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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2553 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 2025

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Video game thread.

I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.

There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.

Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.

Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.

The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.

Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.

Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.

I've still mostly been playing Silksong. It is fantastic. It is a great followup to Hollow Knight, a great example of a sequel: more content with just enough of a new spin to keep things fresh while still staying true to all the things that made the first one great.

The thing that most confuses me is: why aren't more games like this? At this price point. It was made by 3 people. Yes, it took 7 years and probably re-used a lot of development assets from Hollow Knight but... why aren't more games like this? This level of quality to price ratio. Why can't more studios make similar games on similar budgets? You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?

Obviously there's talent and inspiration and stuff that varies and this might just be an outlier of 3 geniuses who are disproportionately skilled at what they do. But what are they actually doing differently that all of the other indie studios haven't been doing?

Lucky thing for us is that Slay the Spire 2 and Hades 2 are going to come out this year too.

It does seem crazy that Silksong is $20, which seems to me like it is mainly a reflection of Team Cherry becoming fabulously wealthy (surely, right?) and not caring at all about money anymore.

Slay the Spire 2 got delayed. 😕

It could be. It could also just be economics and consumer psychology. They have a lot of good will from how high quality Hollow Knight was at $15. If they bumped Silksong up to $30 it might have generated a lot of backlash at the perceived greed of a price doubling, and halved their expected number of sales, especially after factoring in the number of people who are discovering and buying Hollowing Knight for the first time as they see everyone else getting excited about Silksong.

It could also be a combination of both. Maybe they could have had 60% as many sales at double the price and earned 20% more total profit, but didn't care enough to squeeze out that last extra bit.

Yes, it took 7 years and probably re-used a lot of development assets from Hollow Knight but... why aren't more games like this?

Lifestyle business vs MBA business on one side: there are overhead costs to managing a business. It's easier to have one massive company (or a group of companies) that you put money in and it spits out a sequel each year than it is to manage 100 companies that produce a good game once every 5 to 10 years.

Indie life is hard on the other side: you need at least three roles to make a good game (sound and music are often done as a commission):

  • game designer
  • programmer
  • artist

That's up to three people that have to dedicate a lot of time and effort to developing a game. You can combine some of the roles, but then you really need to quit your day job to work on the game full-time. And if you succeed, your success won't scale: you'll be able to make another game in 5 years, but you won't really be able to make games faster or make two of them in parallel. If anything, you'll hurt other indie studios by earning all this money.

I hope you value information over good writing, for I only have the former.

I'm quite sure that the product of Silksong was the goal, and not the money it made. A lot of old games were made by intelligent people who loved video games. Many newer games are made by soulless corporations who only want money, and I bet only the programmers that said company hire likes video games. The managers and CEOs probably don't know much about games at all. I'm also very confident that these programmers aren't given a lot of freedom over the product, nor time to make it. If the end product is chosen by somebody who doesn't know video games and who wants to make lots of money, then it will be a generic copy of something which has been proven to work. It will deliver the minimum gameplay, and be designed to use every exploit to get players hooked to it (gambling, log-in rewards, loot-boxes) and make money (always-online-model, selling user data, requiring an account, DLC), and minimizing moderation costs (bad servers, no voice chat, strict rules, no user-created content, no mods, no private servers, rootkit anticheats, poor support). Such a game will never be great, for it will would be released before it could ever be polished to that degree; past the minimum viable product, ever new update would be dedicated not to add additional value, but to milk the current value. I'm not sure how Candy Crush and Angry birds squeezed billions of dollars out of two games which are actually clones of old, free flash games (which didn't even become all that popular, look up Crush the Castle and Bejeweled), but a lot of companies seem to think that they can do it too.

Arjin is correct, too, programming is pretty hard. And programming has this interesting property where bad code makes all the future programming vastly harder.

