DudeMauler I was first to talk about cave story.It's in my free indie games thread.

*cough*
Besides, what does it matter who talked about it first? It's for the discussion.

He's talking about in the context of this thread. Cave Story has been mentioned numerous times in the past in other threads.

EDIT: @DAME this was, not you HK.

Btw TorrentHKU I'm not retarded.

User was warned for this post - DAME, this is exactly the kind of posting that got you banned in the first place. Please, put some effort into your posts. Don't just post angry replies better suited for PMs - p3lb0x

I've heard people calling it that before. I laughed.

Dame, I'm trying really hard not to harass you again, but you're making it really difficult. Stop pressing stupid points. Why does it matter who was the first to talk about Cave Story? Which, by the way, you were wrong about. Either get the discussion back to Indie vs Mainstream, or shut up about it. Please.

Backontopic, I stand by the "If it's fun, play it" view.

Ohkey besides the first point I think his views overlap considerably with mine except he isn't looking at indie games that aren't for iWhatever or PhoneStationBox II (U). Indie titles stereotypically have very little DRM because it's a massive pain to set up and sales volumes aren't likely to be huge anyway.

Well sure but I figure that's kind of a given. That's like saying "eat what food you like" in a "Who makes excellent food?" discussion.

I understand that this discussion is purely subjective and I'm unhappy with the title because A) it was a spur of the moment topic and really should've been "why I don't like the majority of the console gamer community and the developers that encourage it" and B) I'm really more interested in discussing the merits of certain developers and cliques of developers.

On the Indie vs Mainstream thing though, I think there's merit in the idea of cutting publishers out of the picture. I understand that AAA games wouldn't have the budgets they do now without them and therefore they're likely not going anywhere but they're the primary distinction between indie and mainstream... And they don't do anything "good" for games besides put money into a few studios and then expose the majority of people to the games made by those studios.

Jesus this is getting to be an inflammatory rant again.

I keep seeing you insulting me as a console gamer and it hurts me deep geti.
Indie is becoming to mainstream, I only play my commodore 64 now.

Publishers are to videogames as venture capitalists are to businesses.

Yes, you can get by without one, but they're pretty much critical if you want to succeed. However, you enter an explicit contract with your financier to do one thing: make money. Publishing videogames, financing startup businesses, playing roulette; it's all gambling, and that's the biggest reason creativity is "dying" within the mainstream gaming industry.

And that sucks. But there's a whole lot of reasons for the current system, and not a whole lot of ways to get it to change, and it's pretty much unlikely to change, significantly, anytime soon. One of the reasons I admire Valve so goddamn much (and why, at least, in my opinion they're so goddamn successful) is because they self-publish. The business aspect and the creative aspect are together; there's no gulf between heady, idealistic twenty-somethings and old-fudd investors and executives. So they're willing to take risks, and it pays off, in terms of game quality. But it doesn't pay off in actual revenue. It's the mega-publishers; Activision and EA, who bring the real money into the table with their staid, bland IPs. It's a risk-reward decision, and it's all kinds of ♥♥♥♥ up.

These publishers aren't taking any risks, but they are making snotloads of money. So why should they change their practices? Even the idealistic twenty-somethings want to get paid, don't they? And if the system is working, there's no impetus to change it. It sucks, sort of, but that's the way it is.

EDIT: On an only vaguely related note, a Kickstarter for enterprising videogame titles/IPs/whatever you want to call them(s) would be ♥♥♥♥ radical.

Geti I'm sorry but I just don't know what the ♥♥♥♥ you're talking about anymore. All I hear is "hate hate hate I'm better than console gamers >:(" but really cutting someone open isn't really useful unless you're going in to fix something. How exactly would you propose to abolish whatever the hell you're talking about? Make it illegal to make more than minimum wage off game making.

I mean we get it, you don't like mainstream console games. Even though I think there is such a thing as good taste and bad taste I think this falls pretty comfortably into the realm of subjective. Why are you so mad that certain people like different things when its a matter of taste?

