BeyondElectricDreams t1_j5hdnr3 wrote on January 23, 2023 at 12:38 AM

Reply to comment by themagicbong in Dollar stores were the fastest-growing food retailers by household expenditure share between 2008 to 2020 according to Tufts University. While they still represent a small fraction of national household food purchases, they play an increasingly prominent role for disadvantaged and rural communities. by shiruken

> You can see a similar sorta idea in videogames, where "cheaper" games are rapidly climbing to the top, things like among us, or even at the extreme end, something like vampire survivors.

Part of this is the industry's fault on the whole.

The AAA gaming industry has seen how much money can be made with abusive monetization and "Live services". This has effects on gaming on the whole, to the point where games are explicitly developed as monetization vessels before they're designed as games.

This affects game quality - game developers are making games not to be as fun as they could be; but to encourage spending. This often means making games annoying or frustrating to ensure people spend money to make the game fun again.

Indie games like Vampire Survivors don't do that - they're usually made by artists with a cool or fun idea or a vision. Sure, monetizing is a worry for them, but it isn't their starting point like it is for the AAA execs.

I know a lot of people who've made the jump to mostly indie titles becuase it's the only place they can buy a game and actually own said game and not just a license for the permission to log into a framework to spend more money on something they never even own.

themagicbong t1_j5ma97m wrote on January 24, 2023 at 12:27 AM

Late reply, sorry.

Definitely not disagreeing, and I also think in various industries the reasons why this is happening can vary greatly. Generalizations aren't usually apt to describe specifics, but I believe they stem from similar factors/forces.

For games, its a question of why those AAA publishers felt they should increase monetization in that way, or could be, for example. For instance, you can also point to the growing cost of developing larger games, and the expectations that come along with those scope increases. Albeit, you, as a publisher/dev or whatever they happen to be, have a choice in whether to spend that much on any given thing. Obviously you don't need to necessarily have a gigantic budget to make a good game.

I've heard various people talk about it from the position of investors with a seemingly small appetite for risk, plowing money into large games. This was successful for a while, and still can be, but there have also been some notorious flops that weren't great. But another question that would come to mind is whether the market can even support having so many high value productions going on at once for the same market.

Then, throw in that the portion of society that has been historically growing and spending lots on games is shrinking, and possibly seeking cheaper alternatives. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, but it seems partially valid that a combo of poor bets and losses, combined with a shrinking share of the market, and even more factors I haven't touched on, are on the right path to an answer as to why we are seeing smaller/indie blow up a bit more. These factors alone, I feel, could lead to these companies feeling like they need to shift to a different monetization strategy. I also agree with not wanting to be beholden to a million different companies each deciding to give me as little as possible as far as my rights as a consumer goes.