01-22-2014, 07:34 PM
Video games traditionally have had a short sales lifespan because they couldn't be vastly updated and had to be polished before entering the market. It was a shitty business model because companies had to spend years of development money before seeing any return on investment.
Nowadays with the amount of man hours required to make AAA games and even indie games, quality is getting expensive yet the sales window for finished products remains small. No one is buying Assassin's Creed 4 anymore, which was a pretty good AAA game by today's standards, and that came out less than three months ago. Ubisoft was selling it for 50% off for Christmas for fucks sake. The economy is shittier too unlike the golden days of the 90s, so good luck getting a bank or publisher to back an indie game especially if it's the dev team's first couple of games.
Furthermore, with the advent of increasing broadband speeds, it's now possible to update games online. The games don't need to be bug-free or even finished before selling them. Dead Rising 3 just put out a 13GB patch to fix all of its bugs. A patch that would take up two DVDs. Fucking seriously.
Steam gives indie devs a gradual cash flow during game development and that can allow them to finish games. Of course the game can be shit, but video games are a crapshoot in general. Big name publishers push out shitty games and sequels all the time. You're always welcome to ignore the early access games until they're finished, but if indie devs don't get support, they may not finish their products. I bought Natural Selection 2 almost 2 years before they released the retail version of it, and it was probably one of the best shooters of 2012. If their alpha sales were a couple thousand less, maybe they would have cut corners and made a worse game.
tl;dr: Stable cash flow > selling polished games
And regardless what czd thinks, PoE is a shitty D2 clone with a FFX skill tree. It's like I'm playing a game from 2004.
Nowadays with the amount of man hours required to make AAA games and even indie games, quality is getting expensive yet the sales window for finished products remains small. No one is buying Assassin's Creed 4 anymore, which was a pretty good AAA game by today's standards, and that came out less than three months ago. Ubisoft was selling it for 50% off for Christmas for fucks sake. The economy is shittier too unlike the golden days of the 90s, so good luck getting a bank or publisher to back an indie game especially if it's the dev team's first couple of games.
Furthermore, with the advent of increasing broadband speeds, it's now possible to update games online. The games don't need to be bug-free or even finished before selling them. Dead Rising 3 just put out a 13GB patch to fix all of its bugs. A patch that would take up two DVDs. Fucking seriously.
Steam gives indie devs a gradual cash flow during game development and that can allow them to finish games. Of course the game can be shit, but video games are a crapshoot in general. Big name publishers push out shitty games and sequels all the time. You're always welcome to ignore the early access games until they're finished, but if indie devs don't get support, they may not finish their products. I bought Natural Selection 2 almost 2 years before they released the retail version of it, and it was probably one of the best shooters of 2012. If their alpha sales were a couple thousand less, maybe they would have cut corners and made a worse game.
tl;dr: Stable cash flow > selling polished games
And regardless what czd thinks, PoE is a shitty D2 clone with a FFX skill tree. It's like I'm playing a game from 2004.
![[Image: Gmpw2.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/Gmpw2.jpg)
![[Image: QTm4t.png]](http://i.imgur.com/QTm4t.png)