>hardcore gamers don't buy games
They do. The problem is that Vince does not make very good games.
>colony ship has basically zero worldbuilding, laughably childish factions, companions who barely exist, and terrible combat
Maybe the most shocking thing was how simplistic and bad character creation is. There is zero depth. Once your character is made, that's it, there's basically no progression due to there being only like 10 fricking feats in the game.
vince should just open patreon, since his buisness model is creating games tailored for a very small niche of autists, but he refuses to do it because he's moronic
The guy has no business sense. Refused to do kickstarter/patreon/fricking anything way back in the day because he "didn't want to sell dreams" or some shit like that. He had plenty of people willing to throw money at him but just wouldn't let them.
>follow steam guide or reload until you find the correct chain of events and have the right amount of skill points banked >hardcore, old-school crpg
No it isn't.
It's going to shit because the current mindset that "niche group = endless profit" is a good business model is moronic.
The lack of understanding of the money generating section of their audience is astounding. The kind of people who brag about completing CRPGs with in-game or self created challenge modes don't gaf about story or complex settings and wont stick around unless your system is resilient to cheesing and exploiting.
Comparatively longevity is generated by casuals who require a casual mode, and even these players are hard to deal with as getting them to care about already established characters and lore in old franchises is hard enough let alone brand new settings.
The answer is a halfway house - give the casuals their slop and lock content behind difficulty. But no modern developer I know has the balls to gatekeep extra lore or content like that.
>How would you go about doing something like that?
Well, the first step would be to abandon the dismissive attitude of the casual audience and actually think about possible way to appeal to both. That's what a smart, hardcore developer would be able to do.
"Hardcore" and "casual" are equally uselessly subjective designations for determining guiding principles. The developer's vision of the game is more important that the developer's erroneous perception of a hypothetical audience based on memes. Iron Tower is staffed by people who have very specific tastes in RPGs that aren't particularly interesting to engage with. Main problem is being grimdark adjacent pessimists.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>"Hardcore" and "casual" are equally uselessly subjective designations for determining guiding principles.
Completely wrong. >The developer's vision of the game is more important that the developer's erroneous perception of a hypothetical audience based on memes
But I don't blame you for being binary-brained on this topic. Modern games have gone so far in the direction of pandering to audiences based on marketing research that all you see is soulless pandering vs authentic vision. This is moronic. One can have an inspired vision for a game without totally neglecting reasonable assessments of your potential audience.
The terms "casual" and "hardcore" will need to be narrowed for the context of any given game. But of course, doing that requires a non-moronic, non-dismissive attitude toward the idea of a casual player (which was my original point). Meanwhile, "good" or "bad" literally mean nothing at all. You can define nearly any standard by which to measure anything as good or bad. Equating this to casual and hardcore is very stupid.
1 month ago
Anonymous
If you have an understanding of your audience, then you should necessarily have an understanding of what is good or bad for them. What Iron Tower did is simply make the game they personally wanted and posited themselves as a prototypical "hardcore" RPG player, possibly merely trying to bullshit their way into that classification among the easily swayed with sheer chutzpah. I think you aren't intelligent enough to bridge the gap of understanding, to see beyond memes and labels, though, so I'll make a concession for your crassness and simply disengage.
>Where is Troika?
released incredibly buggy games fixed by fan patches after the fact >Looking Glass
bled talent due to buyout, never marketed well, Steam didn't exist >Starfield
captive audience
>Troika
badly marketed at the time and released their games at the same time as some of the best and most popular games ever REPEATEDLY
but their games always had a very long tail, every game they made turned a good profit but just not fast enough.
>Why is Starfield so profitable
Because it's a good game by a developer who has made great and immensely popular games before it, and no other developer makes that type of games.
You are confused because my original comments were posted in a thread following this one
That is the poster who is dismissive of casuals. You seem to have incorrectly inferred that I'm talking about Iron Tower specifically. Either way, everything I wrote was a totally fair response to the asinine comment "the trick is to make a good game."
It was also a response to me, and again, led to you trying to argue that: >"Hardcore" and "casual" are equally uselessly subjective designations for determining guiding principles.
