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It's so fucking dire it drives me mad everything's gotta be 200 hours and mass appeal to everyone ever now to sell

[💙M] Time for some Cofrom Rock With You. Even though it's quite similar to Cotton Rock'n'Roll in terms of looks and mechanics, it also has much better stage and boss design and the alternate stages are much better done than the ones in RnR's.

I thought it was pretty common for sequels of any kind to sell less than the original games. Like not by orders of magnitude, but the trend has always been there. Could be wrong though, I’m just going off vague memory and also gut feeling.

to the season pass crowd it feels like being asked to move the party to a different location

I dont even think those sell all that bad its just no one makes them anymore You get a game that sells well and the sequel needs to make triple the last game did for some reason. Surely you could support the old game via dlc or smaller scale sequels surely

If they ever get made at all

yeah seems downstream from the dominance of algorithms and just the total collapse of a "games media" or "gamer" identity as instead the audience seperates to algorithmically assigned boxes for existing genres or simply brands. i dunno what to do with no mass audience for generalist curation

if a sequel/spinoff failed, make something new with everything you created from it. cult classics like SotN or Demons Souls only materialized due to it. Nintendo, Capcom, SquareSoft whole development model is based around it. indie studio contracted to make 1-2 games dont got that library building

my guess is all the chronic ‘loved it, didn’t beat it tho’ guys are the culprit

I feel like I first caught this when I realized River City Girls 2 had been out for months and nobody I followed who was crazy about the first one even made a peep about it.

yeah even in-class it's not better than competing things like selaco or supplice or hedon in... pretty much any way. I'd rank it as a mid-tier megawad if it was a doom wad

I wonder if this kind of underperformance (or more likely just a regression to the mean) could be better absorbed when money was cheaper.

I wonder if that includes refunds? I got the game on sale and refunded it because the encounter design was... extremely amateurish. second one is probably better for that

I was a fan of the first one and I didn't even know this existed, what??

I kinda wonder if this also dovetails with how much people are used to getting entertainment for 'free' now, like there's so much art out there of any medium that you can just tap into that the thought that someone has to get paid a living wage for this is like, a violation somehow

every time i see some "what happened to this game???" retrospective where the answer is "it got finished and released" i feel an undescribable dread

Game sequels being iteratively better stopped being the norm back in the 7th gen. And at best the exceptional polished 2nd entry would be followed by a third that puts the series in gaming jail for a while

I'm still trying to figure out whether Look Outside is the game I saw people talking about a while ago that's changed so much that it's fundamentally different now than it was at launch or if that's something else

i hate it!! i like when games are complete statements and you respond to feedback by making a new complete statement the next time

GaaS

It’s wild to me that the GOTY winner from 2016 is impossible to play anymore because it was fucking Overwatch and the game has gone through a billion updates (and a sequel I guess???)

try saying that about cyp2077 and you get crucified

basically makes me not want to ever buy a game at launch. I'm not gonna be playing your shit in six months I got other stuff to play!!

weirdly, some games like zomboid can seemingly do this? I have no idea where their money comes from, surely they can't slowly patch the game forever unless they're getting forever sales

We should have never normalized "Early Access". All games must now be Sisyphus' rock for years before they release. Sure, sounds great.

Likewise, it *is* iterative, and although Boltgun 2 is definitely a great game, I'm sure lots of people bought the first one *because* they saw it as a fresh warhammer experience

given hoppo is now at valve and they sold it to gearbox, I'd prefer gearbox did not try to make a ror3

there's a boltgun 2 ?

Maybe them putting a girl in it scared off the average 40k Fan

Gotta trick people into thinking its an expansion when its actually a sequel. Thats the only way to get around this problem now

they didn't put it on GOG unlike the first one is my reason, though i imagine i'm not exactly representative

iirc this is how Ubisoft makes a lot of their money

i would also include phone games in this

you end up with haves/have nots entirely determined by who has advocates in microsoft etc and, well, glad i work for one of the Haves!

They can't even call the new one mega man 12 lol

This is why the current indie dev model is “see which of your game jam games take off on itchio and then leverage influencer culture to boost number as big as possible during your 6 month dev cycle while you hit steam beats”

I'd be really curious if this trend came from actual sales performance or if the live service model replaced the need for quick turnaround sequels. There was also the trend of big studios pushing big resources and big franchises as their key advantage. This happened to Avowed 2 and I'm still upset.

I imagine it would've been a different story if I was forced to walk into a store to find out only Yakuza 5 is on the shelf, and then went "eh, I'll probably figure out the story as I go" while grabbing it

It's why the new fire emblem has like 100 hours of social game bloat and a strategy RPG in there. Somewhere

Obviously geography is also relevant in that discussion though. I am of the opinion that there won't be a significant video game industry west of St. Petersburg ten years from now.

Those have been replaced by DLC and Patches now. Unfortunate but thats what people are expecting nowadays

To be honest it’s kinda weird the Iterative Sequel ever existed in the first place. They seemed to fit in an awkward place between “balance patch” and “second season”, two roles live service games have largely taken up. A secondary casualty of the way digital media just does not work as a commodity

do majora's masks and pikmin 2s really not sell anymore? i LOVE games that take an existing solid engine and make the game go hard

It always angers me when a sequel comes out and "Its just the first game again but with some updates :/" like yeah?? "Its not a game changer or pushes the series forward, theres no gimmick to massively change it up" like yeah???? Thats fine!!!