New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

Where is Helldivers 2?

If goty is chosen by sales then we'll just get a lot of FIFA as goty over the years.

I think goty should either award creativity or technical breakthrough or both, but not sales. Since gaming industry technical aspect has peaked these years, I am perfectly fine if they put creativity on a higher priority.


This encourages game dev experiment with new game mechanics and stop making AAA generic 3D arpg with a stamina bar No.1275.

The graphic works for a solitaire/poker inspired game. What kind of graphic do you expect for this kind of game? HD cards rendered in unreal engine with ray tracing or something? =.=

I wouldn't say the graphic is bad. It works well for this kind of game. There are someone that I know of irl plays solitaire for over 20 years every single day for a few hours, they are probably the target audience for Balatro. This kind of graphic may be appealing for solitaire fans because they are familiar with the graphic style. You make it any more fancy the real target audience may not "get" it immediately.

Should sales not be part of GOTY metric?

I'm not disputing your claim that it would be FIFA every year, but surely sales should matter. Can a game truly be "Game of the year" if it only sold < 500k copies its first month? Great games dont sell poorly.

I think HD textures is a pretty reasonable baseline for 2024.

HD texture doesn't enhance roguelike deck building experience that much, since it's a very game mechanic focused genre. A properly made addictive roguelike deck building is still equally addictive even if all the cards are made with MS paint in 30 secs. I can probably play Slay the Spire all day even if all cards have no graphic, just icons and numbers. Because it is the interaction of those numbers that made those games fun.

But HD texture makes it much harder to run on a potato PC.

It seems like the gain doesn't outweigh the loss.

I have a potato PC with with 4G ram and 64 gb emmc. My space is often below 3-6gb until I delete stuffs. Balarto's system requirements is 1gb ram and 150 mb available space, actual game is less than 100 mb.

Change texture to HD we'll see the system requirement skyrocket, to a point that even potato PC like this may not run. And it doesn't even enhance the core gameplay, what's the point?

If the game works with 100 mb space without hindered experience then the lower the system requirement the better imo.



How well a game sells depends on the target audience number(market size) and market saturation(competition). Quality matters in the competition within the same genre but it is not the only variable.

Same rules applies to every type of product in the field of business really.

Sometimes innovative games don't necessarily have the biggest market size unfortunately, because it's not "mainstream".

You're going to have a very difficult time trying to sell me on the idea that a game is GOTY candidate despite horribly low sales because "target audience".

I will flat out refute the notion of market saturation being a culprit. If your game sold poorly because of competition, then that likely means the competition put out a better product.

Huh? Balarto didn't have horrible low sales. It sold over 2m copies 6 months after release, which is probably about the same as FF7R.

I was only saying that as a general rule great games can sell poorly if they picked a target audience with smaller size. But this doesn't applies to Balarto. This game in particular actually sold pretty damn well.

or better marketing.

1-I never said it had low sales. I was replying to your statement in regards to sales counts.
2-But now that I looked it up, its $19 CAD, under $14 USD. Yes, this matters. Its easier for a lot of people to fork over $14 USD vs $70 USD.

There was a couple of such example in the gaming history. One of them is Okami. It received 90+ metacritic review and user score but it only sold 270,000 copies on PS2 1 year after release. The game director said the initial sale was a huge failure.

Over the years Capcom re-released it on every platform and through the words of mouth it eventually reached 4m. If Capcom just give up on it after initial failure it would have been forgotten in the history despite it was a good game.

It's hard to make an argument that Okami failed because it is a bad game in this case.


Another example is probably Viewtiful Joe. This game received 90+ on metacritic too. Sold about 320,000 worldwide on 2 platforms.

So it's not uncommon to see games with creativity that don't sell well despite small amount of people praised it.

Funny how you mentioned Okami because I was gonna mention Kunitsu-Gami, a new Capcom game which failed to meet the initial sales target, and its failure immediately reminded me of Okami

Idk anything about the game aside from it looking pretty & received well by critics. So I guess we do have another Okami situation, the result of poor marketing.

Being cute and fun take a backseat to name recognition, most of the time.

More complex than one sentence allows, but too much risk on a new IP for $70 when you can buy the sequel to a game you already know you like.

Viewtiful Joe is awesome, but fun quirky games you rent. And renting is all but obsoleted.

weird, I completely agree with an Afania post