You know, something occured to me recently:Back in ye olden days, competant Devs would shit out a game that would sell enough copies to pay their rent for 2 years and keep the lights on at their publishers for the same time, in the span of just 7-10 weeks on the regular. Take the A2600 ports of Donkey Kong, Defender, Space Invaders, etc.Why do we have indie devs taking YEARS to get out games that sell just as many copies but have more of an impact on the niche zeitgiest, 40-50 years later? Is it just because the tech now is more demanding of a solo dev to work in complex assets to a prebuilt engine? Is that really more difficult than programming artwork, mechanics, etc all via assembly and restricted under extreme size constraints?
I think you are drastically romanticizing development back then
>>12321791>Why do we have indie devsThe thread's not about retro games, but I'll humor you. There are more videogames nowadays. There is more competition. Steam alone is full of a fuckton of shovelware that you will never notice. The games that take years to make as you say are the feature-crept overly ambitious games inspired by stuff that were made by full professional teams.
tech and culture as a whole is stagnant,, theres no competing to be the first to the market with the best racing game, most realistic shooter, RPG with insane graphics etc. they take their time to build games to make them like investments, and to mitigate their risk. which I think is bullshit and lazy. the companies also have massive back catalogs so they just earn money on ports to new consoles and app stores. same as with music theres nothing new good out there, the new shit is AI made by nepo babies and 99% of everything else is reissues from the 70s, everyone else is starving to death. indie games seem to be doing better but its still grim. games were breaking barriers each year and that kind of shit bankrupted Squaresoft who was making significantly better games than Enix, yet they blew their budget trying to innovate graphically year after year (and by trying to invent a digital actress/ proto-AI waifu in 2001)compare with music in 1959 it was Elvis, Chuck Berry, Chubby Checker. 1969 It was Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath (in 70), MASSIVE change. 1979 disco donna summers, Michael Jackson 1989 hair metal bands, digital synths, drum machines galore, 1999 Eminem, Britney Spears and N sync, then from like 2009- to now in 2026 little has really changed. Taylor switch was on the charts then and was now, she's less "country" now but it's the same low quality writing. the only thing different is rap doesn't chart as much anymore thankfully. the iPhone was getting into its groove in 2009, now its much more powerful but its still an iPhone. 2009 many people were getting flat panel HDTVs and high speed internet with wifi...barely anything has changed in over 15 years except some incremental upgrades. even the clothing styles are the same. movies are all sequels and if they're a new series they're promoting groomer shit and casting was playing Pokemon with trying to see how many different ethnicities they could catch in one production
>>12321791a lot of shit changes in 5 decades
>>12322134The world actually did end in 2012 and we've been in some sort of limbo ever since.
>>12322226Parking Lot is Full, 2002:
And? How viable do you think score chasers would be in the modern day? You have games like Dodo Donut, Silver Bullet, and Devil Daggers, but most people don't care about that. The only thing that is successful and had a quick turn over rate would be Vampire Survivors. Expectations these days are much higher. Hell, you have people that think Golden age arcade games are unplayable. None the less who will be as willingly to accept graphics that Robotron 2084 sported.
Those types of games are still being released on the Speccy in large amounts.https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/releases
Depending on the studio, some indie operations could just be side jobs for some of the crew. The market was also different, like kids today make things in their intro to game design courses which could indeed have been sold as a full fledged game back in the 70s to early 80s, in terms of content, but nowadays they'd be lucky to sell 2 downloads for $2 each. The barriers to entry are lower, the tools are better, so the end result is the floor moves up. Just like 3D modeling, where if you could make a passable model of basically anything back in the early 90s, you were well on your way to a paying job. Nowadays, after picking around with Blender for a year, highschool art kids are able to produce models which exceed the quality of most top tier pro 3D work from 30 years ago.
>>12321791Some games would take close to year like Atlantis and some of the David Crane games. Solaris was started a couple of years before it was finally released so some games did take 2 years to make. Also Audacity games made by Atari devs from back in the day seem to take over 2 years for each one to come out.Yeah sure the first Space Invaders or Dooms sells well buy the next one who makes the same thing barely sells anything even if they took 2 years to make their Doom clone.Now with Phantom Gear, this was due out in 2020 and devs are still finalizing bosses, if they started at the launch of the Genesis they would be releasing after the Saturn launched, probably lazy half assed devs, you could say its not their main job but they were paid for it.Other games that are massively delayed I would guess they may work a couple of hours a day and get distracted by cartoons or something since there is no hard ass boss making them work 8 hours a day.>>12322530I play score chases until the game stops changing, I don't think its acceptable to have the same pacman type level repeat 100 times.
>>12322226yeah I sometimes think about that. 2012 I think is when a lot of the world (west? North America? at least the US) got smartphones. and from there it was downhill into everything being packaged into little clips and shitty mobile experiences. phones kept getting better but honestly my galaxy s2 that I bought with cash USED in 2012 was more powerful than the anbernig handheld I just bought for christmas.its just instead of some world ending apocalypse like people thought the mayans said would happen on 12/21/2012 or whatever, it was a significant % of people getting smartphones
>>12322134Well one of Square's big problems was making a CGI Final Fantasy movie with drab brown aesthetics and dark sci-fi (alien/metroid) setting.
>>12323353yeah and the main girl in that FF movie they were trying to market as like a digital actress for different movies. They put her on the cover of Maxim magazine and had all this marketing budget just behind this CGI actress. trying to make her a "brand". Aki Ross.
