€30 vs €80 and I can play it hundreds of hours. Is that so hard of an equation ?
You can play assassin’s Creed for a hundred hours too. Another part of the equation is creativity and ingenuity in mechanics. Paying full price for the same game 4 times with different skins doesn’t cut it
Innovative mechanics are generally where indies are shining though.
I’m not arguing that some AAA don’t have merits either in play time or other but from a euro per minute of pleasure overall they are not as good as indie games these last 10 or so years.
I think part of it is that game budgets are too massive.
It’s as if making a game that players enjoy and want to play while keeping the pricing honest and without bullshit battlepasses and dlc’s worked better than making the uptenth slop made to milk the players with nothing but the shareholders in mind. Shocking, I know.
I’d hardly call Palworld innovative, It’s Satisfactory/Factorio meets Rust with legally distinct pokemon. The novelty is what carries it but it didn’t exactly reinvent the genre by any stretch.
Yeah, the novelty is basically that it’s Pokemon with the rose-tinted glasses off. But I’d argue that’s not really what carries it and neither is gameplay that works surprisingly well for something they glued together from Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, and any survival action game.
What carries it is that Pocketpair have kept improving the game despite legal interference and without succumbing to the temptation of charging more money.
There’s no pre-launch DLC. There’s no out-of-early-access price hike. The 1.0 release had so much new stuff in it that it could’ve been sold as an expansion pack in the pre-DLC days and they just pushed it as a free update because they felt the game wasn’t done yet. Even the crossover content is free.
This is a game where the developer actually seems to care about delivering a good product. And I think you can feel it in the quality of the game.
Traditional studio systems work but traditional publishing models don’t.
