ampersandrew 56 points 3 months ago

I hate to say it, but the business model always affects the game design. The "meta" is to make a game that's longer than 2 hours if you want to avoid this, or that the player otherwise won't want to part with after that 2 hours is up.

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terranoid 20 points 3 months ago

If your game doesn't provide more content than 2 hours that's kinda on you IMO

And I say that as an indie game developer. Like it someone just thought it was neat to play for an hour then they were completely done touching my game... Why would I be shocked they refunded it? They might have refunded it because they expected... Dun dun dunnnn... More content?

It's a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.

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VerdantTome 19 points 3 months ago

It's a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.

Not that it's Steam's fault, but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.

Yes, it's a lot of work to make a game, but the only way to extend the play time of a story-focused single-player game without having to do even more work, is to water it down with low-effort filler content that reuses the expensive assets.

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bookmeat -4 points 3 months ago

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terranoid 0 points 3 months ago

... Or just don't put it on Steam. I don't see why this is so controversial when it protects the players far more to have the refund option.

And just because someone finished and refunded it doesn't mean they enjoyed it. These devs complaining about people "playing it to the end" then refunding it need to realize that part of it might be their game just isn't that good.

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mnemonicmonkeys -4 points 3 months ago

but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.

There are literally orders of magnitudes of difference between making an indie game last 3-4 hours vs a bloated AAA 100+ hour collectathon. Comparing the 2 isn't an honest arguement

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VerdantTome 9 points 3 months ago

There are also orders of magnitude of difference in their staff levels and budgets. Both sides of the equation are relative. I don't know of any techniques for creating good content quickly and inexpensively that only work for small indies and not for large AAA studios.

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