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0 pointsjacquesm7y ago0 comments

Re. The shovelware bit: Once upon a time, when men were real men, etc, making a game meant writing it from the ground up, writing your own engine and then writing the game logic on top of that engine to make something unique.

Now that game engines are commonplace, free and work better than what any single developer would be able to come up with after a lifetime of hard work the end result is that games have a very hard time to differentiate themselves from each other. There isn't really an unlimited space of game scenarios out there, even in the days of the 2D arcade games after a couple of years it became much harder to come up with something truly unique.

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tialaramex7y ago

No.

It was never difficult to "come up with something truly unique".

Your unique thing might be rubbish, but that's not the problem for the millions of shovelware Unity asset flips.

Jim Sterling has covered this at length, even running a competition to show that people can take a horribly over-used cheap asset and do great original stuff - if they try. Asset flips don't even try.

The are tens of thousands of games in which you are an elite soldier running around shooting zombies. There are zero games where you're a pot plant using psychic powers to create sculptures.

Like Hollywood the video game industry chases trends until they're beaten completely to death, and then goes one more round just to make really sure.

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