The fact that there are indie devs that don't release a switch physical or DRM free copy puts a damper on the pro-consumer angle that gets discussed with indie games. You'd think a website download without a 30% cut and crypto payments would be an incentive but they just take the lazy way of using steam combined with steamworks DRM.

>>972883 >a website download without a 30% cut and crypto payments would be an incentive A bigger incentive is to release a game on Steam, that while it might take a 30% cut, it has a much, much larger userbase and could give you at least 10 times the amount of sales, rather than if it was just on GoG or itch.io or your own website. See also all the games that were temporarily exclusive to Epic Store. With that said, if the game is somewhat successful, there is no reason not to release it on Steam, as well as other platforms like GoG. >switch physical How about a PS5 physical :^)

Sword of the Vagrant (also know as just The Vagrant on PC) I have been binging this game for the last couple of days and it's pretty good. You play as a cute amazon called Vivian who was searching for her lost father, and ends up stranded on an island where her quest gets tangled up with the ambitions of a witch. It looks a lot like a Vanillaware game, and they even credit Vanillaware as an inspiration in the artbook. The game is a 2D hack & slash with slight touches of Metroidvania. Think of it as Odin Sphere with less cutscenes if it had one playable character only. It does not have the high level of polish that Vanillaware games have, but then again what other games do? I decided to check out the publisher while I was at it. Red Art Games specializes in publishing indie games physically, which is pretty cool. Some of their releases are limited FOMO bait faggotry, but other games (like Sword of the Vagrant) do not have manufatured scarcity. https://www.redartgames.com/

>>972883 >You'd think a website download without a 30% cut and crypto payments would be an incentive but they just take the lazy way of using steam combined with steamworks DRM. When you want to actually sell something rather than offer a free download there is all sort of legal requirements you need to meet. You also need to make sure the download is available to customers years after the sale has been made. Stores like Steam or GOG do take a hefty cut, but they take care of all the legal and technical details for you. Most importantly they provide accountability. If Steam mishandles customer data that's on they and they will have to pay the fine, but if you make a mistake the fines could very well ruin you. It's not impossible to host your own sales, but you need to know very well what you are doing. For most people it's easier to just let someone else handle it. But even if you know how to do it, do your customers trust you? Personally I would feel much more comfortable buying from GOG who I know have the competence to keep their servers operational, whereas I have no idea whether some random Joe know his shit or if his service will be gone in a month.

>>972905 You do not have to ensure the game stays available. There are tons of games that get delisted and people go crazy.

>>972361 >Mario Party without the minigames Why?

>>973010 Being delisted from stores is not the same thing as being unavailable to people who already purchased it to download, they usually still have the ability to do so.

>>974618 The point of 100% Orange Juice is that it's… 100% R N G (errnngee…uice). That is, no skill whatsoever, just luck (and proper deckbuilding). I'm actually VACbanned from it because I accidentally had a trainer turned on while clicking into the multiplayer lobby. Which is complete fucking bullshit.

>>974643 Orange Jews has strategy, shut up slut, also there are minigames. FISHING counts, and all the other stupid minigames that do barely anything.

>autism incoming I really don't like the idea of an "indie game". Firstly it doesn't necessarily refer to actually independent games; Baldur's Gate 3 is independent while Hotline Miami was funded and published by a third-party, but the former is considered AAA while the latter - indie. It's an arbitrary term. indie Secondly, it inherently "others" games not made by bloated big budget studios. It's not just a game, it's an indie game. A prefix. There's this unspoken implication of lesser quality and polish (when compared to "real" games, by AAA studios of course) whenever it's is used. If a so-called indie actually is impressive in the its presentation its often given the nebulous "AA" title. With it also comes a set of negative stereotypes, there's this idea that the people who make and play "indie games" are the 2010 stereotype of a hipster with their handlebar mustaches and lumberjack shirts. How many times have you heard some variant of the joke "Earthbound-style JRPG that's a metaphor for mental illness", now ask yourself how many of those you've actually seen? It's an almost nonexistent genre. There's a wide breadth of games in the indie category, ironically much more so than you'd see in the GaaS and Ubisoft-style open world-filled AAA industry. I understand it's a useful term to refer to a certain style of game, when somebody says indie you immediately know what they mean, but I think it's reductive and limits the discussion around games.

>>974858 I mean, most of those stereotypes were real back in the late 2010s, but indie as an insulting prefix has waned on most other corners of the net (this place is the exception more for culture war reasons than any other anti-indie bias). Lesser quality and polish is to be expected of smaller and underbudgeted teams, in spite of big name indies like Cocoon, Hades, Stray, or It Takes Two blowing the average AAA out of the water. A lot of trends they had then (pixel art, quirky dialogue, genre choices of rougelite and rpg) are still seen today, the same way that AAA as a derogatory prefix still follows a lot of their trends from that time period (GaaS, MTX, Ultra HD, Open World, "CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE"). Anons here mostly hate them because a lot of them being california liberal hipsters made them more cliquish, encourage each other to push diversity, keep the industry regressed, but otherwise they can provide an outlet that AAA can't or won't and for that I partially respect them. >How many times have you heard some variant of the joke "Earthbound-style JRPG that's a metaphor for mental illness", now ask yourself how many of those you've actually seen I posted half of this list on /vb/ months ago: Undertale, Omori, YIIK, Hylics, LISA the Painful, Oddventure, Yume Nikki, She Dreams Elsewhere, and those are just the most mainstream ones. Reason I hate that trend is due to how big a wave of support it got while I didn't care for Earthbound to begin with.

