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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days, I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how much they loved the game Starflight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game."

Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.

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It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out of the room by any major publisher.

Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.

It's the bent to 'now profits' that ends up killing them. They can't see the forest for the trees.

Just because some genres were revived doesn't mean you can predict which genres to dump money into. Also, what some consider revived others consider still dead.

I think this is a scale thing as well.

Bigger structures like EA have a lot of overhead, making small projects not as worth it (even if its just opportunity cost)

Steam and Kickstarter (combined with everyone having good computers now and of course the internet) have made small games super viable now, luckily

I never played Starflight, but I believe it influenced a game I loved as a kid, Star Control 2. It was given a sequel (...Star Control 3) but without any of the original makers being involved - IIRC they wanted more money than the publisher was prepared to pay.

And what do you know, the bad sequel killed the franchise. People have ported the original to modern platforms, but if anything was due a Kickstarted sequel...

The original studio is now doping the wildly profitable skylanders franchise, falso the studio is owned 100% by Actvision, i doubt they will be doping anything that is nota skylanders unless they pull a Infinity Ward

Oh, I know. But a fan-made one would be possible - some people already tried SBC failed, but with Kickstarter backing.. well, you never know.

> Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.

Do you mean you were fired / you quit? Or was that the conversation?

The conversation ended.

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