Which is completely wrong. And then instead of defending the point you try to save face and dodge then have the gall to call me the stupid one.
So at this point, I'll be the one "disengage" since it's clear you have nothing interesting to say.
Yep, I have a lot of contempt for those designations and those who stand by them. Apart from that, you are too full of yourself, believe in anonymous "face", and are simply rude. Good day.
well i bought age of decadence and colony ship on release, can't do much more than that. they should've released some supporter edition or something that is higher price that people who want to give them more money can buy.
The issue is their production cycle, is it not? Their games take too long to make for too little content, even if it is layered like Age of Decadence. A lot of people seem to suggest crowdfunding, but I don't think that would work either just because of the length of dev time.
Honestly, I think this is all on Vince as the business guy. They make good games. They are passionate. They have a passionate fanbase. It's up to business leadership to turn that into money and enable more development. Dunno, maybe it's another Troika situation.
Is the Colony-ship a good game? I really like AoD and played through about 4 times, should I try Colony Ship?
Also, I like games where you control one character just like in the first AoD, and from what I've seen they changed that to a party RPG, correct? How do you control your party here, like in Fallout where they're just followers or like in some DnD games, where you have to control them like your character?
If you beat AOD four times you'll find CS an easier game, and it's also more conventional. You do get a party in this one with companions you find along the way, though.
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>hardcore gamers don't buy games
They do. The problem is that Vince does not make very good games.
>colony ship has basically zero worldbuilding, laughably childish factions, companions who barely exist, and terrible combat
Maybe the most shocking thing was how simplistic and bad character creation is. There is zero depth. Once your character is made, that's it, there's basically no progression due to there being only like 10 fricking feats in the game.
maybe slavs are incompetent shitheads that think too highly of themselves
>slavs incompetent
Dude, who else can mod fallout 2
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I honestly don't buy these retro revival games. I'm simply playing those old games instead, and I'm not running out of games to replay.
vince should just open patreon, since his buisness model is creating games tailored for a very small niche of autists, but he refuses to do it because he's moronic
That's because then they would have to tell their real names and people would find out that vince is actually obese black woman.
It's not my fault morons don't know how to manage their budgets. If Vince had played his cards right it ain't had to be this way, but it do.
I bought every game they released. I did my part.
The guy has no business sense. Refused to do kickstarter/patreon/fricking anything way back in the day because he "didn't want to sell dreams" or some shit like that. He had plenty of people willing to throw money at him but just wouldn't let them.
>follow steam guide or reload until you find the correct chain of events and have the right amount of skill points banked
>hardcore, old-school crpg
No it isn't.
So is the company dead or what?
It's going to shit because the current mindset that "niche group = endless profit" is a good business model is moronic.
The lack of understanding of the money generating section of their audience is astounding. The kind of people who brag about completing CRPGs with in-game or self created challenge modes don't gaf about story or complex settings and wont stick around unless your system is resilient to cheesing and exploiting.
Comparatively longevity is generated by casuals who require a casual mode, and even these players are hard to deal with as getting them to care about already established characters and lore in old franchises is hard enough let alone brand new settings.
The answer is a halfway house - give the casuals their slop and lock content behind difficulty. But no modern developer I know has the balls to gatekeep extra lore or content like that.
How would you go about doing something like that? Because it seems like Undertale kind of hits that if I'm getting you correctly.
>How would you go about doing something like that?
Well, the first step would be to abandon the dismissive attitude of the casual audience and actually think about possible way to appeal to both. That's what a smart, hardcore developer would be able to do.
You shouldn't try to appeal to either. The trick is to actually make a good game.
Not mutually exclusive.
Also uselessly subjective as far as guiding principles.
"Hardcore" and "casual" are equally uselessly subjective designations for determining guiding principles. The developer's vision of the game is more important that the developer's erroneous perception of a hypothetical audience based on memes. Iron Tower is staffed by people who have very specific tastes in RPGs that aren't particularly interesting to engage with. Main problem is being grimdark adjacent pessimists.
>"Hardcore" and "casual" are equally uselessly subjective designations for determining guiding principles.
Completely wrong.
