i should be gripping rat

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • well, that’s a big bummer. AbleGamers has clearly done an outsized amount of advocacy work in the industry, and it’s awesome that we have stuff like the Xbox Adaptive Controller. Way less cool if the entire org was rotten at the top. Some of these incidents make me wonder if Barlet even cared all that much about disabled folks.

    The industry still struggles with basic accessibility options in a lot of games - many studios will implement a wide array of accessibility options, but they do the absolute bare minimum for each disability, such that it looks like they are being inclusive to the gamers that don’t actually use those options. Colorblind options are a common culprit. Basic color filters over the entire screen are insufficient for most colorblind gamers.

    One wonders if Able Gamers would be tackling issues like this more directly if their founder had his eye on the ball (instead of having his eye on his coworkers’ breasts)




























  • did you read the article? do you understand the state that the industry is in atm? Yes there are indie games and yes they are great, but it has become incredibly difficult to break into the industry. Most of the indie games that we celebrate these days are coming from devs that entered the indie scene over a decade ago, devs like Supergiant or Davey Wreden. We still have breakout debut hits like Balatro, but it’s becoming harder and harder. The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery. Gaming publications are flatlining left and right, so you can’t look to them for discovery anymore. 1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago. Balatro broke big because of a lucky discovery by NorthernLion, but the reach of creators like NorthernLion is shrinking every day.

    TikTok and its peers are the new normal, and as the article discusses, this eats up the exact recreation time that people have been putting into video games and other long-form media. The kids don’t care about indie games because Tiktok is more fun/addictive. If they play videogames at all, they only care about Fortnite and Roblox and maybe some gacha game on their phone. Some of them care about indie creations within Fortnite and Roblox, but obviously even those games are becoming long in the tooth.

    So idk. Maybe Tiktok will become the new main discovery platform and this is how the industry will survive, but it remains to be seen if people will actually get off of Tiktok to go play the games in question, or if people will just stay glued to Tiktok itself.