As a future (PC) indie game dev (going to school for game design), I know what I'm getting into. I don't care much about turning massive profits as long as I'm happy with what I do and I make enough money to keep doing what I love doing.

As for indie vs mainstream: the only thing mainstream has going for itself is the (much) larger sum of money they can use to market their games. Note how I am not saying anything about content/creativity; indie games and mainstream games can be just as bland or just as creative as their counterpart. If the dev teams put enough quality work into the game and leave out any kind of identification as to which party the game belongs to, you shouldn't be able to tell if the game was indie or mainstream.

What. I didn't post since you last- oh that was herbert. You're not listening to my words then and just shutting down whenever I bring up consoles.

@Both of you: see "generalisation vs. individual reality". I'm not saying "You guys are clowns", I'm implying ">80% of the people I've ever played a game with through psn or xbl are clowns". There's a distinction; the fact that you guys come here and can form a sentence not involving the words "scrub", "noob", "lol" and "pwned" and heck, hold a conversation worth having mean you're on the right track to being the kind of people I prefer to associate with.
That said, CounterStrike players are more or less the same there. Maybe I'll use the term "angry internet gamers" in future. Would that make you less angry?

See the great thing here is that that makes them more or less independent. The reason the vs in the title is in quotes is that there's cases where a developer is both - independent and mainstream - like Valve and Mojang.

Yes it would. It'd be nice to see a lot of the "dream projects" people talk about but don't have the money (~= time) to make.

...On a completely unrelated note who's idea was it to make ~= "not equals" in Lua?

When you generalize about a people you still insult every member of that group, Geti. What if I said "oh black people, in my experience people of that skin colour are almost universally criminals". Basically the same thing. "All people from Australia frequently engage in sexual acts involving kangaroos and copious amounts of marmite, in my experience" and so on and so forth.

Look, not only are you insulting us but you're also insulting the games and consoles which we love. Even your statement that pc gamers are generally more mature than console gamers is enough to start a fight.

I am listening to your words. I would talk about more than your console hate, but you haven't addressed my posts at all, for example on the first page my counter claim that

1. There is still innovation in modern, big-budget mainstream console games.

2. Polishing and refining is just as good as innovating

I addressed your comment about polish in my post here though didn't go into any depth as I didn't disagree. Polish, reuse etc are pretty much what making games is about. I get that. You do however have to put them together in a new way for it to count as innovative. Cloning a game is not innovative. You can't make mario again except the guy is mexican and you're after drugs instead of some woman who's been stolen unless you make a gritty, bitching story to go along with it. Making a game in the same genre, using some of the mechanics you liked and putting a new spin on it story/graphics/etc-wise is innovative. Crash twinsanity was a fun game for me: it was like the old, good crash games (PS1 crash 1-3) but with bigger levels and a dynamic story. It felt like a new crash game, not Crash mk 27.1 alpha 5.



I disagree with there being significant innovation in many of today's big budget mainstream games. As we're talking subjective generalisations here we're unlikely to go anywhere but still, case and point: FPS Games.
I'm not even going to inject "console" in there.

I'd go back as far as BF2 but I'm running short on time, so lets start with Halo.

Halo 1 redefined the FPS like 10 years ago. You could run and gun, seems the same as always (guns the same all through the game, HP pickups, floaty jumping, save the world, kick ass while doing so) except you're a war titan and the campaign story was a lot more complicated than "so everyone decided to kill one another" but simple enough that if you mashed skip every cutscene you didn't have too much of a what the ♥♥♥♥ and holy ♥♥♥♥ what's this, I can carry two "primaries"? vehicle combat (as popularised by battlefield)? Regenerating shield (became regenerating health)? ♥♥♥♥ zombie aliens? Sweet Jesus! This is like, simple enough to play that everyone should! Lots of people liked Halo.
Lots of people bought Halo.
Lots of game development studios (or the guys giving them money) thought that if a lot of people liked Halo, maybe they should start doing what halo did..
-> 2 guns + recharging health is standard in most games for a long time. Still kinda is. Note that in the newer games you don't have separate health and shield - even that's been simplified away.

