Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

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> The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.

So what non-multiplayer AAA game you played 400 times as long than an 10 hour indie experience ? Or did you had 400x the fun playing it?

That's very MBA way to look at it. Game's budget is only vaguely correlated with how good it is as a game. Sure prettier blah blah blah, but we had plenty of big games coming out mediocre and just being bought coz of market inertia of average non-internet-scouring user buying next AAA title from big publisher and not even looking at the smaller ones or indies.

Like, if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4), the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space because while 20 years ago industry was busy making games like Baldur's gate or Fallout, now anything similar only happens in sub-AAA space.

> if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4)

I don’t care for those kinds of games at all. That’s the problem with most indie games: they rely solely on gameplay. Me, personally, I’m more into story driven games, and that additional budget buys you better writers, actors, mo-cap, etc.

> the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space

I’m mainly a PlayStation gamer and they release a lot of story driven single-player games. It’s the may reason I stick to PS. God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, TLoU, etc. are all amazing games and impossible to make on a small budget.

> I’m more into story driven games

I have yet to see a story as good as the Blackwell series. Perhaps you have made up your mind that indie games do not have good story lines, so you are not looking for them. I don't know.

I had a quick look and it looks really low-budget.

The thing is, I have limited time to play games, so I can be very selective what I spend that time on. This means I can limit myself to games that do everything right, not just one thing. That means story, but also production value. Good acting, good mo-cap, good graphic, a good sound track, etc.

Why would I spend the limited time I have for gaming on games that don't check all the boxes ? There may not be a lot of games that do, but there are enough for me to only play those kinds of games.

Just for another perspective, there is a limited space of games story- and gameplaywise that can get major funding. If you want something outside this, you have to go indie. You can be also satisfied with the AAA games. Just as there are great independent films and Hollywood classics. They should be able to coexist in the market.

But honestly I don't play AAA titles because they are expensive (don't feel worth it for me, so similar argument as yours), and are designed for long immersive sessions and not 20 mins here and there. There are secondary factors like Linux compatibility and disliking the companies. For story and visuals I prefer films. Second hand I hear that mainstream titles are either designed stupid easy, or in a small niche with spiteful level of difficulty, but this is probably exaggerated sentiment.

> For story and visuals I prefer films.

I like films, but the problem with them is that they have to cram a story into 2 hours, maybe 3. With games being 20-40 hours, there is much more room for in-depth storytelling and world building. Also, being in control of the main character makes a story hit differently from passively experiencing it.

>really low-budget

because they were first. Look at later games from the list http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/

Gemini Rue, Primordia, Technobabylon, Shardlight, Strangeland, but especially Unavowed!

Clifftop Games Whispers of a Machine and Kathy Rain are also good https://store.steampowered.com/developer/clifftopgames/#brow...

> The thing is, I have limited time to play games

This in effect is why you're indirectly picking games with massive advertising budgets - they're far more likely to reach you than the average lower budget indie game.

It's fine that you like games with high production values, but don't just cast the lower production ones into this 'low-value' bucket and never look at them. AAA games might be diamonds, but you might just find other types of rare stones in the other buckets.

> God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, TLoU, etc. are all amazing games and impossible to make on a small budget.

You only list successes, but it's exactly this type of story-driven block buster games that can sink a development studio if just one thing goes wrong (and it doesn't even have to be the fault of anybody involved with the game).

Enjoy this type of game while it lasts, because this era is coming to an end, it's just not sustainable. Eventually each studio will produce an expensive flop, and it's much harder to build an AAA development team then to destroy one.

> Enjoy this type of game while it lasts, because this era is coming to an end, it's just not sustainable.

Do you also think blockbuster movies are not sustainable? Because AAA games have a very similar business model. Actually in some ways games are more attractive due to the possibilities with DLC.

I'm not really that pessimistic about the future of "story driven blockbusters". Especially when they are relying on existing IP's to drive them some 80% of the time. Uncharted was probably the last really successful original IP of that moniker and it came out 2007, at time where games wanted to showcase the advent of what we now know as modern 3d graphics.

You are making quite a few generalizations that I don't think are necessarily accurate these days. Indie games don't always "rely solely on gameplay". That's just not true.

In fact, I would say one of (if not the) greatest narrative games I have ever played, Disco Elysium, would absolutely be considered "indie" by just about every metric.

Outright play time isn't the right way to measure the value of a game (or any other piece of art or entertainment) unless your sole purpose is to spend time. I value Half Life 2 hundreds of times higher than skribbl.io even though I probably have more hours in the latter.

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