While I agree that 1 person can make a game easier than ever before, game development cost has ballooned for bigger studios.
People love to point to Indie mega hits and say "why doesn't EA/Activision just make games with creativity like Balatro? This is what the people want.", but I challenge anyone to actually predict what that hit game is going to be before it takes off.
It's a big gamble to put games out there and most indie studios don't make more than 1. It's not a reliable business model to put these thousand person studios to work on a thousand different solo pet projects.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill. A voxel indie mountain bike riding game that basically has you trying to ride down various mountain trails in shorter times and with less crashes. Very chill game, good for parents who don't have a lot of time to game anymore.
Yeah WTF? Obviously the rest of the world needs to suffer for the cost increase in the US..
Maybe now is the time to preorder a Switch 2 before Nintendo change their worldwide pricing. It's cheaper than $450 USD here in Australia right now.
I wonder at what point are the goods cost-prohibitive. I suppose it depends on the item. There's many things that American made is still more than double the cost of the Chinese item.
I mean, if 450 is hit with a 24% (Japanese) tariff, you're looking at $558 at least. I'm not sure from which country Switch 2's are imported into the USA from. If Vietnam or Cambodia that would be crazy
The API killing my preferred third party app did it for me. And the blatant astroturfing/karma farming also meant that it wasn't a good experience on there.
I will say though, the Reddit hivemind effect is still present on Lemmy. Though I think there's less tepid posts to raise account karma here.
While I agree that 1 person can make a game easier than ever before, game development cost has ballooned for bigger studios.
People love to point to Indie mega hits and say "why doesn't EA/Activision just make games with creativity like Balatro? This is what the people want.", but I challenge anyone to actually predict what that hit game is going to be before it takes off.
It's a big gamble to put games out there and most indie studios don't make more than 1. It's not a reliable business model to put these thousand person studios to work on a thousand different solo pet projects.