrack, let me know. I'm open to whatever genre as long as it has those things.

it reminds me of those Amon26 games like "All of our friends are dead"

Kikes, normalfags. Remove one, become the master of the house again.

Butcher, Salt and Sanctuary, Dead Cells, gonner, seraph

These are actually good sidescrolling action games that either use their styles or gimmicks to draw people into them.

Holla Forums isn't full of graphic fags, it's just filled with people that don't play games not bother to look for them.

And no, not everything has been done, an incredibly small change can make the biggest difference in any game.
Take Darkest Dungeon, it's just turn based combat, absolutely nothing special about it. You combine that with a stress mechanic and some atmospheric lord and you have a smash hit.

I'm not going to pretend like I can come up with something to make that game you posted more interesting because I wouldn't know where to start, but since you keep mentioning platinum I would like to point out that Platinum has that type of gameplay 100% cornered. They know how to do it incredibly well, and they're really the only ones that seem to be able to do it in a 3D space.

Unfortunately that isn't the same for 2D. Since in 2D you don't need to make complex animations, complex movement, and make sure that its all extremely polished, then of course people will think a 2D game that apes off what platinum does is mediocre.

I have a really hard time believing the game you posted has improved on any of the formulas. I can't vouch for it of course, so I'll add it to my wishlist and see if I can get around to play it.

Off the top of my head

Horror-ish game, story told through prompt on a monitor. I haven't actually played the full release on steam but I tried a smaller demo released separarely.
Amazing art style, really smart way of using snall budget.

Fucking hard to describe, but it basically puts you in control of a character working for a dystopian government and broker tasked to collect info about suspects from their online activity
Really good story and actual decisions that matter

Mech battles. Good soundtrack.
Can't remember if you can customize shit or not so you're gonna have to try it yourself

Hope that's good

No matter how many money you throw into gameplay you can still end up with a shit game if the people making it are retards.

With all other things you mentioned the relation between how much money you throw in and the value you get scales much more linearly.

Thanks, user.

Right now I've been playing NHL 04, SMAC and a little bit of Republic the Revolution (made by the devs behind Evil Genius) to tide me over in between working on my novel. I'll check these out and see if they're good.

Also likely a good point, wherein marketing not only hits a point of no additional returns, but even starts to lose return due to reaching a point where over-saturation jumps from "increasing awareness" to being just plain annoying. Bombard people with shilling too much, and you risk them either dropping away from it all, or doing the opposite out of spite (which of either, or both, is possible depends on the circumstances; with vidya it's generally a you-buy-it-or-you-don't).

Normalfags want to watch movies and not play games, so the people looking to make money will make movies pretending to be games.

Exceptions being the ones who have a fetish for retro games and eat up the indie stuff made of bad pixel art, voxels, or just poorly made models.

The honest truth is that in actuality, most game makers want to make money, and they have realized that making things look good is more important than how the game plays. The pushes with technology to improve how games look as been on the plate of game designers since the 80s, and they've reached a point where they have obscured every other point of game design. If they continued at a slow, even pace where the improvements in how games are made allowed for more gameplay and just slight increases in graphical capability, we would be in the same market we had around the time of PS2 and g-cube era.
The gamecube was really good at putting a lot of objects on the screen at once without dying, and this lead to simple games like pikmin where you could move around scores of helping troops to move around other things, fight enemies, etc. The thing that makes pikmin run so well is the fact that the GC could process every asset in the level and keep it there. Every stage has a set number of objects present, the only variable being your troops, so when it loads the level in, it just needs to load the entire stage as a sandbox that you can interact with. The stages in Pikmin aren't exactly expansive, but they were massive in a way when you start the game; until you open all the level's shortcuts, day 2 you're pretty much going through this huge, snaking level every time. The game was built around the strengths of the console
PS2 was not the best with draw distance, but it was really good at textures and making things look pretty as long as they were up in front of the camera. Silent Hill, God of War, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, all of these games accentuate this by having very close in, fixed camera angles that stay close to the points of interest, allowing the game to load squares of information like megaman or metal gear did. Shadow of the Colossus dedicated a game to making a world that was expansive as possible, but because of this they could only load in parts of the world map at one time, and they only added single fights to the game, probably not for the same reasons, but it could really go either way.
Now consoles are just slightly less useful computers that only run certain things, they're not really making games with them in mind or vice versa.

jews only care about money

Graphics are important. Consider Dark Souls. It has good graphics and good gameplay, and people still play it.

