While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
Thank fuck for indie devs making the best games right now at an affordable price.
I have over a thousand games in my steam library and my most played is dominated by indie games.
I am curious which indie titles you would recommend.
Edit: Some of these are not necessarily indies (solo or small team devs), it’s more like indie/niche games I consider good.
- Outer Wilds
- Subnautica
- Slay The Spire
- Noita
- Dome Keeper
- Risk Of Rain 2
- Inscryption
- Barotrauma
- Baba Is You
- The Binding of Isaac
- Battlebit Remastered
- GRIP: Combat Racing
- Factorio
- Dyson Sphere Program
- Against The Storm
- Banished
- Caves Of Qud
- Darkest Dungeon
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Duskers
- Fly Dangerous
- Foxhole
- Forts
- Frostpunk
- FTL
- Graveyard Keeper
- Hardspace Shipbreaker
- Hollow Knight
- Hotline Miami
- Kingdoms And Castles
- Loop Hero
- Magicka & Magicka 2
- Nebulous Fleet Command
- Nebuchadnezzar
- OpenTTD
- Oxygen Not Included
- Peglin
- Project Zomboid
- Rimworld
- Mindustry
- Space Engineers
- Shapez
- Songs Of Conquest
- Starbound
- Starmancer
- Stardew Valley
- Tin Can
- Terraria
- Trailmakers
- ΔV: Rings of Saturn
- Vampire Survivors
- Vectorio
- Wizard With A Gun
- HADES
Non Steam (yet):
Not in any specific order, my steam library is about 80% either Indie or non-AAA.
In addition to that:
- Atom RPG;
- Dead Cells;
- Into the breach;
- Shadowrun series;
- This war of mine;
- Dust - An Elysian Tail;
- Broforce;
- Bastion;
Many more of course.
In addition to these games I find these games below to be an absolute hoot
- disco elysium
- beamng drive
Chained echoes is also a banger
It’s like people don’t know Brotato even exists!
So many Bros.
Would you say bastion is the best supergiant title pre-Hades? I’ve been eyeing both that and transistor for a while
I would. But I didn’t play a lot of their games. Bastion is kind of unique. Story is pretty linear but its structure is quite a novelty. There’s an awesome narrator that is telling the story, but he reacts to everything you do and has a snarky sense of humor. Game is well designed action RPG with a good variety of weapons and in my eyes very little replay value. Still worth the asking price though.
I recently played Outer Wilds for the first time last week. Games like this, I always worry they’re overhyped, but it was great.
There’s a lot of good games on this list, plus ones I’ve never played before, I should probably check some of them out.
Ignore the pre-release hype (I mean hype before anyone gets to try the game, early access hype is good). If the game is hyped after people get to play it, then I find it’s safer to trust, though personal preferences can still make it miss the mark.
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CrossCode isn’t my type of a game but I saved Zero Sievert, looks good!
Yeah, CrossCode is absolutely amazing. I didn’t hear about it until recently. I’m so glad I didn’t completely miss out on it. It’s like my number 1 favourite game now and I almost missed it.
I like to make sure I bring it up anytime people ask about good games they may not have heard of.
Literally my idea of the perfect game.
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This list is utterly fantastic, but if you haven’t given Dave The Diver a chance you definitely should. It’s by far my favorite release from this year, and the devs seem to have even more content planned.
Heard about it, haven’t played it yet but I did have heard great stuff about it, it’s definitely on my future radar
Can confirm these are absolute bangers
Can confirm your confirmation, some of these are incredible experiences
I agree with you man, thanks for agreeing with me
Rock and stoneee o-T
That feeling when you have played (and loved!) Like 90% of this list lmao
…do I play too many games?
…nah
I see an fellow barotrumua player. My favourite aspect of barotrumua is the
griefingclowning aspectThank you very much for the recommendations!
Ty for the list!
I’d like to add Ardor to the list. It’s a free turn based deck building game where you face off against hexagon creatures on a hexagon board. It’s pretty polished for an actual free to play game.
