I still think that falling ship level in Jedi Knight 1 is really exciting. The layout’s quite large and so much of it feels explorable that even when it’s just an illusion and the player’s stuck to a linear path, its effective at selling you on a sense of scale in a way that some contemporary shooters struggle with.
BTW Giles, a new reversed engineered fan port for Dark Forces 1 should be releasing in a couple of weeks. The dev’s been ironing out the kinks for getting iMUSE to play friendly on modern machines. It aims to also be compatible with the LucasArts Western shooter Outlaws.
Awesome!
I always forget about Outlaws when talking about the Star Wars FPS games, but damn, I loved that game about equally with the others. Fantastic level design. Has anyone ever created campaign levels as immersive as those games back then? I can still see many of those places in my mind. And yes, the Falling Ship level was one of those unforgettable places and moments.
I’m sure many games have done it better, or at least with more detail as technology marched on, but in the context of the day (or in the parlance of our times), nothing drew me into their worlds like those Golden Age shooters.
Man, people sure are worried about the dollar losing it’s value because of the government. It’s all I’m hearing about at work from my boss, on discord from my friends, this blog entry.
It just seems inevitable to me that when you have the world population grow so big, especially in a tertiary economy, you’re going to have a lot of people trying to create art. They usually have day jobs, maybe not filling pot-holes, but doing something. Usually in the service economy or tech jobs. And in their spare time they create games, music, books. And there’s a hell of a lot of output. Shrug. This guy really needs to chill. There’s a lot bigger concerns. Like Climate Change and its various consequences and effects.
How long has Jeff Vogel been ranting about there being too many indie games? Feels like it must be a decade by now. Maybe it was kind of insightful the first time around, but at this point if feels more like him being resentful of there being more competition.
I don’t get the concept of “too many” games. I mean, it’s a market, right? If there are too many, the people making the ones that don’t sell will stop making games, presumably. If people are continuing to make games, they must be selling to someone? There could of course be some lag built in, as people jump into a market with projects having long lead times and only hit the market after it gets glutted, but by and large the idea of “too many” seems weird when there is a self-correcting mechanism at work, supposedly.
Part of his point is that the vast majority of these indie games actually aren’t selling to anyone. The devs make them, give away a few codes for reviews or friends and family, sell a couple to the curious, but that’s it. I don’t think any of that is in dispute. We have solid numbers to back that up via Steam’s own publicly accessible data.
His theory (which I’m not sure I agree with) is that people keep making them because they’re indoors with no other creative outlet. It’s either go make an indie game or stream on YT/Twitch, anything as long as it’s indoors work at a computer type work. They’d rather do that than go out and do “meaningful” work because that stuff pays little and is physically hard.
Ok, maybe not selling, but the market is still working; people are choosing to spend their time producing games instead of, I dunno, growing cabbages or something. They presumably are getting something out of it that makes it worthwhile for them. If that is making it harder for other people to sell their games, which they make for other reasons, I fail to see how that should be a problem for anyone other than those people. Rather, it’s indication that people need to look for more robust ways to get their product to consumers.
Totally. Even if he’s right - that the glut of indie games is due to people using game development as a creative outlet with no thought for business - I say, “So what?” For the guy slapping out visual novel #465, if he makes his audience of three happy, and that’s all he cares about, good for him.
He thinks so! He goes on about would-be musicians and authors for a bit. I’m sure Etsy creators would’ve been in his rant if he’d thought about them.
An aside: I am fully aware this phenomenon isn’t just video games.
Spotify now gets over 60000 new songs a day. Amazon now has millions of books. My country has over 550 scripted TV shows in production. And then all of the blogs and podcasts and Twitch streams and webcomics and YouTubers and VTubers and on and on and on …
Yeah, I’m saying there’s too many songs. And I know, musicians are the most precious and valuable and significant people there are. I know this because it’s what musicians keep telling me. But 60000 a day? Sheesh!
Our children are taught to dream of nothing grander then adding to this indigestible mountainous hoard of distractions. Most created alone. Almost all consumed alone in a room in our atomized society. Seeking wheat in chaff. Mountains of chaff. OCEANS of chaff.
I think there’s a lot of games because a) people like making them and b) modern tools have made it much more accessible.
I started making games in Flash before switching to PC. There were 100k+ games on Kongregate prior to the demise of the Adobe plug-in, roughly twice as many as Steam has. I don’t recall anyone claiming the huge number of games was due to “affluent children of empire” at the time.
I think the point that “competition is insane, your game probably won’t be successful” is accurate – yeah, for a small project, it probably won’t!
Where he’s way off is tying this to wasting money. Independently learning to develop software and shipping something is one of the most lucrative hobbies that you could possibly have, if you decide to cash in on that experience. There are a ton of people that went to school for games, or amateur hobbyists, that are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporations making Not Games.
Vogel started this conversation on Twitter and got swarmed for it. A lot of folks brought up a lot of the arguments that are coming up here, and I think a lot of those are valid counterarguments. But what he didn’t explain very well on Twitter–and only explained slightly better in the blog post–is that he’s making a civilizational critique. That’s why he knows he can’t tell anyone else to change their behavior to fix the problem; that’s why there’s no individual or even any government or policy that you can blame for it.
The word for what Vogel is trying to describe is “decadence.” Whether it applies to us is a judgment call and a matter of degrees, but I don’t think it’s hard to find the signs of it if you look around. It can be wonderful living and creating in a decadent society. What makes it decadent is that it’s not meaningfully productive, relative to the amount of energy and attention put into it. Vogel’s contention is that the amount of work that young energetic people put into making video games compared to the effect those games have on the world is out of whack.
I can think of one (maybe small) counter to his thesis, and that’s that I think we see indie developers turning their craft from pure amusement/stimulation toward addressing–in the ways they can via the particular medium–some of the problems of the times. More and more games explicitly touch on issues of anxiety, depression, responsibility. I bet among those 11,000 games released last year, a good dozen at least are stories about Imposter Syndrome! To me, this shows that those creators aren’t entirely happy making timewasters, but have an innate desire to make something more meaningful. And players tell game devs all the time that their games have a critical effect on their lives. From an grand view, though, maybe it’s worth asking whether those contributions are proportional to the time and energy expended.
Still, if they aren’t, there’s no one to condemn for this fact, which is what makes the conversation frustrating at times, I think. Nobody polices these things, and nobody has a dial that they can turn to affect it. I tend to think Vogel is right that the most likely corrective is going to come in the form of an external event of probably catastrophic character, and that’s what will realign our values.
He’s a few decades too late, isn’t he? Maybe it wasn’t games, but I’m pretty sure wanting to be a something star has been high in what people want to be for a long time now.
In any case, while I do agree that too many games are being made, unless those games are being made as a commercial venture, attempts by people slowly losing their initial capital trying their hail Mary attempt at striking it big, I don’t see the problem. Everyone has ideas for games, at least everyone who had games introduced to them when they were young and have kept up with the hobby.
What’s wrong with making games as a hobby? Or as a way to learn coding?
And sure, maybe that means there are too many games. Too many books,. Too many movies. Too many songs. Sure as shit, too many sportspeople, who the hell still cares how fast you can run a marathon, just use a car.
