Selling Out

I made a promise to myself that I will never sell out the game to some publisher or involve myself with a team. This is a project that takes time, and you cannot buy time.

It’s a common assumption to say that anything which involves more people will be of higher quality than those that involve less people, and generally speaking, this is true. Without a solid team and a source of disposable income, I would have never gotten to enjoy Fallout 3 and New Vegas, any of the games from Valve, or Grand Theft Auto.

But on the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Kenshi, Stardew Valley, and everyone’s favorite: Minecraft, all made primarily by one person without funding. In fact, these developers were working a second job to support their game’s development.

And this was a fair balance back then. You’d get some good titles made by AAA studios and some bad ones, and some good titles by indie devs along with some bad ones.. But things change, like everything in life.

Nowadays, you have big AAA game studios who come up with barely playable games, with an unjustifiably high price tag. Even more maddening is when these AAA game studios are the same ones that made games that you used to enjoy. Somehow, the writing and RPG mechanics of Fallout 3 and New Vegas lost its immersion, and by that I mean it has lost a grip on reality: The old storywriters were able to base a narrative on a realistic and believable foundation, such as the FEV virus which came about due to biological research, and was a source of contention as it promised racial, physical and mental hegemony, thus eradicating humanity’s differences and therefore conflict, which is believable because there is a scientific basis to it, but also because race is a real political issue. Now the writing is so wacky and out of touch that people will just write the most ridiculous nonsense then justify it with “magic” or “aliens” or “magic aliens lol”. This is basically the “story” for Starfield: the whole plot was about magic aliens because… because it just is okay?

Creativity isn’t writing nonsense, same way shitting all over a canvas does not make an artwork.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean indie devs, including myself, have found an advantage. Quite the contrary, the democratization of game development with free open source game engines like Godot and Unity has no doubt allowed some great projects, but also a massive influx of any wannabe “game dev” who thinks making another 2D platformer or FPS using the same gun model from 17 other FPS games is something worth bragging about.

But then you’ll say “ermm but some of these games are super popular”. Well I then would ask two things: “Why is it popular”, and “How did it become popular”? A good example is Palworld. Palworld, if I’m being honest, sounded like the dumbest game I’ve ever heard. Pokemon… with guns. Wow, so not only did they completely steal the Pokemon concept, but they think that adding guns to it is going to make it revolutionary. Remember this: Taking two good things and mixing them together does not make an even better thing, if I like eating pizza and ice cream, that does not mean that putting pizza and ice cream into a blender and mixing it together will make it better.

So why is it popular? Because as the title of this post suggests: They sold out. I will not delve into the real nature of why they did it, but they did sell out. In exchange for their souls, they would be given fame and riches, and they got exactly that: Palworld suddenly topping charts and selling millions in days, from a company I’ve never heard of.

Of course, a soul is immaterial, and it wouldn’t make sense to objectively describe it especially on a game development blog site, but it is simply the essence of humanity, the source of creativity, and the most valuable thing which the Devil is after, for the Devil cannot create. So that should answer your question as to why a game like Palworld, which took two of the most tried to death mechanics that’s literally been in existence for the past 20 years, suddenly becoming massively popular.

I should also make a point on graphics, which I think serves to compensate for bad gameplay rather than being a feature of a game. Kenshi has pretty poor graphics by today’s standards, and on a technical level Minecraft doesn’t have graphics, just textures. Yet despite this, these games are played by many modern gamers, and I enjoy these games even with a RTX 3080 so it’s not a matter of hardware limitation, and if you really think about it: The low graphics actually creates a certain aesthetic that makes it strangely more appealing. Good graphics, in my mind, acts more like makeup: It just makes something look good on the surface, but is generally done to hide or draw attention away from an inferior aspect of the game.

This should explain why I don’t intend to sell out my game, and the argument that a game needs to first be successful or good in order to be sold can’t even be used here because I have plenty of examples of terrible games which have sold tons of copies, because once again, the Prince of Lies can promise you anything, but obviously, they’re all lies.

It also explains my second reasoning for why I can not work in a team, because as I’ve come to realize, there are far more people who claim to be developers than actual developers, so I don’t think I’m missing out on much. Many, if not all, have sold their souls, perpetually lying about their skills, their projects, their experience, etc.. I’ve yet to meet one who can actually create, and it would make sense as those gifted with both creativity and skill are extremely rare in the world.

What a sad state of affairs.