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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

> "Gamers deserve better"? What is that supposed to mean?

It means they deserve better than all the garbage that's been pushed out over the last 5 years or so since Unity and Unreal became free, and Steam relaxed its submission standards. There's been a massive wave of terrible "games" that people are just forced to accept because they don't know any better.

I'm not hating on indie game devs in general, there are of course plenty of amazing ones. But the real problem is this trend of a small group of devs forming a "studio", coming up with really ambitious plans for a huge game after learning Unity for a month, and then releasing early access garbage like PUBG and abandoning it when they realize making a triple-A game takes years of effort by a vast team of expert professionals.

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There would be no Fortnite if it wasn't for Brendan Greene aka PlayerUnknown, who is basically single-handedly responsible for creating the Battle Royale game genre. I see no problem in him attempting to make some money on his creation before a AAA giant comes in and sucks the air out of the room.

That's a mighty large statement. He may have made one of the most popular games but he certainly did not come up with the idea in gaming (Minecraft mods based on movies) or in movies (Battle Royale is a Japanese movie from 2000).

It's been a point of contention recently, the question of who created battle royale. Perhaps Greene is responsible for the modern iteration of it, but the last-man-standing concept has been around in gaming since Bomberman in 1983. And the concept of battle royale in general was popularized with the Hunger Games and of course the film named Battle Royale. And, "battle royale" as a phrase was used by Ralph Ellison in 1952 in his classic novel Invisible Man, describing a free-for-all boxing match that the protagonist must participate in. So Brendan Greene didn't come up with this out of thin air, or at least he wasn't the first.

On the other hand, I see no problem with him trying to profit from it either.

Edit: I correct myself -- in Invisible Man, the phrase was "battle royal," not "battle royale." It's still clearly similar however.

It was in wrestling before any of those, too. Mirriam-Webster dates it to 1671.

You are just nit picking. He is talking about the closing circle game mechanics. Yes simple but yet genius.

Bomberman shrank the arena when the matches went to sudden death. Pretty sure others also did this (certainly common in single player games of that era and earlier - arguably Joust with it's rising lava is close to being the first for that sort of thing)

Like almost all game mechanics, I'm fairly sure I saw this in a WC3 custom map half a decade ago.

Or even in a StarCraft (the first one) map. AFAIK, MOBAs were invented in SC/SCBW, and refined with the original DotA - the W3 map.

(Tangentially, I'm still amazed at the variety of gameplay ideas people were testing in SCBW and W3's UMS maps).

lookup H1Z1

also this concept was a minecraft mod called hunger games before that even

PUBG succeeded and vastly popularized the BR genre but it definitely didn't invent it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game#Early_games...

  While Battlegrounds was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million units by the end of the year,[18][19] and is considered the defining game of the genre.

> lookup H1Z1

That's what the grandparent was saying: Brandon Greene, the man mostly responsible for PUBG was also responsible for H1Z1 (SOE licensed the Battle Royale mode from him for H1Z1 and hired him as a consultant): https://www.pcgamer.com/battle-royale-modder-brendan-greene-...

I don't think the question is who started the genre, but who made it commercially viable. And I think pubg gets this

If anything, it's the movies that made it commercially viable, not games that came out later and rode on the wave.

I doubt 50 million people in the West have seen a Japanese cult film, but 50 million people have bought PUBG.

Didn't everyone see Godzilla?

So your problem is that beginners make things and you have to sift through it on day zero without the help of reviews, and/or aren't aware of Steam's generous refund policy.

Excuse me if I find that viewpoint to be very disrespectful to indie developers. I know there is a problem with "asset flippers", but you have to take the good with the bad. Open access is not a bad thing.

Indie devs are honest people just trying to express themselves. If anyone "deserves" anything, it's the indie dev to not be treated like shit by their customers. They don't make games with the intent of getting huge and annoying 1% of the self-identified "hardcore" gamers with their idiosyncrasies. They are just trying to do their best with the resources they have. Sometimes (rarely) they hit on a recipe that captures the zeitgeist and makes them grow way far out of control for what they are prepared for. That doesn't mean they deserve to be bitched at our told they are screwing their customers.

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