So speaking of indie games, I finally finished Crystal Project. The game's outright incredible for one made by a single guy out of free sprites and music. Well-designed Final Fantasy style combat, 3D platforming world exploration (which I guess not everyone likes), little to no plot, and great archive of tracking stuff for obsessive-compulsive completionists. The only infuriating part is the not-Chocobo racing and breeding. >I would post some pics but them's the breaks of torposting

An indie horror game came out recently called Indigo Park. It's one of those mascot horror games, but people seem to really genuinely like it. The twist is instead of being "subversive" like most in its genre, it's played straight as a horror game. The major mascot character Rambley the Racoon is genuinely just a cheery cartoon racoon, he glitches out but that's not really played as a horror thing, he's just glitched. He cares about the MC's safety, allowing you into the staff rooms even though he's not supposed to so you can hide. He also lies about what day it is so you can get a discount on his toys He just wants you to have fun at the park, even if it is run down and corrupted Most anons here wouldn't like it, but I do like it bucking the the main trend that defines mascot horror.

>>988327 Oh my god it's FNAF but even more furry He looks like a boykisser

>>972904 Wait, they changed the name? I have that game on Steam and it's just called The Vagrant.

>>988327 Yeah I saw footage of this game and it's nice to just have a good ol' played straight horror like this. It's just a shame it's yet another game releasing in an episodic format that'll probably never be finished or take way too long to get done. I hope the dev just puts it all out at once and gets it done that way instead of releasing episodically. Same hope for another game I found during NextFest called "Illusion Carnival" that didn't get much coverage by anyone. Dev's a faggot and was going on about pronoun shit in the steam discussions regarding characters, but it doesn't show in the game and such has a good story and cute characters, with a neat "alice in wonderland" type of premise mixed with glitch horror and more psychological horror ideas, so it got my attention and I'd say it was pretty good. I think the demo is still available, actually, if any anons here want to give it a try. I just hope it isn't going to be another one of those "all in the head" kind of stories. >>974837 >Tsihposting Nice. But yeah, there is quite a bit of strategy in 100% OJ, a lot of it dealing with RNG mitigation or working with what you can get and adapting it to that character's kit and changing conditions in the game. People saying it's "All RNG" are just taking the piss or people who haven't sat down and tried to play the game mildly seriously.

>>988327 I really liked it from what I saw. It's very refreshing to see just a plain horror game but I'm curious how good it'll actually turn out since the developer is so new. The guy making it originally started off by remaking Garten of Ban Ban in a single week, then decided to just go ahead and make an original game since it was way easier than he thought.

>>988629 I thought he was reaching out to a dangling cock in the bottom right. haha

>>971529 Has anyone played the CD-i parody game? The one with a black princess and animated by WalrusGuy?

>>989597 I haven't since it doesn't really interest me.

>>989615 Never understood why they thought it was a good idea on the first place, what made the CD-i games so fucking hilarious is because of Phillips desperately trying to stay relevant by leeching on popular franchises only to dick slap their braindead consumers. As expected the game's cutscenes fall flat or don't have any memorable scenes because it was done on purpose and added some subtle poz like making the princess being a dyke and pushing for democracy (wtf it's like the Al Gore law where you must propagate liberalism into your art or else), unlike the struggling slavs unintentionally trying their hardest and coming out with the most heinous, disastrous animation traumatizing or leaving a bad taste to any devoted sucker who blew more than $1000 USD.

>>989965 Anon, they brought in a Youtube Poop artist to work on the game, this was targeted at the late millennial/early Zoomers born 1996-2001 who grew up watching the old Zelda CDI Squadallah Dinner PINGAS era YTPs in the late 2000's and are now old enough to be nostalgia pandered to.

>>989973 Shouldn't they have just tried to make something funny then instead? But then again it already looks lower effort than a lot of other YoutubePoops I've seen.

>>990646 They could've made it like pibby, where it's meta and has lots of ytp refefences. It could've been the next ebin tumblrtale

>>990675 >file is not named "niggertonguedmyanus"

>>990675 I'm not really sure what would haven been worse, it's like comparing similar looking turds.

>>990646 >No parodies >No absurd violence <Not even a sex joke besides the librarian being teased over her gay sex books Even a surviving ytp from a decade ago is a lot funnier than whatever they came up with. >>990675 Fucking Pibby is just another of the many preschooler spooky shows/games that have been done to death, they had to throw in other franchises so it could stay relevant.

You lads like turn based tactics? I got rec'd Reverse Collapse the other day and it was pretty dope. Story's quite long but the gameplay is quite challenging for what it is since you cant just brute force it in the year of CY+8, and there's barely any stat padding in this game so you have to use your shit and think your way out. There are mandatory stealth missions but thankfully they're not timed missions which are the worst, and the stealth missions are glorified puzzles anyways. The gameplay seems to be about 30 -40 hours along and from the looks of it i'm at the halfway point. There's also a challenge+ mode that fucks your shit up by adding elite enemies more often. Funny how the Chinese managed to do actual games for once and NOT another fucking gacha game.

>>971529 Pokerogue, it's do-able in a version where the main dev hasn't left, not like current <Cyrus challenged you to battle with Darkrai, Mesprite, Mega Houndoom and Howling Moon <Viable pokemons are nerfed because reasons

>>988327 Rambley has such an sincerity you just don't see a lot in vidya, let alone horror. Even though the game is free I would not be surprised if the dev becomes wealthy off of merchandise.

Saw this and it looks like it could be fun. It's a shitposting rhythm game where you play as a terminally online creepy girl who's goal is to spread her conspiratorial brain rot to as many followers as possible while overdosing on denpa tunes.

>>993712 Reminds me I need to get a Steam Next Fest thread going.

>>988327 Rambley unironically sounds like a faggot, not suprising that VA's username is OtterBoy.

UFO 50 is nice.