We’re flooded with an incredible back catalog and a sea of gems, yet the sentiment is “small devs are fine” is totally ignorant of how, literally the vast majority of the time per the article, these small devs barely make ends meet on their genuinely good passion project.
Or they generalize that all games are junk because they haven’t even made a bare minimum attempt to shop around the sea of excellently organized stores and review sites/databases the industry has, like they expect absolute perfection in a personal TikTok/YouTube feed directed at them, then turn around and complain about paying a few bucks for an indie after dropping $600 on a GPU.
…There really are too many games because it’s so many passion projects now, and that’s… fine. It’s a lot better than the cinema situation now, for example, where indie makers are getting squeezed so hard.
But I still don’t like the entitled culture that hurts the discoverability of these smaller games and feeds the AAA slop conveyer belts.
There are also the people that don’t have time for many video games like me. It’s incredibly hard to find these hidden gems if you aren’t immersed in video game talk.
Is there some trusted review publication I should be going to check to find them?
RockPaperShotgun is my go-to, but I also tend to use ‘sorting’ features in stores and stuff.
For instance, on steam, you can filter by tags you like, like ‘co-op’ or ‘base building’ or whatever, then sort by review score to float the best to the top. And sometimes there are external sites like GamePasta (for Gamepass) with similar features for other platforms:
I may have better advice if there’s a certain ‘type’ of game you like. For instance, do you prefer coop with mates or an SO or something? Do you like RTSes or sandbox games or what?
I’m sorry, but gamers are so entitled.
We’re flooded with an incredible back catalog and a sea of gems, yet the sentiment is “small devs are fine” is totally ignorant of how, literally the vast majority of the time per the article, these small devs barely make ends meet on their genuinely good passion project.
Or they generalize that all games are junk because they haven’t even made a bare minimum attempt to shop around the sea of excellently organized stores and review sites/databases the industry has, like they expect absolute perfection in a personal TikTok/YouTube feed directed at them, then turn around and complain about paying a few bucks for an indie after dropping $600 on a GPU.
…There really are too many games because it’s so many passion projects now, and that’s… fine. It’s a lot better than the cinema situation now, for example, where indie makers are getting squeezed so hard.
But I still don’t like the entitled culture that hurts the discoverability of these smaller games and feeds the AAA slop conveyer belts.
There are also the people that don’t have time for many video games like me. It’s incredibly hard to find these hidden gems if you aren’t immersed in video game talk.
Is there some trusted review publication I should be going to check to find them?
RockPaperShotgun is my go-to, but I also tend to use ‘sorting’ features in stores and stuff.
For instance, on steam, you can filter by tags you like, like ‘co-op’ or ‘base building’ or whatever, then sort by review score to float the best to the top. And sometimes there are external sites like GamePasta (for Gamepass) with similar features for other platforms:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/
I may have better advice if there’s a certain ‘type’ of game you like. For instance, do you prefer coop with mates or an SO or something? Do you like RTSes or sandbox games or what?