Then ♥♥♥♥ was quiet for a while, Halo 2 was cool and all but was more or less halo 1 but prettier and you could dual wield the smaller guns and then CoD4 happened.

CoD4:MW spawned MW2 and soon 3, which (besides writing a huge action movie tropefest each campaign - not a bad thing) kept (and is looking to keep) the gameplay more or less the same + a little bit of polish because it's a well known fact that people like shooting and they like it fast. Perks mix up the action a little but they're simply a variant of "power up" that you don't have to collect. The upgrade system is analogous to an RPG levelling system, for both perks and guns. There's a levelling system on top of that. The game modes are more or less stock standard. The specops missions are cool and give a nice variety but it's the same concept as scenario play.
That's cool, that's just a chain of sequels and that's actually fine by me. (I enjoy IP development)

Except just about everyone making a big budget FPS since then now wants to be like CoD4 was - fast, simple, and to the point with an emphasis on the shooting. Both the other CoD games made by whoever (5 and 7 respectively) have been the previous game with rehashed graphics, gibs and set in a different time period. Crysis 2 made everything more run and gun and brown and bloom and less think and don't burn all your ammo, and apparently took out the wars part of multiplayer (I haven't played Crysis 2 Multiplayer it'd be nice to have confirmation therein). Freaking Halo has been getting CODier (less health, armour abilities have been compared to perks a million times). Homefront, SOCOM (TPS but still applies), other minor FPS titles have had CoD fans screaming rip-off in their faces (google them and have a look) regardless of whether they just played the "simpler to play" card or not.

Note that I'm silently applauding DICE the whole time for emphasising slightly deeper play. I respect that.

tl;dr: FPS games have a trend of getting simpler -> more people can play them. They also include regenerating health and fast multiplayer almost by default.
I'm not saying that all this isn't fun because fun is subjective. Lots of people like it and it sells. It's not innovative.

I think a large problem is putting everything into a genre based on how you play the game.
This works with movies because you know what you're expecting: horror movies will be scarey, probably gore everywhere, action movies will have guns and splosions and the good guys win, noir will probably have a femme fatale and angst up the walls, romcoms will make you laugh every now and again and someone gets pregnant or married or both.
Even with film though, the compartmentalisation route is dangerous to take - you end up making new boxes every time you can't pidgeonhole something (-> the romcom banner appears when you can't decide whether something fits "chick flick" or "comedy" better.)

Games, it's even worse. FPS just means you see a gun for most of the game and shoot stuff. If those were your only mechanics, FPS games would (all) be boring as ♥♥♥♥. I keep wanting to ramble here, but I'll get to my genre related point:
Using CoD4 as an example of a game that people associate with the title "FPS" - Most FPS games made these days borrow heavily from CoD4. That means that rather than a fully explored "action shooter" genre we get oh for ♥♥♥♥ sake this is easier when explained by DanC: (this image is aimed more at developers as advice of where to start designing games from but whatever it gets the point across)

I'm afraid most modern FPS games are in the area marked "clones" at the moment.

Oh also re: generalisations being offensive - indeed, but I've always either attached a disclaimer (most, likely etc) or simply implied snideness, rather than saying "Console gamers are all wankers and should die". I'm not saying that, nor have I or do I plan to.

This is a similar issue to feminist discussion commonly using the word "men" to describe the antifeminism movement - there are many articles out there and it's almost universally accepted as shorthand for "antifeminist men" or "anyone supporting patriarchal society" unless directly discussing the distinction therein. I'll find and article about that later

Sorry for how terribly organised this all is, I've been forced to stop tidying it as dinner is calling

I'm mad :< I've lost all my conciseness in terms of this argument. Perhaps this indicates that I'm not in a position of certainty.