I have no problem in playing old-school RPGs. But I would never pay more than a 1$ for "Legends of Amberland".
I'm having a blast playing M&M3. And Amberland looks like trash compared to that 1991 game.

As for the fanatics in "RPG Codex" and other places: some years ago I tried to get back to pen&paper roleplaying. I had a blast playing RPGs when I was a kid and wanted to see how the new "P&P RPG renaissance" looked like...
I had to flee in terror. What I found was a universe crowded with a huge ammount of autistic fanboys and old grognards who seemed to be stuck in a time loop and thought that spending several hours in a dungeon fighting monsters and evading traps like in the old 80s scenarios was "The Real Deal". Not that I have anything against it specially. But it's almost like 30 years of game theory and concepts had never existed. Whenever I browse the "Drivethru" website 90% of the stuff I see is generic Heroic Fantasy and Space Opera trash :(


In the same way, it seems that many folk still seem to think that spending hours in a game with ugly graphics, grinding and grinding combat to earn XP and raise stats in order to fight tougher monsters also is "The Real Deal".

After all these years I'm still waiting for an open-world RPG with Ultima7-like graphics and mechanics, where you can raise from a peasant into a king, conquer foreign nations, manage your realm and dinasty, grow old and even continue the game through your children and heirs. A mix between Ultima and Mount&Blade games, so to speak.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s the devs would say that hardware limitations wouldn't allow them to create huge games like this (who would play an Ultima game on 100 floppy disks?). Well... what's the excuse now?

Just my ranting 2 cents here.

On a related topic Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls, which GOG also rejected for undisclosed reasons, and many people complained about is STILL in release limbo on the Steam storefront. Last official post by the developers was May 29th 2019 (almost 2 months ago now).

Lol yeah....time travel chairs.........imo Journeyman's suits did it a bit better in that regard.

If a dev states it is a beta/test build then GOG should at least allow them to submit a finished build later on to allow them to re-evaluate it and not just auto-reject a game based on an unfinished/buggy build....just my two cents.

Didn't that guy have his games pirated so much because of the high pricepoint/gounging for hint books and other extras, and he even went so far as to make it so that one of his games(Nethergate Classic iirc) needed to be sent VIA CD to try and prevent piracy?

Stuff like that is why I am glad I am more flexible and can/do buy stuff from steam that is DRM free......imo if one's ideals keep them back from too much culture/experience in life just to stick to one's guns those beliefs need re-evaluating/restructuring...if just a tad.

Honestly , i'm glad GoG make the effort to cull the overabundance of games similar to the classics i once played, Steam is full of them, non compare to the likes of Zelda: ALTTP or Alundra, they end up taking certain aspects too far which just put me off, either going for the JRPG combat style (Final Fantasy), full of half naked anime chicks, or some other weird shit.

I got sick of being bombarded with the anime porn on the Steam Store, i blocked it out and still get that shite in my listings. To prevent it i'd have to limit my games to the basics, cutting off "nudity" which would also remove games like Witcher.

Atleast i don't have to do that here, atleast not yet...



I was never one to be interested in anime, it's whatever floats your boat, but when i'm searching for actual games to find upto 5/10 games in top sellers being some anime love crap, you can bet it will start pissing me off, the sex games are enough to skip past.

Spiderweb used that approach for years because it worked quite well, and Jeff Vogel specifically recommended that other developers do the same. However the market changed some time ago and he was forced to adapt. Even so, I kinda get the impression that he doesn't earn as much these days.

too bad for you then


anyway enjoy the curation people keep clamoring as such a blessing over "eeeviiiil Steam"

The more threads like this I see, the more I'm happier I am that GOG uses curation. Over the years I've maybe disagreed with one of GOG's rejections. If this and Grimoire are the latest reasons of outrage over GOG's curation, then the trend continues.

Personally, I consider both games as horribly overpriced at launch. And while Grimoire(a game for which the developer adamantly claimed that there will never be a discount) recently saw a 50% discount on top of a huge price reduction, is also a poorly game designed game, for Legends of Amberland I'll just say that it's overpriced, and only time will tell on the quality of the story/gameplay elements.

