Post

it is not polite to say so but no discussion of the state of the games industry/press can really avoid the reality that the audience is just. really really bad.

195 reposts1K likes

It's nuts. The most fundamentally incurious audience ever. Go to any subreddit full of people who primarily engage with just one series as their main hobby, or even just *one game,* and 99% of them know nothing at all about it besides its most absolute surface-level qualities

not only are they definitely not clicking on a story or review for your indie game but after they play the one that blows up from northenlion's stream they will post "every indie game is just balatro but x slop now" at anything vaguely similar. and thats if you're lucky enough not to get harassed

how many of the guys that screamed about silksong through every single promo stream for like five years actually played another metroidvania in that time. ten percent? five?

This is almost certainly true as the way the industry defines "game players" includes people who play mobile slop or have a couple live service games/series and that's the only things they touch.

There is definitely something to this I think. I actually play a lot of games and I think it leads to a very different head space and having more nuanced opinions of games in general. And much less of the your entire personal self worth being based on one game.

silksong came out and the same subreddit that kept being talked up happily as a wacky, silly places of obsessive fans who love the game so much, quickly became a miserable swamp of endless complaints about team cherry choosing to make the game Somewhat Challenging.

As an indie enjoyer, we must come to these people with compassion, AAAs arent hitting, the world of indies can be intimidating at first, we must guide them. But no i do agree with you on this.

I also think that folks here overstate when A Discourse is happening. Not it's not; it's like 4 people talking about a thing maybe and seven more going "oh man, I can't believe thing is happening."

We have long talked about Gamers vs gamers, but every day I worry there are far more of the former than I think. I know the grumlings are louder than they are numerous, but they’re still really fucking loud.

there was a period of about 3-5 years where you could argue that the games press was starting to get more respectable, with criticism that was more nuanced and articulate than "is it good? what's the fun factor? is it worth my money?" and as it turned out the audience fucking hated it.

Also probably hasn't helped that the industry's marketing has consolidated almost entirely around (1) Keighly run events and (2) Nintendo, who fucking hate the games press lol. Seems they both read the room on where this situation was going

There were good intentions, but the constraints on the industry meant articles often felt more like intros. Plus, there was a habit of truisms like arcade games are just penny pinchers which often didn't get any pushback. A little too much US centric narrative crafting and a lack of true deep dives.

No the mirror is true though. While their are ghastly fucking people in the fan bases of these games your estimation of games journalism is laughable. Developer's compensation for games are based on the scores the games get while those same score companies are dependent on the games. Viscious Cycle

I think the way we consume video game stories is not correlative to how we play. Basically smartphone attention span is way larger than any video game console or TV even. And we writers are always fighting for literally grabbing somebody's head and focus them into what we wrote.

Also technology already gave up on convincing people to try this and that. Everything is algorythmic, nobody knows what they want unless you know your tastes pretty well. Maybe we need spaces to focus on gaming and absorb the content, just like when we used to save time to read our monthly magazines