We generally have a very tenuous grasp on what is legally distinct or not, and the game clearly wants to be as close to pokemon as possible.

I personally think it is fine, but I have seen people comparing the 3d meshes and they look way closer - with textures it is clearly distinct, but I don't know if the meshes being too similar might be infringement?

But I must say that I really, really don't care for Nintendo's intellectual property. As far as I'm concerned, anyone should be able to sell games containing the Nintendo-created Pokemon. The original 151 are almost thirty years old, IMO they should be on the public domain already. So yeah, screw Nintendo, they might find a valid legal argument but morally fuck them.

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Quoting: suchNever heard of Double Eleven before, so I started digging... and this appears to be a support studio. Lots of ports, made stuff for other games, published an indie, but nothing remotely suggesting they have what it takes to make a game like this (which is not easy to make).

Tl;dr: not the PA1 dev, no experience in the genre (from what they share), and the latest in a slew of (poorly made) games published by PDX...

I'd be cautious.

They have been working on the first Prison Architect since 2016, initially to port it to consoles (that was before Paradox got the license!) and then were brought by Paradox to update the game and develop new content - I think they made all the DLC released for it (a few mid-sized expansions afaik, haven't played any of them). I'd guess that for all purposes they were the studio that got the PA license after the sale.

So yes they used to be a support studio working on ports and making stuff for existing games - including Prison Architect. So they do have experience not only in this genre but in this very franchise... which is not necessarily reassuring, as they mostly did DLC and the original design came from Introversion which was a very different company.

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Oh no, they changed it to 3d and got rid of the distinctive style.

Not that the new style isn't good (I like it for most management games, it is generic but nice), but I liked how the old one looked. It was perfectly clear and workable, but also unique and interesting. I liked how you could see the furniture being carried to the rooms being built, and how the top-down view made everything clear when building, and everything was very distinct and clear while also looking coherent together. The tiny sprites had lots of personality and matched the somber and edgy tone of the game (the cartoonish, rounded 3D is a bit too "friendly" in my opinion).

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Well they finally addressed the main complaint by gamers about those handhelds: no multicolored LEDs.

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Quoting: EagleDeltaThen maybe "indie" isn't a good category name for games. The minute we start shifting the definition of a word like "independent" we create confusion in the language and semantics do matter a lot. Yes, language changes over time, but that only works when the definition changes holistically, not when it changes definition for just one sub-area of concern. It also creates issues where now "indie" means different things depending on if you're talking about movies, shows, music, books, games, board games, etc. That is too much to expect people to keep track of.

All that said, a studio making a low budget game for their publicly traded company is obviously NOT "indie". By the same token, I don't think Larian, ConcernedApe, EgoSoft, etc can be anything BUT "indie".... being successful doesn't mean someone loses their "indie" or "independent" status. That implies that only failed studios that make something people like can be "indie".

It one hundred percent is a terrible category name, and my first post a bit above suggested many alternatives. I just don't think we are going to change everyone's minds. The meaning already changed, like it or not, and linguistic prescriptivism isn't going to change it back.

As far as we want to promote a better way, I'd rather we moved to better terminology to remove the uncertainty, than use bad categories to keep the language accurate.

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To comment generally on many answers: I think being too literal about the word "indie" as "independent" is a mistake. Being self-published is not remotely the most important part (or the single important part) of the games we consider as indie.

Indie as a category referred to the use of the term in the music industry, where it was at a point a good description but eventually moved on. AAA referred to the stock market (the reliability of a bond). Neither is perfect for defining games, and associated terms like AA or BBB have never been popularized so we are stuck with awkwardly-named categories.

Sure we probably should use a more accurate term for each category, for clarity, but letting our categories be decided solely based on the terminology being used is not a step in the right direction. The meaning of "indie" has evolved, and going back to dictionary definitions to make it linguistically consistent comes at a cost of being a good category for games.

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I think "indie" encompasses a lot of aspects so having it as a single category is just meaningless.

Yeah it can't be indie if it is owned by Microsoft or Sony or Apple or Tencent or another huge company. You could call it "alternative game" or some shit, but even if the company makes a point of limiting the budget it is not the same as other indies - it has more visibility, more stable funding, and all the constraints of a big studio which make it a whole other deal. Mostly the same if such a company is funding the development without directly owning the studio, but not if they just published it without any funding.

