Timboli: The screenshots don't have to be brilliant, they just need to be informative. If they are too dark for instance they only inform you of darkness.
But it all depends on the game really, and I assess based on the merit of each. If it is not a photogenic game, then it still needs to be informative, and that's all I am after really, a sense of the game ... which might be a graphic style I am not interested in playing. You should never be attempting to hoodwink a buyer to gain a sale. Be open and honest and show things as they are.
Right, I'm with you on that, but I feel like the qualitative merit here is very much down to the genre and sometimes the individual game in question as opposed to being a universally helpful purchasing aid. Text adventures for example wouldn't really communicate anything useful via screenshots and while that's an archaic example, a game like
Sunless Sea suffers from a similar problem: screenshots are
somewhat informative, but most likely won't be able to convey the strenghts of the game adequatly.
Similarly I think the medium as a whole has progressed enough that presentation doesn't necessarily imply gameplay anymore. For example, if you knew nothing else about the game, looking at
Firewatch you'd be excused for thinking that's a shooter, simply because traditionally games had been about a rather limited set of problems to solve and the "shoot bad guy dead" problem over time became the one most closely associated with a first person perspective. Now of course there's still valuable information to be had here. Personally I don't deal well with a first person perspective, so I can infer that I'm to proceed with caution. For other people the same might hold true just for the visual style. However I can't shake the assumption that that's more of an exclusory process. Maybe that goes hand in hand with the sheer number of games we're bombarded with these days and whittling that down to manageable subselections. But I think it's a lot more difficult for a game to convey its positive qualities, once it strays far enough from certain conventions. After all, a screenshot in a vacuum only informs you of visual qualities. Everything else you infer is down to comparison. If every screenshot shows you a steering wheel in first person perspective, you're looking at a racing game and you evaluate that information in comparison to your knowledge of racing games - and subsequently skip the game, if you're not interested in the genre, for example. But let's say the game you're looking at is
Euro Truck Simulator 2 and you have something sufficiently different enough for your entire evaluation to be undermined, possibly without you realizing it.
Timboli: It is one thing to say, it is damn cheap, so I will just buy it, and then do that.
That's a big NO for me. I have plenty of other things to spend my money on (other games even), and I never like wasting or spending even a dollar foolishly. So if a Developer or Publisher want my money, even just a dollar or so, then do the right thing. Because that's the other thing ... I refuse to encourage doing the wrong thing, by paying that dollar etc.
Right, I might have communicated that a bit inefficiently.
I didn't mean to suggest just buying any old wank, once it's cheap enough. To be honest, I cannot with certainty state what I like and I'm going out on a limb here and assume that holds true for a lot of people. When I got into gaming, you had enough technical limitations that games, as a whole, were a lot more formulaic and predictable. If a screenshot suggested an RPG or a plattformer, you generally had a pretty good idea what you were getting into. There weren't a lot of crossovers in genre, either. You see Roger Wilco, you know you're going to feed lots of "Look at x" into a text parser and that's basically it.
That's very different today to the point where sometimes even gameplay footage isn't informative enough to make an educated purchasing decision taking that into account. For example, I like chill, comfy stuff. Turn-based, take your time, indie affairs. The relaxing side of gaming. By all accounts I should
not like
Hotline Miami. Turns out I do. Quite a lot, actually. I wouldn't have known that from any other source than experiencing it for myself.
Then you have Wasteland 2, which by all accounts (including screenshots) I
should enjoy and let's just put it nicely and say I don't.
Games are complex and diversified, so neither of these are isolated cases. Judging potential enjoyment comes with a margin of error and I think that margin only gets bigger the more the medium progresses. Pricepoint is a way to address this and I found taking a gamble on highly acclaimed games that don't look interesting to me at first glance to be rather beneficial. Sure, I might waste a unit of currency here and there, but I'm pleasantly surprised often enough that it balances out in the long run.
Timboli: P.S. On a related note. We live in a terrible throwaway society mentality now, where Rubbish Dumps are a huge problem. Most of that is down to the semi-rich and middle class, who want something now, and so pay for it, not taking into account they discourage things being fixed or reconditioned. So it has become more cost effective to just toss something out. In many instances, products barely have anything wrong with them ... but it is now too expensive to fix them. The poor mostly pay the brunt of this stupid selfish mentality, but in reality, we all do ... even the super rich who are more careful with their money (why they are super rich). And it is not just about Rubbish Dumps either, it is about wasted and dwindling resources etc.
Well, there's no profit in you fixing your stuff, of course it's heavily discouraged.
But yeah, you're 100% right.