This sounds interesting, thank you!
What’s your genre?
Can you recommend any dungeon crawlers or survival games?
Some dungeon crawlers I enjoyed: Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Torchlight 1 & 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Legend of Grimrock, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth
Hades on the Switch might be right up your alley
For the king (1&2) & Valheim
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is my all-time favorite mobile game. It’s a Rogue-like with hundreds/thousands of ways to win; but be prepared to be humbled.
Literally just made it to the shop keeper after defeating the slime boss. It’s a hell of a game. Maybe one of the best.
See I normally like this type of game but struggle to get into this one in particular. I’m also confused about most items in it.
Neverwinter Nights has 20+ years of custom content, runs on almost anything, is still getting graphical & engine updates and has modules & persistent world servers that cover both of those genres & more.
TIL: NWN is still alive.
For a literal dungeon crawler: Demeo
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Ape Escape is very quick to pick up and a blast to play. It’s more of the old school side scrolling style, but definitely in the survival theme.
Tower defense and strategy in general.
Try Factorio, its fantastic
Thanks! On my wishlist already.
Mindustry
Cool, thanks. Wishlisted this.
Not exactly a minor indie game by any means, but bloons td6 is the game I’ve player the most on mobile by some distance. It’s £6 with no microtransactions and a shit load of content. If you like TD games this is a home run.
For strategy paradox games are always fun
Do you mean Paradox Interactive? Publishers of Stellaris, Europa Universalis, etc.
Yeah
If you want something competitive, Legion TD2
Looks interesting, thanks.
First person shooters
Check out Splitgate not indie but I had a good blast with my friends
I thought Split Gate was shutting down.
Otherwise I’d agree it’s great fun.
I was going to reply, but most of the games I would recommend are already listed out.
Some gems are missing, but I’d need to be at my PC to figure out which ones.
However, I did not see Unexplored 1 mentioned by anyone off the top of my head.
A few of those games form my core of things I’ll go back to every so often, though my list isn’t all Indies. I’d probably throw CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and KSP in there too though, off the top of my head. Surprised to see foxhole in there but I suppose it’s in a relatively decent state at the moment and it’s somehow claimed 1400 hours from me on steam now.
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You seem like the kinda fella that could appreciate Brotato too :-)
Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It’ll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
Disco elysium
Yea, I wouldn’t give them any money, though. The actual creators got fucked and any purchases of the game go to the people that fucked them. Great game, but I’d sail the seas for it.
Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.
Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it… a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.
Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.
Death’s Door, top down dungeon crawler/RPG.
The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.
Do people get refund if the game have a bug or a glitch that slow them down?
Or hell, what if I play the game for 20 minutes and hate it? Do they pay me? Do I give them 25 cents?
An hour of grinding - that they will also sell you powerups to help you skip that grind.
The games will go all grind to maximize profit per player.
As a Morrowind player, I feel attacked
Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying ‘dollars per hour’ while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)
Stupid metric by some rich asshole who is solely focused on making more money.
I read something like this and my immediate thought is “torches, pitchforks, guillotines.”
Returning to a feudal economy is a sensible idea, lighting with renewable materials, making hay while the sun shines and executing traitors is much more productive than playing games
Seriously I’m tired of all these gaming CEOs that don’t play games therefore are so out of touch. Guy is just another Kotick clone.
Theoretically he can go fuck himself. All that is going to do is make games drag out mindless crap with no actual value entertainment-wise.
The most successful games are already like that, and I hate it. Give me a good story in a compact experience (luckily, still many examples for that).
First thing that comes to mind for me is Far Cry 6, where there is a few missions you have to find certain things without the aid of any quest markers.
Imagine a game like that with absolutely no markers and they take your map as well. At best you’d spend 3 times as long trying to finish the same game, and now they think they can charge you 3 times as much? Fuck that noise.
Sounds like someone wants me to not buy their overpriced game.
