I've never worked in the game industry. Please, pardon my ignorance and draw my attention to better ways to look at this.

It guts me. The AAA sector has been the equivalent of factory farming of the beigest, lowest common denominator for at least two decades now. Now the industry is laying off lots of hard working people that earned the profits they operate on. That's business. There are few, if any, companies who set out to foster creativity. Iwata, CEO of Nintendo back in the 00s, has been making headlines for his legendary move of halving his and having the board at the time take 20% cuts to their salaries to stop Nintendo from hemorrhaging the creativity and "take responsibility for the poor performance". I've never heard of this happening before or since.

Can you imagine the balls it took to make that move? Even more, to get the executives at Nintendo to go along with it? Not brass, adamantium.

Nintendo cultivated a community of creativity, and they understood how valuable that is. I wish I had the cash it would take to do something similar. I have been making a point of browsing GOG's indies, itch.io, and Patreon to foster that kind of creativity. If only I could do more.

I'm not sure where I am going with this, except to encourage everybody else to take a look at the Indie scene. Throw some money down when you find something worth playing. There is so much good stuff out there to find. The hard part is matching that good stuff with the people who resonate with those games.

I'm a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the whole AI thing. I don't think AI is threat to artists many of us are afraid it is. After tinkering around with image generating AI, I have come to recognize that it takes skills all its own. It takes a trained eye to recognize what is worth keeping and what is worth tossing. I am hoping the next wave of indies are able to leverage AI in a way to make prototyping, getting better games to demo, and flesh out into a final product with a team when they find something that resonates.

Do you have any pet indies that need some love? Share them with us! I would love to see more of these. Especially projects from people affected by the industry turbulence.

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Here's one I found about a year ago. Toziuha Night: Draculas Revenge. This is a classicvania the solo developer put together as a demo for his metroidvania Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists.

This game gives me such Aria of Sorrow vibes. It definitely deserves some love. I would love to see this on GOG, too. If GOG were to create their own Android store, this would be a fantastic addition.

Price: $4.99
Platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux, Android

There's a GOG release of Order of the Alchemists planned.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/toziuha_night_order_of_the_alchemists

With that said, these games (or at least their demos) have some issues for me:
* For the first game, I was unable to turn off controller vibration, and that's a deal breaker for me. (There's a setting that's supposed to do this, but it doesn't work and the game often crashes when I try to leave the menu after changing it.)
* For the second game, I got to a certain point early in the demo, right after the first save point, where there's a mandatory jump that appears to be impossible.

By the way, if you want more metroidvanias in this style, have you tried Timespinner or Bloodstained? (Timespinner could certainly use some love, even though it has a balance issue in that your defense power increases too quickly.)

There is a myth that everyone who was cut was someone of talent. I've been through several restructuring efforts on both sides of it. I'll tell you know with confidence that all the best and most hardworking individuals stay employed. Maybe a chunk of the good ones are laid during the shuffle. The vast majority (75%) of those let go, are either inessential to the company or are outright worthless. Yes, that's the unfortunate cost of business. Companies should trim fat in proper amounts, not go balls to the wall, but this is the current reality.

That being said, this recent wave has a lot to do with the employee shortage a couple years back. Many large studios overstaffed during that time thinking that there was an apocalypse coming for them in the form of not enough talent. Now, it's becoming apparent that the quantity is unsustainable. It's not a thing only in the gaming industry, it's across the entirety of the tech sector.

I do concede that everyone in leadership take an example from Iwata. That however should not directly translate to utterly useless idiots continually being employed and wasting time. I'm sure many have worked with such before... and they can be a part of the restructuring any day.

NOICE!!!

Yeah, it's a hazard of the indie scene. Some things go unpolished. Still, we can recognize something as being worth encouraging despite its flaws. I own Bloodstained on GOG, XBox and Switch. Such a good game! Iga got the love he rightly earned.

I am going to have to look into Timespinner. That sounds like a good time.

Since Toziuha is getting love from GOG, I will submit another game in need of love:

Trash of Titans, a turn-based strategy game about cuddly scavengers. Well yeah, 99% of every artform is crap. You are not wrong, not everybody who got laid off is a Kubrick-level auteur in the making. I just mean to say, there are people with real skills who get cut, too. It's great that we have places to find indies and give them some attention. Hopefully a few will be able to take what they know from the big companies and use it for themselves to build creative teams.

Yeah, part of what I meant to highlight with Iwata is the fact that there was a person who fostered a community and network of creative professionals. That community and network is a valuable resource that makes Nintendo what it is. It sounds like you are describing a situation where people were taken on without much care to fostering that kind of pool of creativity. Which is a shame, but it shows.

It shows with the AAA live service garbage we have been seeing. It shows with the unwillingness for games to tell stories that say -- anything other than "hey, look at those particle effects!" It shows with a fixation on graphics technology that bring us closer and closer to the trough of the uncanny valley.

Consolidated above.

Of course it's the majority they listen to. We're not in 80s/90s anymore with games for nerds like Might and Magic or Ultima or Wizardry. Video game industry is a bussiness now, and a big one at that and bussinesses exist for making money, first and foremost.

While I do enjoy most games I play, the infatuation with the bad side of eldritch (not to say straight up mental) is painfully apparent in games nowadays. And it's not just games but the whole entertainment. In my opinion we got collectively numbed by years and years of this stuff, so bad that they have to feed us more and more bizarre stuff to get our juices pumping.

We don't want to be heroes anymore, that's for sure.

