Sometimes I make video games

Itch.io

  • 1 Post
  • 98 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 26th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m pretty dialed into indie games. What kind of games do you like? I might be able to recommend some. I get most of my indie recommendations through word of mouth or curators.

    The steam store page has an algorithm tuned to your preferences. If you’ve already been playing a lot of live service games, then it assumes you must like them. Once you start showing an interest in other games, you can probably just cruise through your discovery queue.

    To skip the algorithm, you can try looking at the steam store web page in a private / incognito window. But if most of the money makers are live service or free-to-play then that may just be the default offering.


  • I agree that it’d be nice if they depreciated in value like in the days of physical media.

    In those days though, the store only has a certain amount of shelf space. So in that sense it makes sense that they depreciated because a new game is always going to have a higher perceived value.

    Digital storefronts don’t have that problem. The game can be shared infinitely without accruing a ton of publishing costs. There’s always more shelf space.

    In this sense, there’s no financial motivation to depreciate. And we all know the social responsibility of big companies will be to only do what they’re forced to do.

    We often feel games ought to depreciate because that’s how it’s always been. But just because that’s how it’s always been doesn’t mean that’s how it always will be.

    Battlefield is an interesting case though where each game in the franchise is highly derivative of the previous game. So if each new game is essentially an upgrade of the previous one, then I’d agree that there should be an expectation that the older version is less expensive.

    The same could be said about many of the giant titles. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and most major sports games come to mind.

    One final thing to think of is that many games have continuing development. It’s basically the early access model (a whole other can of worms), and you could argue that many of these games appreciate in value. Some notables have - Factorio comes to mind.

    I don’t think Battlefield 2042 falls into that category though


  • Discounts on games creates a sense of urgency in the buyer, as most discounts are temporary. Since discounts are often shown on the front page of a storefront, it gets a lot of eyeballs on it. If someone’s wishlisted the game then they’ll even usually get a direct notification.

    Another way to look at it is that the game is always available at the full price. But if you’re a patient gamer then you can expect to get a lower price eventually.

    Depending on how much discretionary income you have, you might be forced to wait for a sale. Or the difference in price might be no object to you. Or you may have to hoist the black flag.

    Something else to consider is that the perceived value of the game differs from buyer to buyer. If I’m a big fan of a niche genre, I might be willing to spend more on a weird game than the average user. A $30 game might be worth it for me, but you might only think it’s worth $20

    And more to that point, it’s extremely difficult to nail down the exact value of a game. What honestly separates a $12 game from a $15 game when they both offer a unique experience?

    Anyway, all this to say, I don’t think having sales on games is strictly a predatory thing. Sometimes a discount is the only way you’ll get eyeballs on your game, or a way to reach more of the market that wouldn’t have otherwise bought your game.

    I do agree that modern AAA prices are out there. I don’t pay very much for games now, and usually AAA prices me right out of the market








  • Dominos used to be the cheapest pizza in town. Then we got a Little Caesars that was much cheaper.

    I was eating the cheapest pizza, so it’s Little Caesars for me. A couple years later they get shutdown for gross (heh) health code violations.

    I no longer get Little Caesars, and that made me rethink getting the cheapest pizza. Now I prefer my local pizzeria.











  • Not a specific command, but I learned recently you can just dump any executable script into ~/bin and run it from the terminal.

    I suffer greatly from analysis paralysis, I have a very hard time making decisions especially if there’s many options. So I wrote a script that reads a text file full of tasks and just picks one. It took me like ten minutes to write and now I spend far more time doing stuff instead of doing nothing and feeling badly that I can’t decide what to do.