Seeric

I'd prefer it if the industry moved on to a new setting that they play out to death before returning to something that has already been done endlessly. Every World War 2 game that comes out eats up millions upon millions of dollars and thousands of hours of production time that could have been put towards a game about anything else. Sure, coming back to World War 2 with stronger storytelling and different settings could be fascinating, but I can't say I really expect any companies to do that, let alone do it well.

No matter how many inevitable M ratings World War 2 games get, companies know that teenagers are going to be a huge chunk of their audience and said teenagers want (or are going to be presumed to want at any rate) plenty of explosions and an excuse to shoot the bad guys and be the heroes more than they want to have anything resembling a history lesson. It's a safe bet that any graphic imagery would boil down to cheap, repugnant shock value rather than any sort of actual attempt at conveying the sheer scope and intensity of pain, terror, and suffering that went on during those years.

At the end of the day, World War 2 games have always played fast and loose with history and primarily use the setting as a way of justifying the weapon/vehicle selection, so they may as well just go crazy with the storytelling. Add time travel, supernatural elements, robots, magic, and aliens. It's an alternate universe where World War 2 is now War Worlds 2 and each planet in the galaxy is a country. Take a note from The Producers and just turn the whole war into a musical. Slap World War 2 into Kingdom Hearts 3, I'm sure Disney could make it work.

It's going to be the same handful of weapons repeated endlessly with the same shoddy, sloppy storytelling which primarily serves to let teenagers project themselves onto the blandest of protagonists so they may as well do something absurd to make the campaign amusingly terrible instead of just terribly boring.

Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I think it would be best if game companies stayed as far away from World War 2 as they possibly could for at least another few decades. I hope the current efforts to reignite some warped sense of nostalgia for "going back to World War 2" quickly crumble into dust.

The original Doom and Doom 2 were the first things to come to mind for me as well (also DUSK, which is a newer indie game very heavily inspired by them). The adjustable difficulty is great, you can make a save anywhere, and, if you feel like you need/want any of them, there are plenty of easily accessible cheat codes built right in that can be toggled off just as easily as they can be toggled on.

Plus, people have made, and are still making, an absolutely absurd number of mods for Doom (and especially Doom 2), many of which are entirely different games outside of the basic engine, so you certainly get your money's worth of content.

I'll definitely keep track of a game if they have an interesting trailer or a creative setting/mechanic. That being said, I almost never purchase a game without first seeing uncut gameplay. I become suspicious of any game if a developer goes a long time without releasing gameplay footage or the only footage they release features nonstop smash cuts which make it impossible to see the way the game actually flows; too many cuts or too little gameplay makes it seem like the developer doesn't trust their game to stand on its own.

Now, one form of marketing that does work on me, at least when it comes to games, is brand recognition. For example, I knew I would buy Mega Man 11 the moment it was announced because I greatly enjoy classic Mega Man games and I like collecting games from series which I enjoy. I'm not entirely sold on the new mechanics, but I'm already sold on the game itself because, even if it turns out to be a massive disappointment, it's a game I want to collect and something I want to experience firsthand regardless of its quality. New IP's need to work hard to prove themselves beforehand, but a beloved franchise would need to flop rather hard for me to lose faith in any future entries.

I'd like to see more big companies taking risks with mid-tier games. It feels like they produce very little beyond extremely safe visual marvels for $60 or equally safe "retro throwbacks" at $15. I'm not saying either of these are bad, but so often it seems like the vast majority of big risks are being taken by Nintendo with stuff like Sushi Striker and by smaller indie teams, which immediately get copied to death (survival games, MOBA's, battle royales, etc).

It would be wonderful to have a barrage of truly weird and creative games around the $30 mark (and not just bargain bin trash), ones which have higher production values and slightly larger teams than the average $15 game, but which aren't 50+ hour behemoths and don't have the same infatuation with raw visual spectacle as a $60 product. Smaller teams and shorter production times would help to keep costs down in the event of a flop while a big hit could always be turned into a franchise with $60 sequels.

I realize that companies can't survive if they do nothing but pump out cult classics which only become popular years after release, but the ongoing trend of constantly playing it safe while production costs continue to rise can also only last for so many years before audiences become completely fatigued.

