If you build a really good game, there is a market for it. Otherwise it will be lost in an ocean of not-interesting titles.
If you have 0 standards.
No film, no music, no game.
There's good, but there is no truly magnificent to the level I burst into tears and see the face of God.
Come on people. Your standards are too low.
Producing things of value takes a lot of time and effort, you would be too busy to waste time lamenting about things outside of your control.
Anybody with a big imagination must feel trapped by mediocre content. Daydreams are often more enjoyable.
But not finding joy in anything is an actual sign of depression. Have some media standards declined? Yes, definitely. But by no means is literally everything bad now. You can still find plenty of non-formulaic media on streaming services.
Moving to something else that provides joy is a sign of healthy life, not depression. If you don't like modern media, you don't have to find some that you like, you can look somewhere else, in a completely different area.
Hang in there! It gets better!
Even if you take an old established media, like literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30.
Saying that about gaming industry, which is barely 50 year old, is a joke.
One can only say that when they no idea what "high standards" actually means.
Some time ago I started playing all the games that to me felt worthwhile to play in roughly chronological order.
I think the project is overall quite different than "reading all the classics" though - a lot of old games have aged pretty poorly so I can either skip them or abandon after giving them a fair shot.
I'm currently roughly in the 2000-2010 era of games. (It's not pure chronological, because I tend to sort play order by console, then by series, then by year.)
I don't think this is true, at least not for an ordinary person, unless you're dedicating your life to it (hardly trivial) or ploughing your way through for the sake of completion rather than absorbing them intellectually and emotionally. Writers like Joyce can be difficult to even parse if you're trying to read their work quickly, and to truly understand it you'll probably need to engage with secondary sources. And then there's the likes of Proust, which aren't exactly difficult to read but are extremely long (and probably won't do much for you unless you take your time with them). There's no objectively valid set of 'classics' but we're talking about certainly hundreds and arguably thousands of books. A book a week every single week from the age of 15-30 would do it if we're taking about a medium-sized set of classics...
Or spend a lifetime reading and re-reading them non-trivially.
"My definition of a great story has nothing to do with 'a varied and interesting background.' It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure."
- Gene Wolfe
Depends on how you define high quality, indie games with quality similar to Hollow Knight do not come out all the time.
It just is much harder to have that level of polish and amount of content without a bigger well oiled team, so almost no indie games reaches that level.
Which is completely expected, and not unique to this era. The commenter said "Released recently," as though there was some time where we were basking in masterpieces. If that's your definition for quality, the situation is still better now than it was at any other time in the industry.
There used to be hardly any indie scene. Steam was not dominant yet and consoles didn't let just anyone on their platforms. Because of this, there were far fewer games, and many of them were shit. But of course, we only remember the excellent ones, or the ones from our youth, as we do for film and music.
Today, the variety of different stories and risky ideas being tried dwarfs any other time, and people are pulling off more ambitious things with less money. And the games are also cheap. I got Songs of Syx for $25.
For what it's worth, there are a bunch of indie games I like more than Hollow Knight. I think it's a good game, but it's a pretty specific genre. I don't think we "peaked" there.
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
But I suppose that's part of the problem with all media. We have more media than ever, so tastes get more divserse. This can consequently be bad for "cultural" purposes because you can meet 1000 people and struggle to find more than 2 who like the kinds of games or movies you watch regularly. So you instead default back 20 years ago to The Wire or Sopranos or The Dark Knight Rises, etc. Around the last time we have "mass culture". or Sports.
For gaming, GTA VI will be an interesting time, even if I don't personally care for the series. Because that may be the first time since perhaps Pokemon GO where you have so many subgroups of gaming aligning together for a single release.
If you have a limited interest in genres, no, you're not going to enjoy a lot of games, which has always been true. There is not some mythical time before now where a greater quantity of excellent games were being made.
Ever bothered to actually go through the "all new releases" list on steam and actually check each new release? You should try it.
99% of "stuff" there is worthless trash, think 0 effort assetflip, which is never going to make $100 steam tax back. 1% is barely passable, as in "not a blatant insult to consumer". Unique stuff worth playing is extremely rare, if you're not 7 years old and you played more than a couple of games in your life of course.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who has played as many games as I have, and I couldn't disagree more. I find this sentiment more common amongst people who have played 20-30 games in their lifetime. The more I play, the more interested I am in the smaller titles sprinkled throughout the month. Even a janky, low budget game can do something unique. I have a massive backlog.
There are very cool games coming out every week, IMO. Just this next month,
- The Kingsfield inspired game Queen's Domain. That looks visually amazing.
- Noble Fates is a very cool Colony Sim that surpasses Rimworld in some respects (even if it comes short in others)
- Worship is a game where you play as a cult leader and command minions like Pikmin (I'm a sucker for cult games).
