Games

Bad game design choices: Early Access

Submitted by Duion on

Early Access for games is a more modern invention, which did not exist in the past, it was once praised as a good and innovative thing, but now I think it has more drawbacks than it does good.

What does Early Access do? It grants users an early access to the game before it is finished, so they can get the game before it is actually finished and therefore help develop the game through testing and giving feedback.

Sounds all good at first? So let us break down what is bad with this model:

Bad game design choices: Cosmetics

Submitted by Duion on

This is probably the "Pay to Win's" little brother. So what are cosmetics, it is the way of the game making money by selling cosmetic items for the game like hats for the player to wear. This is different to "Pay to Win" in the sense that someone who purchases it, does not gain an advantage in the game, so sounds good at first, but at second thought, then why does it work anyway? I mean if cosmetics supposedly don't do anything for you in the game, then why people buy them?

The dumbing down of gamers

Submitted by Duion on

After writing the recent blog post "The dumbing down of games" I started asking myself the question: Is it the dumbed down games that create dumbed down gamers or is it dumbed down gamers that require dumbed down games?

It most likely is a combination of both, the question is more what is the bigger factor or the root cause.

The dumbing down of games

Submitted by Duion on

This is a topic I wonder why not many people already talk about this, it is the dumbing down of games.

It is probably because most gamers today are young and they don't know how it was in the past and for the older people maybe because their memory is not working anymore. However let me tell you how it was in the past and go through each step you needed or did go through in order to play a computer game:

The potato farmer problem in open source

Submitted by Duion on

One issue leads to the next and the potato farmers kind of arise out of the denial of technological progress in the open source gaming community. Most often those are open source game developers or advocates and probably out of their denial of technological progress they use the argument "But it runs on old hardware" to justify, why they never improve or care to improve.

Open source gamers are in denial of technological progress

Submitted by Duion on

This is kind of a part two of the open source gaming community in denial. There are so many aspects to this problem, that I probably need multiple articles about it. The last blog post covered the problem that the open source gaming community is in denial of them failing in terms of market share and this one is more about how they do not even understand the concept of improving in technological progress, like most of the rest of the world does. You understand?

The open source gaming community is in denial

Submitted by Duion on

As an open source game developer I needed to search for methods to market my game and since the mainstream market is not my main target group I needed to search for alternative ways for marketing. So I searched what open source gaming communities there are and also what Linux gaming communities there are, but there were not that many active ones and the "active" ones I found basically all live in denial and therefore are as good as inactive.

Open source game development is just plagiarism

Submitted by Duion on

So you have to consider you are supposed to be the good guy, fighting against the evil big companies with their evil proprietary products and then everything you do is trying to steal their intellectual property, steal their fame, steal their creativity, steal their brand, steal their users etc. Sure many companies do that as well, but in the business world, the default is still, that every company has it's own product, in their own style, their own brand name etc, but in the open source game development scene the default seems to be, to just steal everything and be a copycat. This amazes me again and again how nobody can see the issue in there.

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