Yup. For every idiot like this, there’s an indie game or even a Larian Studios offering MUCH better bang for your bucks.
Rockstar’s games are the rare few I’d say are worth a full $60
That was before they started diarrhea shitting themselves since the founders left. GTA Trilogy, GTA+, and removing cars people paid for in Online is just a taste of things to come.
I specifically mean their in-house single player games, so only GTA V and RDR2 for the last decade.
That’s what I mean, Rockstar was a brand you could trust until after RDR2. Founders left right after and you can see how things changed right after.
Yeah, they left and the change was IMMEDIATE. Holy moly the shit show that was RDO. If you were playing that game back then, you could see the crumbling of the company happening in real time, it was wild. RDO being left to rot is my Roman empire, and I wonder if the founders feel regret at all with how their creation was treated by the company they left. Or if they just dry their tears with hundos these days?
Heck, I don’t even feel like RDR2 lived up to it’s full potential before they left, what with post-game being the most buggy and unfinished-feeling part of the whole game. It felt like it was just waiting for DLC content to be added, since it was a huge patch of map with hardly anything going on. Sigh, who knows.
Too bad it will be at a minimum $70, and i bet with the hype, even $80, while also being chockful of microtransactions.
It’s Rockstar Games, they love microtransactions and Sharkcards and will more than likely implement more greed tactics into their next big game (GTA 6). I’m still pissed off over the bilking they did with the bunker series in GTA 5. They’re a ruthless, greedy company. And don’t forget those times they went after those fanboys/talented game designers who were revamping their old games like GTA 4. Those kids were super talented and Rockstar busted their asses like the mobsters they are. Fuck Rockstar and their next GTA greed fest.
Don’t call them mobsters, they probably think that sounds cool. More like corporate sell outs.
Sure, great idea, why wouldn’t I want more low quality padding content in my games? It’s not like they already have too much of it.
That’s a subscription. He should try it and see how that goes.
GTA+ is already a thing…
Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their “+” more attractive.
The less someone actually plays games, the more this idea will make sense to them.
Gamers, especially older gamers, will know this is a BS metric.
“We were going to charge $60 but then we added 40 hours of tailing side quests so now we’re charging $120” - Ubisoft.
Hours of gameplay is a god awful metric and only a corporate dipshit could utter such a stupid fucking sentence.
4k+ hours on path of exile. I played D2 probably more hours than my kids have been alive.
Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that’s all people do. Here’s the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.
he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:
“In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to.”
So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics
He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC in GTA 5 and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I’m sure will continue with 6. I’ll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I’m still a fan, but I’m not giving them another cent.
“I will pirate because you didnt give me sp dlc” is one of the craziest reasons ahaha. GTA 5 was good value all things considered, was a great game.
Yeah, I’m going to have to agree. It had plenty of content to make up for its price tag.
I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is “i’m going to pirate your next game” then you’re probably just pushing them further into a direction you don’t want them to go.
It’s rockstar, they’ve enough money to not give a fuck no matter what.
They were not going to shift course on game design based on a single sale turned pirate
If you think that giant companies don’t look at social media responses to their games in order to make future decisions, I have a bridge to sell you.
If you think that companies look at social media more than their own sales metrics, then Ive probably already sold you a bridge and have a loyalty program for you to sign up for, to get 15% off your next purchase
If you think that giant companies don’t look at social media responses to their games in order to make future decisions, I have a bridge to sell you.
I’ve been part of Community Management at a major studio, and I was told to stop ‘wasting their time’ with customer feedback, so which bridge is it?
Odds that you can name the studio?
I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it’s more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti… mizion, Sledge…wammer Ztudios, 434… endustries, Pioware… Grames?
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That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it’s no better value than any other story driven single player game.
gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it’s been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.
we can complain about a lot, I’ll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst “very very competitive”.