So, why don't we have more good indie games? From what I can tell, people who make Indies aren't doing anything wrong, they just stop too early. Most games I have on steam can be completed in 10 hours or less. It feels like I'm buying demos. All the legendary games which has existed so far (TF2, Garry's mod, Warcraft 3, Terraria, Minecraft, Factorio, Diablo 2, Roblox, and The Sims come to mind) are ones you can play for 1000+ hours. Notice how all these games have communities and user-created content? They have custom servers and modpacks. They basically allow the users to create more content, and content created by users has soul. Games which are merely good or great still have 100+ hours of content or a lot of replayability (Pokemon, older GTA), and multiplayer (Monster Hunter, Fortnite, newer GTA). By the way, if your mix all the traits of a popular game but lack programming ability, you get games like 7 Days To Die :P 11 years of early access! And despite being "released", it's clearly not finished.

You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?

I'm not in the industry so my impression might be off, but there's a few reasons I can think of:

  • Programming is hard. For as long as I remember there was some gray-suit asshole that tried to come up with a paradigm that would make it work like all other forms of engineering - you get one guy that sits at the drawing board for a while, you pay him relatively well, and when he's done you send off the blueprint to an army of worker ants, that get paid peanuts. This had several manifestations like trying to ship IT jobs to India, or trying to ship India into the west, I think now they're hoping they can hand it off to AI. For whatever reason this has always been a disaster. I can't explain why, there's just something whimsical about the entire field, that makes it resist cookie-cutter solutions, and ends up requiring talented people who are quick on their feet. It's actually counter-intuitive for me, I'd expect IRL engineering would be the thing that would keep falling flat on it's face, due to the inherent dirtiness of the physical realm, but somehow it's the opposite.
  • Programming games is even harder. All the things I said apply to your run-of-the-mill, boring-ass, web applications. Games are insanely complex systems where a tonne of stuff is interacting with a tonne of other stuff in unpredictable ways (and that's before the user input is taken into account), in real-time. Every paradigm that was invented to make the boring forms of software engineering a little bit more legible, go right out the window in game programming - at least if the code from games that ended up open sourced is any indication. This makes it even more resistant to standardization.
  • You know what else games need? Art. That other thing that doesn't go quite well with soulless, standardized, production pipelines.
  • You know what big organizations really like? Soulless, standardized, production pipelines. This one is the actual core of your question, and I now realize I don't actually have a good answer. Why? I don't know, but companies will literally eat massive costs if it buys them a sliver of predictability. In theory it should make no difference, if you have a lot of money, you can just throw it on thousands of creators, and more than make up for the money with the few good hits you get. Maybe it's because the good ones start acting like divas? Once they make a name for themselves, you need them more than they need you. No self-respecting industrialist wants to be in that position, so they prefer to throw half a billion dollars at a game with a list of credits longer than a Holocaust memorial, and get a billion dollars back, and rely on a million mindless drones, than to get the same amount of profit for a fraction of the investment, and risk your drones getting uppity.
  • Why do all the other indies suck? Well, see all the "this shit is hard" points. Yeah, this one might have been made by 3 people, but I'll bet blindly that each of them is in the top <= 0.1% of their respective field. On top of that, finding 3 talented people is not enough. You need to find 3 talented people that get along well, and can work with each other.

For whatever reason this has always been a disaster. I can't explain why, there's just something whimsical about the entire field, that makes it resist cookie-cutter solutions, and ends up requiring talented people who are quick on their feet. It's actually counter-intuitive for me, I'd expect IRL engineering would be the thing that would keep falling flat on it's face, due to the inherent dirtiness of the physical realm, but somehow it's the opposite

I think it's the thing where, if you have a cookie cutter solution to a problem, that problem is now solved and your engineers should no longer be spending an appreciable amount of time on it. If you're a civil engineer, and you get really good at determining how to design supports for a bridge on certain kinds of soil, you can (I think) make a career out of it. If you're a software engineer, and you write substantially the same code more than twice, you have almost certainly done something wrong.

Yeah this is a good point. From a certain perspective, the computer takes the place of the grunt worker and does its job for free. Programmers are the guy at the drawing board designing something brand new, and then bam you copy/paste it to a million different people's computers across the internet without having to hire thousands of grunt workers to physically build a million copies in a factory. So we're comparing different levels across industries and then wondering why the hard to automate level (design) is hard to automate.

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