JB Oger

(btw it's okay not to play everything good that comes out, it's part of life)

And finally, the market is "nearly impenetrable". Where's the data about the games that succeed and who made them?

Here are the top new releases for Steam in August: store.steampowered.com/charts/topne...

I count 15 games out of 36 (40%) that come from new developers, it doesn't sound bad to me.

This is another bold claim, because for all we know, there could be plenty of reasons why these games failed to be bigger than they already are. Games falling behind expectations have existed before 2025.

For instance, "many of the other have failed" is how many? How many of the 80+ metacritic games have failed and is it more or less than previous years? Do we have the data on how quickly the game or the studio got shut down?

My gaming pet peeve is journalists/Linkedin influencers who use the annual number of Steam releases to make dramatic articles about the state of gaming, without doing any research to back their claims with actual data.

Sorry, I love the guy and his books/articles, but not this one...

Either say from the get go that it’s speculative, or lie after the fact that your plans changed, but damn say something at least.

Makes you appreciate so much more people who actually follow through and make things happen, got invited to such a podcast recently and it was a blast

Publisher ghosting is a real annoyance in the gaming industry but after releasing Drop Duchy, I discovered something even worse: people who reach out to you for interviews/partnerships/events/etc and then stop responding after you said you’re interested. Why contact me in the first place then?

Love seeing this, river has been my fav strat for a while now and yet all the discord is about are the religious/belfry combo

Elle n’était plus représentative du jeu, mais on a prévu d’en refaire une plus tard !

En vrai ils font ce qu’ils veulent, mais je trouve pas que ce soit « louable » non plus, certains indés qui ont fait un hit vont update leur jeu pendant des années et des années gratuitement.

Vu l'audience de fans qu'ils ont déjà, ça me semble largement faisable, un DLC qui rajoute de la custo, l'art book, etc. Ils n'ont pas besoin de plus de millions, ils l'ont déjà dit qu'ils vivaient simplement malgré le succès donc pourquoi il leur faudrait 100M de plus?

Plus de gauche: le jeu de base gratuit, avec un supporter pack qui leur rapporterait quand même des millions.

Ou alors sinon un prix vraiment bas 5-10€ signalant clairement "nous sommes une exception, pas la règle" (et ça laisse des sous aux joueurs pour acheter d'autres indés)

I guess I hate the press/social media discourse that puts a couple of mainstream « indies » on a pedestal only to criticize everyone else, without taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture (hint: it ain’t as black and white as AAA bad and indie good, lots of nuances of grey in-between)

Ironically, it’s already 33% more than Hollow Knight

And once again, considering the team size and how rich they already were, I don’t think we need to praise them as if they were offering a gift to humanity with this price choice.

Ok, the game is extremely anticipated, people would have paid any amount for it and that’s awesome for Team Cherry.

But worshipping them like they’re some sort of industry saviors for not selling it for a higher price??? Yeah, that’s going to far imo

Because I don’t like rarities, even if that’s a good tool to increase the longevity. I preferred to have a meta progression based on challenges and factions that encourage to try out the variety of options available, rather than force it. It feels like rarity would be frustrating in this context

We’ve been very successful so far by our own metrics. Not a hidden gem but people keep discovering the game, so it’s cool.

It was never going to achieve even 10% of Balatro’s success anyway (except in my publisher’s wildest dreams)

(Hot take: the fact that you’re a micro-indie studio doesn’t make it better but worse imo. Happy that you’ve become filthy rich and decided not to hire more people, but you really don’t need that to survive while others do)

This.

I’d go even further and say that when you’re the most anticipated game of the year, you shouldn’t go with a « let’s get all the Gamescom attention on us » strategy.

You can do it at anytime and get the same results, while others have this one silver bullet to thrive.

The more I play, the more I realize stuff and go like "wow this is cool, I didn't know about this ... why didn't they tell me?"

Skull & Bones isn't an outstanding experience, sure, but it's a rare case of a game that feels both overwhelming and hollow (but actually isn't).

Even sandbox games have to meticulously plan out how they distribute content, how the player will learn what action or item does what, understand their goal and how to achieve them.

The many quests of SB are a band-aid, but the core issue is the lack of structure.

When there are this many options available and you're not sure what the paths lead to, players will naturally resort to following the path of least (cognitive) resistance and ignore the rest.

This can't be fixed by removing quests entirely either, this huge mass of content would still be confusing.

Meanwhile, SB has so many game loops that aren't exposed or straight-up confusing. So everything you're doing is hoarding on quests and following the markers.

I understand the need to keep things open and not force players into a scripted path, but ironically it decreases the sense of agency.

Classic Ubi formula open world would have you playing a main story that gradually unlocks and teaches side activities & rewards, giving meaning to what you're doing.

It teases you enticing rewards and showcases difficult challenges that motivate you to keep upgrading. Objective, challenge, reward.

Skull & Bones isn't meant to be a challenging game, but it has more depth than other open-worlds and is interesting to study because it exemplifies what happens when a game lacks a proper spine.

But what do I spend my money on? I don't know really. Should I explore the world, is there something to find? Not sure. What is the levelling doing, what upgrade should I get? No idea.

Playing after a year of post-launch additions certainly makes the thing harder to grasp, but still.

But you come into the game, and all of this depth and complexity is not introduced gradually, not made interesting and valuable to you, which leaves you extremely confused. What am I supposed to do?

Guess I'm going to follow one of the dozens of quests I have in my log and gain money?

I thought it'd be like Anthem, a shallow experience that spreads the jam veeeeery thin to keep you replaying again and again the same thing with artificial pretexts.

Instead, there's a ton of things going on with factions, characters, loot, crafting, quests, ships, combat depth, economy, and more

Setting aside that it's not the swashbuckling adventure game people wanted, it could be a great ship-based Destiny-like with enjoyable combat, loot & exploration. It should be. And somehow it is, I got strangely addicted to it.

But it could be so much better presented that it's almost infuriating.

I've been playing Skull & Bones a lot lately for... huh... research... and I've never seen anything like it.

There are so many mechanics, so much content, but the game doesn't seem at all interested in onboarding the player. Everything is just ... overwhelming?