Ah but see, that may only be due to GTA V actually having the development time and releasing as a single player game because Online wasn’t near being ready when the game launched. Now that Online is out and that’s where their focus has been, we will most likely see the base single player game quality suffer dramatically. Look at games like Call of Duty. They used to have phenomenal single player experiences, and now you’re lucky if you get something worth playing at all.
So I would point at rdr2. That came out long after gta v online made mountains of money. Large single-player experience. Online existed, didn’t detract.
That may be true for many, but I’m willing to bet most of those “hours” they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn’t included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.
If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don’t try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they’ll ignore after release, and don’t be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.
Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!
the makers of the software they use also have their own algorithms for determining pricing yes.
Yeah, and I bet they’re affordable. What Strauss is proposing is a massive increase in initial purchase price for those that aren’t paying subscriptions. $70 is borderline affordable for a lot of people as is and that will now be a higher entry price. I’m not in that boat, personally, but I can see how it would be detrimental to the gaming industry as a whole.
Then again, there is the flip side where people are now forced to choose the games they can afford that year even more carefully (1-2 vs 6-7 or more as an example) and if a game fails expectations and someone misses out on something else, then maybe it’ll start putting some shitty developers out of business.
They aren’t proposing increasing the price. Did you read the article or my initial comment about how people just read the bad headline and argue against it at all?
Of course I read the article. It specifically says, “… value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to…”
I’m beginning to wonder if you read the article. They want to charge off of one value and add it to an initial base value. If you think this idea has nothing to do with increasing profits then I have a bridge in the Sahara to sell you.
Nothing in that is about raising the price, the whole thing is about him showing off what great value the series is by their metrics.
Here’s where you say “of course it is! I’ve imagined that this leads to the next thing which is raised prices”. Cool, go make these comments on the thread about them raising prices, or proposing raising prices. That isn’t what is happening here.
Executives are assholes and should not be listened to, ever.
Can’t wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.
One correction:
Apple releases “iTetris” for $3000. Their fans claim it’s way better than the original. It’s the same game with only 8 levels, but you can pay extra for more.
The blocks look fancy but do EXACTLY the same thing.
Doesn’t seem fair that some people get paid so well for fucking up so badly.
This dude just speedran 2024 and 2025
We’re living in a dystopia so boring that the future is easily predictable.
I’ve often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it’s very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.
This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous ‘story’
I also have less time to game, but I sure as hell don’t want to play shorter games. I like to play games with good stories, who are engaging and with fun play. Witcher 3 is a prime example of how even the majority of the side quests can be meaningful and not feeling too generic. I also enjoyed the last of us part 2. And I usually feel sorry when I finish a good game.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price which isn’t always the case.
I don’t know if shorter games should command a lower price. It depends on the value you get out of it.
It is debatable, but would you pay 70$ for a 2-hours game and another 10x70$ for DLCs and expansions that would extend the original content?
But this also doesn’t mean that you should feel your game with generic content in order to make it longer either. It is a fine line but I know that I would have a real problem justifying 70€ for 2 hours of game content without replayability, even if the game is amazing.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price
This is exactly the thing that doesn’t make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter? What about Bioshock? It’s half the length of The Last of Us 2
I agree, that’s why i think Take Two owe me $23 because i finished GTAV in 37 hours.
Though i hope Wube, Bethesda, and Fromsoft won’t bill me for my playtime…
"breaking news: a czech man known only as kovarex has rocketed to the top of the most wealthy men in the world list. Legislation is currently being drafted to regulate the use of the drug ‘factorio’ with several legislators describing as ‘extremely addictive. Like, so addictive. Really guys.’ "
I played 3 GTAs, and I only enjoyed gta 2. They owe me money
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Ok so somebody should ask this CEO how he expects gamers to pay potentially $200 per game.
What an idiot, games are priced at what the market will bear and they’ve pretty much reached that limit now.
When you get paid in 6-7 digits annually, ideas start to form that the peasants aren’t paying you enough of their 2 digits.
He’s out of touch and thinking about profit, like the blizz ceo pushing games-as-a-service
What are you, a weenie?
Which is what he said