- County of Fortune is a massive city builder that goes a scale beyond what most city builders allow
- Silver Pines is a horror game borrowing from the genre's greats. It got a 97% on Steam.
This is a hot take indeed. Unless you use the word unique to pick only a single game from each genre, even a single genre has more games than I can hope to finish in a lifetime.
I mean, I still play Dune 2, warcraft II, sc:broodwars and C&C, in addition to Starcraft II.
And that's just a single genre.
As a kid, I played games with a board and counters. Sometimes I made my own board and counters. And there was only one channel on the B+W TV.
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
I also want to make games and music. Open source everything after 5 years. Honest games you buy once and self host forever.
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
The hate for technological advances is so strong that we're wanting... Entertainment austerity for poor people?
Oh my God.
This community needs more hope.
> extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
You're telling this to someone who is Meisner-trained, who acts and performs, who has directed, shot lots of films, and who is heavily involved in the arts. A24 is my jam, and even that's not enough to sate me.
I sincerely hope this isn't a performance.
I want better. Both as a consumer and creator in the arts.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
Understanding is a combination of consumption and reflection. There is simply not enough time to do so. This is driving a push towards content that is so simple to consume that it takes no effort.
There is a bit of a parallel here to what LLMs have done to software. They have sped up the act of writing the code, but have done little for everything on either side of the code writing.
There were trends in the past like the magical girl trend, giant robot trend, space opera trend, and high fantasy trend, but those always pulled from things like Japanese women's rejection of staid maturity, Japan's manufacturing boom and the rise of complex electronics, Star Wars and the exocolonization hype of the late 1970s, and Dungeons & Dragons and Wizardry. There was always something new outside of the sphere that got integrated into it. Nowadays many manga are copies of copies, where the things they're copying pulled from games like Tera Online, Xenoblade Chronicles, or Dragon Quest, and from landmark '90s manga and anime like Yu Yu Hakusho, Record Of Lodoss War, and Tenchi Muyo. Especially in the last seven or so years these properties are so many layers removed because of the copying that they don't know why certain plot tropes or character archetypes exist and thus don't know how to use them (or more importantly subvert them).
Sturgeon's Law obviously applies, but currently many of the best examples of ongoing manga and anime lie within a fraction of the diversity that used to exist. Comparing 2024-2026 to 2004-2006 (which was considered a dark age in anime and manga at the time) provides a pretty stark example. The same thing happened with American comics in the 1990s and 2000s before the indie comics boom following Diamond Distribution's years long fight with the industry. While kids don't have a reference for what's good or not because they don't have a back catalogue of experience to compare to, adults absolutely do. And adults are the ones that drive a majority of sales considering the anime boom started in the mid 1990s. They won't read or watch something that repeats a well worn premise but worse. So we might be about to see a collapse of manga as the snake reaches the end of eating it's own tail.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
So while AI has potentially made it easier for some Japanese content to reach English-speaking Western audiences, I’m not so sure that it’s doing justice to the original creations.
Note: I’m not suggesting that AI doesn’t have a place in translation work, but it still needs close supervision from bilingual people.
For one thing I've watched enough anime that I have quite a bit of comprehension of spoken Japanese, there are a lot of things that you hear over and over again that stick in my mind. I will even instinctually translate English translations of anime back into idiomatic anime Japanese.
Another thing is that emotional comprehension of Japanese is really easy for English speakers. The people who make Chinese mobile games realize this and make Japanese the default for westerners as opposed to Chinese or English: Japanese speakers use tone to express emotion and I dare say are more expressive and more comprehensible emotionally to English speakers than English speakers.
My spoken Chinese comprehension is weak but I've been training myself to read it emotionally -- like emotionally Chinese was "inscrutable" [1] to me when I first started watching Chinese language media but I hear people speak Chinese every day at my Uni and I watch their faces out of the corner of my eye and maybe even drift into a synchronization trace and I can feel the rhythm of how their voice speeds up and slows down and the other cues and it seems really expressive to me.
Now I have a lot of respect for professional western voice actors who do "cartoons", I saw one who went to my acting school who did a 5 minute skit where he did about 20 different voices. There you really have madcap expressiveness but unfortunately the genre is limited and you just don't have the range of subjects and a stance which is just a bit more serious but still has a "cartoony" range of expression when things get heated.
[1] tone is semantic in Chinese so it is not used so much to express emotion
Wrt to voice actors, the world of today is far different from the VA world of yesteryear. There's a lot more competition and also less demand for somebody who can do a multitude of bombastic voices. It's rare that you need somebody like Dan Castellaneta or Mel Blanc. Partly I think because if you look at the trends, especially in Western cartoons and animation, the characters' voices are often very close to the voice actors' natural voices.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.
It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.
[1] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/yellow_economy_14_...