XB1 3 Million Units Sold

[cidbahamut]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

It's more than just the indie community backlash. There's plenty of folks out there who are still bitter and spiteful regarding Xbox One's initial approach to dealing with consumers(read: cockslapping them).

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

It's more than just the indie community backlash. There's plenty of folks out there who are still bitter and spiteful regarding Xbox One's initial approach to dealing with consumers(read: cockslapping them).

The spite didn't make much of a difference; it looked like the retailers were able to sell xBox One about as fast as they could get them from Microsoft.

Above and beyond the ability to make some sales, it fills out a software catalog (something I think everyone agrees has been a weakness for the Vita, and is certainly an issue for fledgling new consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One).

Good point; I would only add that catalog stuffer is helpful as long as it's not shovel-ware. (Then again, consumers have very high tolerance for year after year of movie/tv merchandising games... I guess as long as the programmers and the artists get to eat, I should be happy for them.)

I think we're down to semantics here. What matters at the end of the day is: are people making money on the games, and does the consumer - and the platform itself - benefit? I think the answer for now is "yes" to all of the above. The rest is just putting things into buckets for classification.

Semantics can be important; saying "The Indies are of a great help to the industry" doesn't mean much unless we know what exactly is "The Indies" and have some sense of how much of the industry is in that bucket.

That said, I'm happy there seem to be more and more teams willing to make the odd and unusual titles, pushing the boundary of the medium, or just making games in categories ignored by the big players, if even I'm a bit fuzzy on who/what they are exactly, and remain unconvinced if they are truly 'important'.

[Icemage]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

That said, I'm happy there seem to be more and more teams willing to make the odd and unusual titles, pushing the boundary of the medium, or just making games in categories ignored by the big players, if even I'm a bit fuzzy on who/what they are exactly, and remain unconvinced if they are truly 'important'.

That willingness to experiment on a small scale is what makes the indie scene so important. More and more, AAA-level games are costing more to produce and as a direct consequence, developers and publishers alike for major big budget games are progressively less willing to take any significant risks. There's a reason why Call of Duty is more or less identical every year; it's because Activision knows it has a cash cow and breaking the formula too much will alienate the audience and end the gravy train prematurely. Indies have smaller scopes and are much more able to explore those niche tastes that might not appeal to millions of gamers, but still able to be supported by a healthy consumer ecosystem.

It's also important to note that the indies of today may become the major studios of tomorrow. Some of the biggest names in game development began as similarly small indie startups. id Software started life as an indie developer. Valve was too. Activision began as a splinter group of misfits originally from Atari.

And then you have places like PopCap games that started as a free-to-play browser game indie startup. Zynga was an indie startup at one point too.

It would not surprise me to see Mojang (Minecraft) eventually become a major player in the market. Notch has a LOT of money and the ability to bankroll pretty much anything he chooses.


Icemage

[DakAttack]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Can we stop pleasuring ourselves to the thought of indie developers? Are you guys aware that there's nothing independent about these "indies"? Their success is, to a large degree, dependent on publishing to platforms owned by Valve, Sony, and Microsoft.

Besides, what's so innovative and experimental about a million small-scope side-scrollers or isometric games built on pre-existing engines?

id was never indie; there was no commercial, mainstream process for publishing games back then. Browser games were never indie. Mojang was indie at one point, but the second he published to Xbox Live he lost that title. Nothing on Steam is indie.

[Icemage]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

^
So there are no indies, there are only commercial juggernauts? Right. I'll remember that the next time I play Hotline Miami that it's obviously identical to Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty because they're all about killing people, and I'll try to remember that games like The Witness and Zen Pinball are totally using someone else's game engine.


Icemage

[DakAttack]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

^
So there are no indies, there are only commercial juggernauts? Right. I'll remember that the next time I play Hotline Miami that it's obviously identical to Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty because they're all about killing people, and I'll try to remember that games like The Witness and Zen Pinball are totally using someone else's game engine.


Icemage

And I'll try to remember that you live in a black and white world.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

And I'll try to remember that you live in a black and white world.

If IM's world is black and white, yours is only black.

[cidbahamut]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Forget Indie gaming, I want shareware to make a comeback.

[Malacite]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Hell I'd settle for local multiplayer at this point.


Seriously I really hate how more and more games have phased it out. The best part about Borderlands 2 wasn't the game itself (though it was hilarious and entertaining) but playing it with my buddy together as we joked and had fun. Yeah online MP is great, but so's local - why do we always have to pick? I mean shit, back in the day we really had to squint on those tiny ass SD TVs when playing stuff like Goldeneye with 4 people. Bow we have gigantic HDTVs and the best we can get if we're lucky is 2-player splitscreen? WTF?!

[cidbahamut]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

I feel like the fighting game genre is gonna be the last holdout for local multiplayer, and that's only because it's literally impossible to make the netcode good enough to phase it out.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Besides, what's so innovative and experimental about a million small-scope side-scrollers or isometric games built on pre-existing engines?

Engines are just tools; not every painter need to make his own brushes, not every mechanic needs to make his own wrenches.

Besides, no one thinks the indies pump out innovation and grand experiments to the exclusion of all else. It's pretty clear that Icemage means the indies are more likely to depart from the current formula than the studios working under major dev houses and publishers.

id was never indie; there was no commercial, mainstream process for publishing games back then.

Id was founded in 1991--of course there were commercial publishers then: Accolade, Acclaim, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. "Game publisher" is not a recent invention.

[Armando]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Can we stop pleasuring ourselves to the thought of indie developers? Are you guys aware that there's nothing independent about these "indies"? Their success is, to a large degree, dependent on publishing to platforms owned by Valve, Sony, and Microsoft. ... Nothing on Steam is indie.

You can define "indie" however you like, but most people seem to mean something along these lines:
1) Not funded by a major publisher.
2) No AAA budget.

Whether they pay a publisher to put their game on some particular store is irrelevant for most people.

Besides, what's so innovative and experimental about a million small-scope side-scrollers or isometric games built on pre-existing engines?

The bottom line is that the big devs and publishers will always go for whatever maximizes profits. That precludes many good games - which don't necessarily have to be innovative or experimental. Indie devs can make those games happen. Of course they also make a lot of shitty games happen, but what do you expect? A lot of them are amateurs.

[Icemage]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Forget Indie gaming, I want shareware to make a comeback.

Nope. I have a soft spot for some of the best of the shareware (Commander Keen), but modern independent digital distribution kicks shareware in the teeth.


Icemage

[cidbahamut]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

Commander Keen kicks every indie game to come out in the last decade in the teeth.

We need to cut the fat from this industry and that means letting some of the big players crash and burn while we ruthlessly castigate shitty indie developers for putting out shitty indie games. Not everyone who can beg for kickstarter money on the internet is up to the task of developing a game and we need to stop telling people that it's ok.

[Armando]

Re: XB1 3 Million Units Sold

We need to cut the fat from this industry and that means letting some of the big players crash and burn while we ruthlessly castigate shitty indie developers for putting out shitty indie games. Not everyone who can beg for kickstarter money on the internet is up to the task of developing a game and we need to stop telling people that it's ok.

The onus is on the backers to not be stupid. A fool and his money...