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[Holammer]

'Sir, We Have an Orc Problem' was released a few days ago on Steam, a cheap roguelite tower defense game by a tiny Germany indie studio.
It did not make a massive splash, but they found a niche audience. Interestingly they posted the deets on Twitter and they earned $361,657 in the first 24 hours.
This is a game developed in four months, by two guys with no marketing and a soda and frozen pizza budget. You don't need to be Nerdslayer to figure out they chose popular genres and themes for the game and it worked.

They suggest indies "make smaller games faster" and there's truth to it, some of the big hit friendslop games for the past two years went from idea to finished product in weeks.
RV There Yet? devs worked on a "real game", they paused development, worked on RV for 9 weeks and it sold several millions of copies.

 

[The_hunter]

A lot of indies put a lot of effort into making a complex project. While it's probably better to pump out smaller gameplay focused games.

 

[StereoVsn]

How many fast made "slop" games can sell though? That novelty wears off quickly.

 

[Killer8]

Not just indies.

 

[Fake]

Herwomen: No.

 

[lughnasadh123]

Or devs can figure out the budget and timeline that works best for them.

 

[simpatico]

Doesn't help bad ideas become good ideas. Orc Problem is just a good ass idea. It didn't really need to cook any longer. I'd like to see the big pubs cut those budgets into third and make smaller game. Treat them like lottery tickets. That's how Ubi operated in the 00s when they were on fire.

 

[Buggy Loop]

No Law from Neon Giant is the kind of scope I hope to see more and more from a ~25 ish team. Insanity what they are doing.

Teams with >400 artists are in deep shit. It's not gonna be sustainable.

 

[Lokaum D+]

Go back to ps360 era of lenght, no more bloated open world games

 

[Clear]

On the face of it a good idea...

But:

Its very self serving to expect bigger, more experienced teams to give up their advantage of working at scale with ambitions to match.

The real issue however is what would happen if everyone tried that. The market cannot support all the games it has now, so greater churn would mean more titles slipping through the cracks.

"More games not better games" is basically the GamePass philosophy, and its toxic.

The plain truth is there will always be successes and failures in an open marketplace, the goal should be to maximize the number of successes versus failures, and just shitting out increasing volume is not going to do that. Especially on digital storefronts where visibility is key.

 

[rkofan87]

'Sir, We Have an Orc Problem' was released a few days ago on Steam, a cheap roguelite tower defense game by a tiny Germany indie studio.
It did not make a massive splash, but they found a niche audience. Interestingly they posted the deets on Twitter and they earned $361,657 in the first 24 hours.
This is a game developed in four months, by two guys with no marketing and a soda and frozen pizza budget. You don't need to be Nerdslayer to figure out they chose popular genres and themes for the game and it worked.

They suggest indies "make smaller games faster" and there's truth to it, some of the big hit friendslop games for the past two years went from idea to finished product in weeks.
RV There Yet? devs worked on a "real game", they paused development, worked on RV for 9 weeks and it sold several millions of copies.

but most fast-made games feel like slop most of the time