Don't get the wrong idea when reading my post. I do think for example that Postal used violent mental illness theme in a classy way and it was an artistic choice. On the other hand, frantic violence in most games nowadays just seem a bit off putting to me. And it's not just those mental games that do that. Take The Witcher 3, or Warframe and basically anything multiplayer really. I can't be sure but I bet that after a momentary excitement over the graphics quality, those nerds from 80s/90s would be off put by the amount of creepy/ultraviolent stuff in games nowadays.

Speak for yourself on the hero part. There are dozens of us who can't play as evil characters.

The thing about gaming is that the variety is hidden by the walls of repetition. There's simulators of every kind out there and more churning on the way. And all of that with little to no violence. But you don't see those because they don't get the big splashy advertisements.

What people want is a fantastical real life. Doesn't matter what kind. Whether magic or technological, people want to do more than they are able to. So gaming will never die as long as it offers that.

It was a manner of speech, probably should have said "majority of us don't want to be heroes anymore", but what I wrote seemed more forceful.

That's demagogy for you.

Personally I just want to be left alone to learn and enjoy what I want in my free time, which I do and I don't need fantastical life for that. But yeah, I get what you're saying.

I agree. As much as we blame corporations like EA or Ubisoft for copy-pasting games and not innovating, it doesnt change the fact that EA made sports games are still some of the top sellers in the video game industry. Even though there is a unified rallying cry against microtransactions, games like GTA Online still rake in millions a year through those microtransactions. Corporations are just serving a need they clearly see in the market.

While the trolling and insults have always been a thing since the arcade days, there is a clear change in gamers' preferences in what they want in games. People now want beautiful graphics, a "mature" story, lots of lore, and almost infinite replayability. I frequently see questions on reddit asking about what game you could replay forever, if you could only have one game for the rest of your life what would it be, and similar sentiments of only playing one game. Gameplay and mechanics take a backseat over story with games like GTAV or The Last of Us being praised as the best games ever made when games like Metal Gear Solid 3 or Resident Evil 4 exist. If gamers want those kinds of games and are willing to pay for DLC and microtransactions, why shouldnt companies serve to meet that need?

I do think indie games are the future. The big AAA developers now all made their start from "indie" games that were fun (except for EA). While AAA devs can sometimes make amazing games, their high costs prevent them from taking risks and making anything truly innovative while smaller devs can and take the risk to do so. Its probably why many top developers are leaving and founding their own studios (Kojima and Mikami being obvious examples).

I beat San andreas a long time ago and it rubbed me the wrong way, I haven't played a gta since and seeing people in real life go down drug influenced downward spirals and being quick to get themselves into conflict troubles... Yea the amount of crime and torture Sims in gaming isn't just disturbing, it makes ya feel angry. And younger gamers seem to relish getting older people with convictions angry. I also notice that gog is a lot different than Steam. You guys actually post content and thoughts and not one sentence trolling.

The same idiots on steam who post no content at all, and talk shit constantly go on about simps. Pretty damn hypocritical. But the reason San Andreas rubbed me the wrong way. Here is cj, a violent greedy stereotype, who gets mansions, fast cars, a gf of every race, and can even collect military tanks. Fuck this guy, he's a pos that deserves a firing squad. This is not a role model, this is not a guy people should fantasize about being.

Fuck crime Sims, for many of us we have seen this behavior in real life I guess those Scott's over at Rockstar haven't to make light of some of the worst behavior on the planet.

Not saying censor gta or ban it, or anything. Freedom of speech and creativity. But I'm not interested in that toxic filth. As for my colorful language, hey I'm new here I can afford a few moderator warnings before I have to act like a shivering online victim. Which is what they want, nobody likes honesty.

The fact that the big companies are publicly traded does in fact affect incentives for the worse. AAA has become Hollywood, where risk is minimized and returns are the focus. Art style and innovation is the afterthought. If there IS innovation, it is immediately copied and rehashed to death. They get away with it because popularity invites popularity. Just how it is, just how it always will be. No one has the time to look through every game online for gems. Why would they do that when they can go off the best sellers, the recommendation list, or their favorite sport as mentioned above? This is at least part of the reason I started buying more games on GOG - Steam might have everything, but it's impossible to find anything on your own. Their algo is useless.

You quote Nintendo as an exception and example of innovation, but I am not sure it is a good one. The fact is that for every innovative game they put out there are 5 remakes of games they have already made updated and repackaged for their current console. The only difference in them and the other big corporations is that they treat their paying customers with dignity. Their games are overly expensive, but they are complete and they are polished. At most there is a single expansion pack to add to them, if that. They also understand the desire for one to own their own games. This stuff creates the perception they love their own games, but you could argue they do it just because they target a much wider demographic than normal gaming companies. They are a good company regardless of the motivation (Japanese mentality regarding IP aside) but I don't think it's necessarily because of amazing creativity in their games.

Anyway, I am just happy that games are not like film where there seems to be a greater barrier to entry. As long as there is an audience to appreciate more adventurous games we'll always get good titles.

Yeah, I can see, why they would ban you there...

Most AAA games are shovelware.

And most indie games are also shovelware.

itch.io is the motherlode of shovelware.

GOG has far more shovelware in its catalog than it has good games in its catalog.

So while I do agree that AAA games are garbage, usually, the same is also true of indie games just as much.

Don't sing Nintendo's praises too hard. If you don't recall they did and still do, take down creators constantly. They seem to be waging an active copyright war against their own community constantly. Nintendo is arguably more litigious than their competition all put together.

No large developer/publisher/manufacturer is without fault here.

Live services, microtransactions, and other crap that you mentioned are not alone indicative of a bad studio. They are an unfortunate evolution of gaming ever since the horse armor, and all the way to the current state of mobile gaming. Path of Exile is heralded as one of the (if not the) best aRPG from an indie studio. They also have one of the worst microtransaction/ live-service systems I've ever seen.