Sorry to add my opinion to the pile but this game art direction is seriously lacking for the asked price in early access... This is not "pixel art" but ugly SNES level 3D.

Oi now, that's an insult to both Mode 7 and the Super FX Chip.

There are several games on the SNES that had better looking 3D or pseudo 3D effects.
The undisclosed reasons turned out to be a copyright/trademark dispute. The original creator finally got his hands back on the rights, and now he's trying to sort the fine mess Japan made of his IP. (Is what I understand, anyway.)

Lol wut, Vogel himself admitted that as soon as he put his games on Steam with a much lower price, he sold heaps more copies than he ever did the old way. The old gauging approach only "worked" because it generated only enough money to employ one person - Vogel, and the graphics of the old titles were atrocious, it was only when he came to Steam at lower prices that the production values actually improved.

So...a middle ground fallacy? The fact of the matter is that anyone trying to be a principled person is unlikely to have a fun time in life. But in fact, some extreme principles that we all experience in every day life are good because they stand up for truth, some are bad because they violate consent of others. Some other extreme principles, like "really not even wanting to buy DRM-free on Steam", may seem rather insignificant in the scheme of things but are nonetheless important to those who feel that way.

Regardless, clearly you would concede there are people like this on this site, even if they are a small minority. One has to ask why the dev wouldn't be bothered to put the game DRM-free on itch, his own site, or Humble (and that's to say nothing of ADDITIONAL places like fireflower and z oom). Consider why it is viewed as valid to criticize the supposed "laziness" of the graphics and lack of value for price point, but not valid to criticize the laziness of not putting a DRM-free game on available DRM-free platforms that would take it.

The answer, to use your analogy of culture, is that pro-Steam bias has taken over the culture of PC gaming even on DRM-free sites, lol. Also, there is a saying "history is written by the victors". At one point, it would have been considered "extreme" and ridiculous to have to connect online to play most of PC games. Now it is considered weird and eccentric to not to do so, and even this very site adopted and continues to adopt Steam-like features (as long as they don't make the client mandatory or make DRM worse, I guess it's just the cost of doing business anymore).

Actually, it is honestly difficult to think of ANY small production indie that I would want to pay over $20. RPGs do get more benefit of the doubt with me though, not just because my love of the genre but because they generally come with a lot more content than, say, a platformer. On that note, if a consumer is choosing between Grimoire (not released here) or Gato Roboto (recently released here), both are currently the same price iirc yet one literally offers more than dozens and dozens more hours to the player. Do you criticize a game like Gato Roboto for being overpriced? Or numerous other releases over the last year or so.

When the new-and-improved Grimoire came to itch, it was $9.99. I know you are referring to the original price but do you believe even $9.99 is overpriced? If so, you are entitled to that belief...just like I am entitled to mine that many, MANY indie games (non-dungeon crawler RPGs) are accepted here but are priced higher than I would want to pay. And I am not trying to be a cheapskate either, in other threads I have advocated that DRM-free versions of big games like Fallouts, Bioshocks, Mafias, etc are imo UNDERpriced if anything considering you get to own them. I would have been willing to pay more than "full" price for those games I named.

Haha yes some were good to great (Starfox, Mario kart), some were really meh (street racer) and some were ugly like this new game... (wolfenstein 3D, that part of Jurrassic park)

Are you trying to say "gouging"? Anyway, that doesn't match with what he's actually written:

"Our newest game, Avadon 3, didn't do that well. I think it's a really good game, and the people who bought it seem to like it. But there are new RPGs coming out on Steam every single workday, some of them are good, and you can only hold off so much competition before being overwhelmed.

Any way I can cut costs and still maintain a constant art style and game quality, I will take it, and I won't apologize. This market doesn't allow for blowing money unnecessarily anymore, at least not for me."

Also his newer games are $20, which is not much less than the $25 he used to advocate for.