Going by the movie logic of moving pictures --> movies, it would fit to go from "controllable media" to "controllies". Alternately, "conbits" or "visibits" for "controllable/visible bits" since we so often talk about them as being 8-bit games, having a 16-bit aesthetic, etc and it fits in with "films" getting their name from being on rolls of film.

I could also see calling them "digital/virtual plays" since being a "video game player" has so many similarities to being an "actor playing a role" in a play. If you want to get really short and lazy with it, you could even call them "acties" since you, the player, are always acting out some sort of role (excluding games like Tetris which have no characters).

Basically, anything that sounds kinda lazy and serves as a shorthand for "what they are" or "what they do" works since that's how a lot of other mediums are named. I mean, we even already do it for most actual video game genres like "Role-Playing Game", "First-Person Shooter" and "Platformer". Even "Walking Simulator" follows this rule, if in a rather derogatory way.

All that being said, I'm fine with "video games" even if it doesn't always fit.

In Mega Man X7 you fight the first phase of the final boss on an elevator and then the second phase in...space?

Super Cyborg (a much better game than Mega Man X7) also has the first phases of its final boss take place on an elevator.

At the end of the day, do any of us really expect Valve to put forth anything resembling effort towards any one thing for more than a few days or weeks? Valve likes to put plenty of effort towards developing new systems and policies and whatnot, but once they release them into the wild they tend to move on to something else entirely.

For whatever reason, Valve has decided to target a handful of games for violating a guideline which they may or may not have actually violated. In all likelihood, generating a bit of a buzz about being proactive about removing games with certain types of sexual content is the reason in and of itself. This buzz will die down soon and Valve's active enforcement of these guidelines will die with it. Perhaps an algorithm will get tweaked somewhere to make visual novels show up on the front page less. All or most of the games which have been removed will likely be back on Steam in the near future with little to nothing in the way of changes. Mild inconveniences will be had by all and, in the eyes of the majority of people complaining about these games, Valve will seem like it is doing something and that will be that.

So, if you're for this move then, sorry, but don't expect it to amount to anything beyond what it already has done. If you're against this move then, hey, it's unlikely that anything else will be done so don't worry too much.

In concept, I'm more than fine with Steam getting rid of the HuniePop games and any other games where the content amounts to nothing but a thinly veiled excuse for their audience to look at naked / highly sexualized anime girls. In reality, I don't trust Valve to handle this well at all because they always take the quickest, laziest route to solving all their problems, often only making things worse in the long run if any difference is made at all.

I don't trust them to be able to draw a line between nudity and blatant pornography. I don't trust them to not accidentally take down completely unrelated games. I don't trust them to moderate new releases because they very, very clearly do not do that. I don't trust them to be proactive about taking down less popular games which violate these same guidelines. Last of all, I don't trust them to want to moderate most pornographic games because the "Popular New Releases" tab makes it clear that such games often rake in cash.

In short, I'm all for the concept of Valve putting more restrictions on what they allow on their service, but I do not for a second believe that they'll enforce these rules all that often nor do I believe that they'll enforce them correctly.

Valve as a company seems to hate putting any time, effort, and especially money towards self-moderating their service, so this will likely all amount to a bit of moral grandstanding, a few slapped wrists, maybe one sacrificial lamb, and then almost completely unbroken silence on the matter going forward.

Matt Makes Games (Celeste / Jumper Series / An Untitled Story / Tons of other stuff) - I've been a huge fan of Matt Thorson's stuff all the way since the original Jumper games. So many of them are fun, brutally hard, and wonderfully creative.

Joakim Sandberg (Iconoclasts / Noitu Love / Chalk / Legend of Princess / etc) - He's another developer whose games I have been playing for ages. Most of his games have extremely fluid combat and there's always such an energetic atmosphere to them. I was expecting to love the combat in Iconoclasts, but the story also blew me away with how dark it was willing to go at times. Plus, Chalk was the first game I ever decided to stream as a way of helping with social anxiety and I've been having fun streaming stuff ever since (which in turn really did help me a lot with anxiety too)!

Locomalito (Hydorah / Maldita Castilla / l'Abbaye des Morts / Many other things) - Yeah, it's another developer I've followed for a long time. It's amazing just how many very different types of platformers and shmups they've made over the years and all of them are highly polished.

Studio Pixel (Cave Story / Kero Blaster / etc) - Cave Story was my favorite indie game for a few years and it still holds up well. Their other games are also consistently great, though Cave Story was one of the first games to really get me into indie games so I have a ton of nostalgia for it.