It also isn't fair to call indie any studio that isn't funded by a large publisher indie regardless of their budget or size. A game with a AAA budget and AAA number of employees is way more like a AAA than like other indies. It's organization structure, constraints to their "artistic freedom", dev practices and so on are not at all indie. Any categorization that puts those side by side with the small ones is frigging useless.

If you are filtering games that are "indie", go for the strict option: pick just games that are all of self-published, small-budget, author-controlled. Set "small" as low as you want to select just single devs or allow for small but established studios.

Indie games that are successful but aren't bought by a large company, in particular those that sell millions (I call them "triple I", the indies that won the lottery), still keep most of their original characteristics, so I wouldn't advise using revenue or sales numbers to classify them... but a "hidden gem" category could make sense, and would pretty much only include indies.

Or just be more specific instead of just "indie", don't assume "indie" will tell people whatever you think it does. Alternative game, game by small (or medium) studio, self-published game, low-budget game, solo project. Or just list the numeric cut-off point directly: game made by less than 20 people, best game under $1 million budget, etc.

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Oh damn, this is exactly the upgrade to Planetary Annihilation I would love to see. I am not really into the TA style of RTS, where you have a bazillion units and an elaborate meta but very little complexity in the economy. I like economy that has a lot of different resources, with lots of specializations and long production chains to eventually build an army and attack. PA looks absolutely amazing, is pretty polished and elaborate, and it has many interesting things like the spherical maps, orbital units and interplanetary transports (and planet killer weapons!)... so adding factory building to the sequel has me extremely interested. The big robot bugs you kill also look damn cool.

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Quoting: EhvisI don't entirely agree with you here. When I see something like Stellaris having a DLC list that totals 7 times the price of the game, I just don't believe that what they added is worth that much. It just seems that they abuse the DLC method to try and sell content for an inflated price. Which may not be the traditional cash-grab, but it's still related.

They price the base game, which is the entry point, relatively low so that:
1) upfront cost to get started isn't too high, you don't need to put a lot of money before you even know if you'll like it.
2) most of the cost is optional, only the most hardcore completionists will pay the full cost, most people will pay a lot less. I am a super fan of the game but even so I don't have all the stuff.
3) more casual players can get great cost-benefit with the base game (which improves constantly with free updates), while people that really love the game can pay for content that for them is worth a lot because they put hundreds or thousands of hours into the game.

As for "inflated price", for any game DLC has a higher margin than the base game - meaning the same amount of "content" or "work" sells for a higher price. It is unavoidable, because by definition it will only sell a fraction of the copies of the base game, and naturally it won't re-make all the basics (that would be dumb, more work but not more value). The point is that for many people, improving the game they like is better than buying a new game they like less.

I think that big strategy games are a very natural fit for additional content, because you play many matches from start to end - so you don't have to replay the entire story or redo some puzzles, but it can still work together with stuff from the old game instead of being a separate story or something. Plus they benefit from complexity, are mostly singleplayer so no pay to win issues, they have a long learning curve and good replayability so you stick with the same game for quite a while...

Paradox keep adding DLC because they keep working on the game for years, and we can see it as it happens. It is not like they are holding content back (day-0 DLC) or making a game without enough content - their games are huge and they keep even reworking the basics. Not that their DLC is always good, much less worth its price... but they are upfront and honest about what they are doing, and it does not usually detract from the (cheap and excellent) base game. I'll take Paradox' DLC over microtransactions that make the game worse to try and manipulate me into paying.

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Wow, I admit that it looks like a terrible launch but taking all of one week to throw it all away is shocking. AAA development is wild.

I'll say that I hadn't noticed the game was out (was thinking maybe next year or something), and I was looking forward to it. Well, more like curious than "anxiously waiting", but I am quite dedicated in following tactical games, Paradox and HBS, so missing a release like that looks like a big marketing fail.

People seem to be complaining of technical problems with the game (bugs, performance issues). Combined with not a lot of marketing and with the mass firings, to me it speaks of very troubled development. I'd guess that the bad release was less of a surprise to Paradox than it was a last chance that HBS didn't hit.

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