As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation.
You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.
Could you name a few? Not trying to challenge I’m actually really curious how the bar has shifted over time. (It also makes me curious if it means newbies have an increasingly high bar to clear and eventually pushes out young people?)
Among us and Fall Guys are the definition of games that just happened to be at the right place at the right (and completely unpredecent) time. Among us especially was one that was released for years before it became viral. Party games are a whole is a hard genre to crack (especially on console) but COVID had people stuck and seeking such content
For a AAA example, Lawbreakers is probably one of the more recent stories. It was a game made by a director behind the acclaimed Gears of War (Epic's biggest series until Fortnite) thst was like Overwatch, but released a year after. Of course the game wasn't made in a year. But had it released 2 years earlier it might have been able to reach a bigger crowd rather than slowly fade into a niche cult following.
Anecdotal, but Lawbreakers wasn't nearly as good of a game in any respect. Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition. Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.
> Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition.
It wouldn't have zero competition in 2015, and I'm not talking about it coming out a decade prior, before Team Fortress 2. two years isn't even half a generation (or a quarter, in gen 8's eyes). I think your metaphor is a bit slanted here.
Also, I'm not saying Overwatch wouldn't have overtaken it anyway; But a year of being around would be enough to establish an audience and keep the game around. For a live service game this is key.
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>Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.
Sure, and pong was successful because it came before brickbreaker. Well, brick breaker is Lawbreakers in this case, the difference between cultural phenomenon and "but you HAVE heard of me" (which is an increasingly harder bar to clear).
And as a tangent, this is also why I'm never a fan of naming games in conversations. I don't think Overwatch is nearly as good a game as people think, it just got all that viral fan art and (previous) goodwill from a company gamers (previously) trusted. But there's some just world fallacy going on mentally in that I am inherently "wrong" when bashing a successful game and also inherently "wrong" when I praise a non-successful game. Because surely if a game fails it must have been bad right?
our perceptions are influence not just by quality, but by the zeitgeist around the games. Especially when we can't truly define why those games are "fun" to begin with.
It probably is, but because games are such a new medium, the rate it’s advancing (not just in terms of tech, but also in design and audience expectations) is quite rapid. It means if you work on a single game for a few years, by the time you release it the demands of the market may have changed dramatically.
But do they really? It's not the '80s/'90s, genres are somewhat fossilized by now. Some things do change, but they tend to be refinements of well-established concepts.
In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.
Tech is only a small part of what I’m talking about. I mean more that the standards have risen significantly as far as the quality of art style and polish, and the sophistication of gameplay and metagame depth.
You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.