Because art and graphics are easier to define and put a price tag on than design is. A person who actually understand what makes a game fun and how games work and how to design a game to maximise a game's strengths and avoid its pitfalls is basically labeled as an "idea guy" and is excluded from the budget.

Every game should have not just beta testers but also pre-alpha and even prototype testers, and those testers should be working intimately with the programmers and artists. They should be allowed to raise important questions such as "how do we make this (more) fun?" and "how do we integrate this into the gameplay better?" and "is this the feel and emotional weight you wanted for this segment?" Instead, mostly due to corporate organization and "optimization", you're lucky if the testers even work for the same company as the designers.

Testing is my job and I've heard rumors that it might get outsourced to forign countries like India in the next few years. If that happens, expect a LOT more fundimentally broken games from AAA devs.

because companies are run by incompetent hacks who got rejected from other business and just milk shit.

Square Enix, Activision, EA, Ubisoft and Capcom are good examples of companies who have no idea what they're doing but are usually saved by a popular IP

Square = Dying
Activision = CoD
EA = SPORTSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Ubisoft = Dying
Capcom = Dying, even with the most popular and diverse IP only second to Nintendo. Now that's just incompetence

the only company I can think of that can successfully control normalfags is Bethesda, and that's only with Todd's games or a numbered sequel.

>>>/reddit/
>>>/neogaf/
>>>/4chan/
>>>/somethingawful/

Because there goal isn't to make good games. It's to make profit.

is right.

And flashy stuff sells better, even if it's actually shit.

Right, I'm sure that's totally true
When I see a thread that isn't for a cult classic from 15 years ago or triple A garbage released this year I'll consider it

AAA games are already mostly shit on release. Some are partially redeemed with patches or mods, at least. But this would make things even worse, in just about every way. Fuck this gay Earth.

Only russians do this nowadays.

Guess you should go to reddit / neogaf etc like he suggested since your required terms are met.

Stalker is a cult classic, just from 10 years ago rather than 15 you spaccy cunt

Too spastic to read my post properly I see.
Also nice to show that you arent an unreasonable contrarian yourself by just outing it as being "cult classic" pretty much any even shitty game has a following you could argue to be a "cult" so in practice you pretty much told us to find a game that isnt 15 years old and doesnt have anyone "group" who likes it.
Fuck off to neofag my dude.

I think you need to check what moving goalposts is
It's cool though, I realise you're a retard, I won't hold it against you

Graphics and cutscenes are marketable (because it must only look good, not be good) and marketing makes money because common plebs are malleable husks which only resemble a human being.
Death to all Jews.

I was with you until that second sentence.

Reported for anti-semitism.

Back to your containment board, fucking retard.

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Because normalfags are retarded pigeons that only care about shinies.

I just see a nigger. He's probably in prison right now.

it is when your kind is involved.

BUT TODAY'S GRAPHICS SUCK DICK. Instead of looking like any of those amazing pre-rendered cinematics from before 2005.

They instead look LIKE THIS.

Then why the fuck do we allow them to live? I'm sick and fucking tired of this decade of garbage. We should have not lived through this. This should have not lasted for more than 3 years at most.

We never had degeneracy this insane, the 90s PC culture was a total joke and nobody took it seriously.
Now we have companies listening to retards, feeding them, protecting them, instead of just killing them.

But that's wrong because even the graphics look abysmal.

9000 hours

Because its easier to cover the turd with a golden coating and paying people to say its pure gold that just happens to be shaped like a turd than making actual gold. Plus some people unironically believe that if you keep buying shitty games from the same dev the games will eventually become good.

Because for the same amount of money, one requires creativity and innovation and one doesn't. Designing good gameplay is mentally challenging. Designing realistic graphics isn't - just look outside and there's your template.

This game looks fun. Is the "meta" storyline as pretentious and stupid as it looks? If it is, is it at least easy to ignore or play around?

fucking this. A big problem with the current-year industry is that playtesters get no love from devs or from gamers. The difference between mario 3 and some amateurish gamemaker garbage is hundreds and hundreds of hours playtesting the game.

There's always a balance between the vision of a director and the 'playability' of that vision from the point of view of the gamer. It's a chicken and egg type of relationship but these days the director (who controls the cult of celebrity and big $$ in the form of publishing dollars) seems to impose their decisions with the job of playtesting being outsourced to the gamers themselves through public betas or some other useless cost-cutting measure.

That would require smart gamers. And Holla Forumsirgins are just self-hating normalfags who end up doing the same.

Why does a shitty korean pre-rendered cinematic from 2001 look better than most video game cinematics nowadays? at least from an art style perspective.

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This is how gay meta-dweebs are.