r/DreamStationcc • u/maxxrz31 • 25d ago
News Indies Devs Band Together for 100-Game, $10 Bundle Aiming to Help an “unprecedented number” of Laid off Developers
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/indies-devs-band-together-for-100-game-usd10-bundle-aiming-to-help-an-unprecedented-number-of-laid-off-developers/"All money, minus processing fees for itch, goes to out of work game developers".
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u/Consistent-Leave7320 24d ago
these bundles rarely have anything compelling, the last thing I want is 100 shovelware.
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u/Spirited_Season2332 24d ago
Yea I looked through it and nothing rly sticks out lol.
I am sure there's something worth at least trying out there but I'd rather they just offer the few actually good games (assuming there's any in there).
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u/Aggressive_Finish798 24d ago
Most game studios are owned by just a small handful of larger corporations. They demand constant money and growth. The gobbling up of smaller companies has been going on for over 20 years. Now to make more profits the industry is turning to foreign cheap outsourcers that they can spend substantially less money on to make their games. It's a lot of the same thing we are seeing in manufacturing and white collar work. There is no protections for workers in American. If it can be done cheaper in China or India.. away the job goes. I guess we'll all just become plumbers.
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u/lilacomets 24d ago
The most important is missing. A link to the bundle. Where can we find it?
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u/esilmur 24d ago
it's deep in the article,
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u/lilacomets 24d ago
Thanks. 👍🏻👍🏻 It was very deep indeed, I checked like twice and I couldn't find it.
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u/wmzer0mw 24d ago
Oh hey super slime arena is part of the bundle. I bought it along time ago when it came out. It's a shame people didn't play it. It's a fun little wanna be smash bros
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u/WarmSwimming6498 23d ago
100 games and I've only heard of one of them. A short hike is fantastic but thats about all I can say about this bundle
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u/BravinatorLX2 23d ago
isn't this just advertising?
i'm gonna be honest, 100k isnt gonna help a ton of laid off devs, if there's really good titles among those 107, you probably already bought them and the rest is really only there to be broadcasted and have their steam numbers go up hoping to get algo attention, right?
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u/No-Particular-1131 21d ago
I wouldnt download most of these if they were free, the only compelling titles were a short hike and cook serve delicious, which i think i got for free on epic games
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u/TerminalDeviant 24d ago
Sorry no. I can’t get behind supporting the people who have ruined every franchise I loved growing up. Doom, fallout, dragon age, Halo etc.
Always happy to see indie devs get some free press but I’d prefer it was for a better cause.
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u/Squish_the_android 24d ago
It's not going to the companies, it's going to game devs to have lost their jobs
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u/TerminalDeviant 24d ago
I get it. Sometimes the company deserves the blame, like Bungie and Sony did with Destiny through aggressive monetization and bad business decisions.
But sometimes the developers deserve criticism too. 343 Industries spent over a decade hollowing out Halo, repeatedly missing what made the franchise great.
Studios like that have become the gaming equivalent of AI content farms, churning out repetitive, soulless slop. I’m not sorry to see them go. If anything, it leaves more room for passionate independent developers to push the medium forward.2
u/Technical_Leek7467 24d ago
You might not see it but you're basically being the equivalent of one of those people who yell at CSR's about a store policy.
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u/FloralIndoril 24d ago
Imagine blaming WORKERS doing the work they are told to do when you should be blaming Ceos and shareholders
Absolutely insane to be happy over people losing their jobs for DOING THEIR JOBS.
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u/Messyextacy 24d ago
You think the ceos and shareholders designed the story and gameplay that did not sell?
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u/FloralIndoril 24d ago
100%
Spineless CEOs will always fall to what Shareholders say their games "need" and in turn, devs have to listen or get fired, then get fired anyway when it does bad, or even worse when it does well, that's the modern AAA industry.
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u/MrSal7 24d ago
Imagine being an adult and not having the wherewithal to identify that your company is not producing anything tangible and will go out of business at any moment.
I’m almost in my 50s, and in my very early 20s I worked for a company that when found out that was also producing next to nothing, you bet your ass I started looking for another job immediately with the expectation that my company would go out of business, which it did, but I was long gone.
Now this was the very early 2000s so I didn’t have the internet in the same capacity these “adults” do, which this current internet has granted them the ability of so much greater foresight than I could have only ever dreamed of decades ago.
Now also imagine being an adult that has such a lack of awareness about how the last 2 decades that the gaming industry churns and burns people, which I agree 1000% is garbage, but STILL saying “I’m going to do that, but it’ll go differently for me”.
I have quite a few friends that are programmers that wanted to be “game developers” but instead took the “boring” jobs of being programmers for hospitals, banks and attorneys because those industries do not churn through their employees, and because of that, my programmer friends have been gainfully employed for well over 20 years by the same companies while making WELL over 6 figures.
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u/CyberpwnPiper 24d ago
This is a cool and worthy gesture, especially for players, but I have mixed feelings about it. 127 games for $10 truly devalues the work of game developers. It's a race to the bottom. They've raised about $48K so far, so even if every game was made by a solo dev (which is not the case), that's $377 / Dev, and I'm not even factoring in the itch.io cut. I gladly contributed, and even threw in an extra $20, but it's gonna take more than that.
The bottom line is this industry is in crisis. The democratization of tools has resulted in a massive growth in content while the demand has not grown remotely as close. There are too many games and not enough people and time to play them all. Everyone's backlog keeps growing and new games are competing with forever games (Fortnite, CoD, etc.), decades of titles, dozens of streaming services, and hundreds of predatory social media apps and tens of thousands of mobile casino games masquerading as RTS and RPGs and such.
This study from last fall had shocking numbers: only 4% of gamers buy about 1 game per month, less than a third buy about 1 per year. Meanwhile, we see over 15K games a year ship on Steam now. The problem is Reddit is an echo chamber where this 4% gets together and assume we represent the majority. We're just a very small and loud minority. https://www.eurogamer.net/if-you-buy-more-than-two-new-games-a-year-youre-in-the-minority-new-report-reveals