@dagda @SuperDicq @coolboymew @romin @takao

> true, but I really think western big publishers are in collapse mode anyways,

You don't need to qualify it, the Japanese ones are doing that, too. The problem there is there's not as much indie stuff going on. Cave Story was pretty great, but it's not like the US, even the EU. There might be more great shit coming out of Euro indie game devs than American ones, which is thoroughly confusing.

I really like consoles but I don't think we'll see more than a couple more generations. @SilverDeth might have some commentary, he's got a broader and longer view of the industry than I do.

> which is not just consoomer “compliance” but also class war against industry workers

I don't exactly buy this, you know, they want to get the same results by spending less money and the management guys (producers and directors) ends to think of the coders and artists and level designers and musicians as interchangeable cogs, a view that the "class warfare" way of looking at it actually reinforces, with the monolithic "workers" as "a class". But this is more or less the normal tendency of people to view the world in terms as simple as they can get away with (it's not anti-machine warfare when someone is content to view the computer as a magical black-box) combined with the normal tendency to try to save money and the generally conservative trend in the industry to try to stick to things that work. Music is doing this: the guys that wrote the hit songs in the 90s are the same guys still doing most of the song-writing in studios, the producers and mixers, and that's because the labels want to reduce music to a factory so that they can get predictable sales: not many people with dumptrucks full of money try to renegotiate the fees for streaming services, this is something that people do to try to keep the dumptrucks coming when the money slows down. (Youtube gets a big boom, it slows, and then there's the wave of "demonitizations" as the people running it start having to chase the advertisers' dollars instead of just getting it dumped onto them.) Movies are like that: sequels and remakes and capeshit, massive budgets, trying to placate both the mobs on Twitter and the Chinese censors because if you spend a billion dollars, you don't want to be shut out of any markets and cutting a check for a billion dollars means that, even if the director gets some guarantees about artistic license, there will always be several guys from the studio trying to ensure that the billion dollars isn't going into a hole.

So I'm excited about the indie games, the self-published music, all of that. I did that album (and there's another one coming down the pike, this is a threat, I caught myself whistling modem noises in the shower the other day) and the budget was basically zero. I think most "real" musicians can't get away with $0 but you can get pretty damned close, you can do it in your living room without buying studio time, you don't need to pay the studio for use of their mixing equipment. The dinosaurs are dying, this is great.

> Often however the remasters don’t feel sovlles and fit the “like I remembered it in higher Res” sweet spot. With Quake 2 Nightdive for example

See, I think this is *really* dependent on *which* game. I think most of the iD stuff is going to fit in the category where remakes work all right. I don't mean that in an even remotely negative sense: it's like the gun variant of Tetris or Breakout, it's right if it feels right. But imagine an attempt to remake Leisure Suit Larry or Vagrant Story or Castlevania II or Bravely Default or Duck Hunt: you couldn't do any of them and expect the same feeling to come out, and all of those for different reasons.

> (RIP satanism)

:satanmad:

> the original was VERBOTEN by the german state anyways.

Shit, seriously?

> encouragement and the top 1% didn’t exist because being good at a game didn’t mean quitting your job back then).

Ha, I think, like, where I really got the difference was Warcraft III. Games are not played or viewed the same if you're in the top 1% of players. It's like this with everything, but you really see it with games, especially RTSs, FPSs. Speedrunners have a very different view of Mario than most people that play Mario.

> I like unbalanced multiplayer games, they have sovl.

Ha, yeah, some personality.