>The developer's vision of the game is more important that the developer's erroneous perception of a hypothetical audience based on memes
But I don't blame you for being binary-brained on this topic. Modern games have gone so far in the direction of pandering to audiences based on marketing research that all you see is soulless pandering vs authentic vision. This is moronic. One can have an inspired vision for a game without totally neglecting reasonable assessments of your potential audience.
The terms "casual" and "hardcore" will need to be narrowed for the context of any given game. But of course, doing that requires a non-moronic, non-dismissive attitude toward the idea of a casual player (which was my original point). Meanwhile, "good" or "bad" literally mean nothing at all. You can define nearly any standard by which to measure anything as good or bad. Equating this to casual and hardcore is very stupid.
If you have an understanding of your audience, then you should necessarily have an understanding of what is good or bad for them. What Iron Tower did is simply make the game they personally wanted and posited themselves as a prototypical "hardcore" RPG player, possibly merely trying to bullshit their way into that classification among the easily swayed with sheer chutzpah. I think you aren't intelligent enough to bridge the gap of understanding, to see beyond memes and labels, though, so I'll make a concession for your crassness and simply disengage.
>The trick is to actually make a good game
Horseshit. Where is Troika? Where is Looking Glass? Why is Starfield so profitable?
>Where is Troika?
released incredibly buggy games fixed by fan patches after the fact
>Looking Glass
bled talent due to buyout, never marketed well, Steam didn't exist
>Starfield
captive audience
>Troika
badly marketed at the time and released their games at the same time as some of the best and most popular games ever REPEATEDLY
but their games always had a very long tail, every game they made turned a good profit but just not fast enough.
>Why is Starfield so profitable
the same reason McDonald's is.
>Why is Starfield so profitable
Because it's a good game by a developer who has made great and immensely popular games before it, and no other developer makes that type of games.
You are confused because my original comments were posted in a thread following this one
That is the poster who is dismissive of casuals. You seem to have incorrectly inferred that I'm talking about Iron Tower specifically. Either way, everything I wrote was a totally fair response to the asinine comment "the trick is to make a good game."
It's a dig at Iron Tower, saying they didn't make a good game. But, by all means, huff away.
It was also a response to me, and again, led to you trying to argue that:
>"Hardcore" and "casual" are equally uselessly subjective designations for determining guiding principles.
Which is completely wrong. And then instead of defending the point you try to save face and dodge then have the gall to call me the stupid one.
So at this point, I'll be the one "disengage" since it's clear you have nothing interesting to say.
Yep, I have a lot of contempt for those designations and those who stand by them. Apart from that, you are too full of yourself, believe in anonymous "face", and are simply rude. Good day.
well i bought age of decadence and colony ship on release, can't do much more than that. they should've released some supporter edition or something that is higher price that people who want to give them more money can buy.
The issue is their production cycle, is it not? Their games take too long to make for too little content, even if it is layered like Age of Decadence. A lot of people seem to suggest crowdfunding, but I don't think that would work either just because of the length of dev time.
Honestly, I think this is all on Vince as the business guy. They make good games. They are passionate. They have a passionate fanbase. It's up to business leadership to turn that into money and enable more development. Dunno, maybe it's another Troika situation.
Is the Colony-ship a good game? I really like AoD and played through about 4 times, should I try Colony Ship?
Also, I like games where you control one character just like in the first AoD, and from what I've seen they changed that to a party RPG, correct? How do you control your party here, like in Fallout where they're just followers or like in some DnD games, where you have to control them like your character?
If you beat AOD four times you'll find CS an easier game, and it's also more conventional. You do get a party in this one with companions you find along the way, though.
I beat AoD with non-combat characters only.
Yes, you explicitly can do that and the game is designed for it. Trick is to stick to what your character does best.
there's nothing hardcore about their games though, they're just fallout clones, which was always an entry level dialoggay crpg
RIP
What is "good" on a scale from 1 to 10
>What is "good" on a scale from 1 to 10
at least a 7
Real good games have never been tried.
Check to see which games you have over 100 hours of playtime in. There's your real good games.
are they confirmed kill or is this speculation
It's not confirmed it's conflaccid.
You need to make your hardcore game also instresting.