Hempuli (Environmental Station Alpha) - I love Metroidvanias and Environmental Station Alpha was/is one of the best ones I've ever played. It takes a lot of ideas from Metroid and twists them in great ways, such as keeping the range on your gun limited and letting you use the grapple on nearly any surface. It also had a massive chain of FEZ-like environmental puzzles which opened up all sorts of new, optional content. Their upcoming game, Baba Is You, also looks great.

PEPOSOFT (GIGADEEP) - A Japanese developer who contributes music, sound effects, and sometimes some other stuff to a surprising number of games. They also made a few games of their own, though my favorite by far is GIGADEEP, which is an over the top, absurdly fast Mega Man X-like game.

Team Cherry (Hollow Knight) - Hollow Knight ended up being my favorite game last year (and 2017 had a lot of good games). The atmosphere, the combat, and the exploration all completely hooked me and I couldn't believe just how expansive the game's world ended up being. I'm also completely impressed by how Team Cherry have continued to roll out patches not only to smooth out some of Hollow Knight's shortcomings (ex: backtracking travel time), but also to add in completely new bosses and other forms of content. I can't wait to see what they work on next.

Rad Codex (Voidspire Tactics / Alvora Tactics) - I'll almost certainly buy whatever their next game is the moment it comes out. Voidspire Tactics combined Zelda-like overworld exploration with quick tactical combat. Alvora Tactics switched to procedural generation for its exploration (with a healthy dose of hand-made content too) so I like it slightly less, though it added a lot of polish all around. Both games have great classes and you can freely interact with the environment via your skills, such as using any given ice ability to freeze water in or out of combat. Their artwork isn't the best out there by any stretch, but their gameplay systems make up for that in spades. I wish they were better known because I've really enjoyed both of their games.

Kasey Ozymy aka Housekeeping (The Heart Pumps Clay / A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky / Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass / etc) - One of very few developers whose games have made me tear up a bit. Most of their games are freeware RPG's made with RPG Maker, though Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is scheduled to come out later this year as their first commercial game and the demo has already prepared me to toss money at it in all of its bittersweet, heartbreaking glory. Like with Rad Codex, I really hope they get more attention one day.

There are a ton of other great developers that I could think of if I kept at it (Toby Fox, NIGORO...), but these were the ones which first came to mind for me.

We'll probably see a lot of the bigger MMO's die off within the next 5 years. WoW is unlikely to be shut down any time soon, but it's getting pretty long in the tooth at this point and there's only so much content they can keep piling on to it - I wouldn't be surprised to see a WoW 2 pop up with some sort of character transfer feature after WoW has an official final expansion.

As for new MMO's, I doubt we'll see many of them beyond a handful of smaller ones aimed at very specific niches. Part of this is just MMO fatigue and the whole post-WoW MMO craze naturally dying down, but a giant chunk of it has to do with mobile games. Generally, the primary goal of a P2P MMO is to keep people playing over a long period of time while the goal of a F2P MMO is to attract the big spenders (whales) via the cash shop and keep at least a decently sized community since new players are unlikely to spend money on a game that looks like a ghost town.

However, mobile games, especially gacha game, eclipse these models. Gacha systems can keep players around for the long term and, since they are directly tied to your power since you're getting gear/characters from them, gradual power creep ensures that whales will keep spending while login bonuses can entice free players to stick around and maybe spend a little here and there. Portability and generally rather low system requirements also make these games far more accessible than something like Final Fantasy XIV. On top of all of that, they are likely far faster and cheaper to make and maintain since you mostly need a fancy menu, character art, and some backgrounds, rather than all of that on top of a ton of assets and animations for a whole world.

In other words, gacha games require less money to make initially, less money to maintain, and generally rake in at least as much money as an MMO would. MMO's used to have the advantage of providing a unique social experience, but, as others have said in this thread, they play mostly like single player games with some light multiplayer elements these days. All those companies from Japan and South Korea that used to put out F2P MMO's have pretty much either died off or moved on to mobile gaming with few exceptions, it just makes more sense business-wise right now.

I think we can expect to see a resurgence in MMO's in about a decade, after many of the current ones have died off and the gacha craze has died down, since people will start feeling nostalgic for them around that point. Any big-budget MMO's coming out in the near future are probably doomed to failure though.