I’m back to talk more about gaming. Here’s my last post in which I just meandered all over the place, but I did manage to talk about Sarah Bond and how she “resigned” to be with her family and pursue other oppportunities. I believe it even less today than I did yesterday. All the things the Xbox execs are saying are just noise. I. Don’t. Believe. Them. Period. I just fucking do not.
I’m old. I’m tired. I’m mad. I ain’t got time for this shit. Do not fucking tell me that the sky is green and expect me to believe it. I have included a video from Paul Tassi below. He’s solid, and I trust his reporting. He mentions the same The Verge article that I cited in the post yesterday. Again, I don’t have a sub, so I’m relying on what others have said about it.
I’m pretty anti-capitalism to begin with. I mean, as much as I can be in a very pro-capitalism world. Specifically in the gaming world, I don’t buy games on release day for the most part unless it’s a FromSoft game on PC (BIG sigh over The Duskbloods being a Switch 2 exclusive, but also, mixed feelings on the nature of the game).
I haven’t been happy with the gaming industry in general for the whole time I’ve participated in it, and I’m thinking it might be time to bow out. I have never considered myself a gamer beacuse I have never felt welcome in the community. I mean, let’s face it. It’s a community of mostly cishet dudes in their twenties. Not exactlyy my people.
For the most part, I didn’t care. I mostly play games by myself, so it didn’t really matter if I was part of a community or not. However. I hate what’s going on in the gaming industry in general, and I’m not sure I feel comfort supporting it. At least the AAA developers.
I always separate indie devs from the rest of the gaming industry because it’s a whole different situtaion. Well, we need to get even more granular than that. When I say indie, there are different levels. Anything less than twenty people is a small indie dev to me. Twenty-one to fifty is medium. Fifty-one to a hundred is larrge. I just added the last category right now. I’ll be honest. A hundred-person company is too big to be indie to me. Wait. Larian Studios. They have over 400 employees, but they self-published. They are considered an indie studio, but some people don’t really consider them indie.
Do I? Huh. I’m not sure. I mean, they do self-publish, but they are gigantic. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it more and deal with it later. It’s not really relevant to what I’m trying to talk about in this post, so I’ll let it go for now.
For the most part, I play games that are made by truly indie teams. We’re talking ten or less people. My favorite game last year was made by a studio (Promise Mascot Agency, Kaizen Game Works) that has 3 fulltime employees. They do use contractors, but still. My favorite game so far this year (The Spirit Lift, prettysmart games) has two people on the team. They also have other people they use, but the team itself has two people.