The pre-indie indie dev. It's very rare indeed for a dev from the shareware days of the '90s to survive in any meaningful way, while also pretty much following the same model up to this day. I doubt he would be able to replicate it if he had started making games today instead of back then.
Ah, yes, the scourge upon humanity. What ever did people do before the arrival of their 5-second attention span? Critical thinking: what's that? Too busy chasing their own tails. Ugh. Now that's a whiplash combo right there. Barbie already looked barf-tastic on its own, but like this? Hell, no!

I must admit I am not even sure what is the "first Spider-Man game". I would have expected there must be dozens of old Spiderman games on various platforms over the years or decades. Probably this is some more recent "first Spiderman game", from Sony? That's how out of touch I apparently are for the currently trending movies and games (especially when it comes to superhero stuff).

When someone mentions a Spiderman game, the first game that pops up to my mind is that certain multiplatform Spiderman game probably 10-15 years ago where the console version was supposedly quite good, while the PC port was quite different, some kind of children's game? I just remember it because it seemed to cause quite a lot of irritation on PC gamers, feeling that game publishers were treating PC gamers as second-class citizens worthy of only some dumbed down children's games.

I presume this specific "first Spider-Man game" is the 2018 PS4 game, right?

https://www.mobygames.com/group/471/spider-man-licensees

Yes. Since you were talking about Spider-Man 2, I thought "the first one" would be pretty clear in this context.

Don't forget about today's (anti-)social media, where every single misstep" of (e.g.) one of your design artists, from years ago (even if that "misstep" is only perceived as such by some), WILL get dug up again, and used against you/your company/your game.

Combine that with "review bombing", "crunch-time" and all the other points that you brought up, and the gaming industry turns into a place where only masochists feel well.

Maybe you shouldn't.

But most gamers aren't ultra focused on mostly, or exclusively, playing ancient, obsolete games.

Many customers on GOG are, but that is a niche audience that does not represent the majority of the gaming population.

For the general population of gamers, though, they expect modern graphics & gameplay mechanics and they expect to play games while they are fresh & new, which are two things that old games never can be.

So this idea that old games are somehow stealing the market from newly-released games, I don't believe that.

As for the idea of devs having it rough these days: I don't agree with that either.

Modern digital distribution platforms like Steam and Itch and GOG have all become dumping grounds for absolute garbage games, the poor quality of which would have ensured that they never received any distribution, because they simply aren't good enough to publish anywhere, if PC games distribution had remained something that was done with physical media discs that were sold at brick & mortar stores.

In contrast to that, the switch to digital distribution of PC games have opened the floodgates to the point that any piece of crap at all, that any person calls a "game," now can and will be published.

For this reason, shovelware is now omnipresent, whereas before digitial distribution, it was instead a rare thing (as it should be).

And that gives makers of shovelware the ability to make a living in exchange for them producing garbage, even though they never would have been able to do that before digital distribution became a thing.

Thus, devs now have it easier than ever - to the great detriment of video game players.

"Rough" for those trying to compete for profit, sure...but that just goes to show how far afield things have gotten. PC gaming was better a few decades ago before it got so mainstream/before it was as concerned with maximizing profits; i.e., when a large sector of games was produced for hobbyists, by hobbyists. Mind you, there is nothing intrinsically stopping devs from making games for other hobbyists nowadays, other than external factors unrelated to gaming itself, which unfortunately do curtail the ability of many to engage in such practice.

Times are hard for a lot of people these days.

If you're a game dev, odds are good you got marketable software development skills.

You can stop at any point and leverage your skills to get a well paying software development job in another sector of the software industry.

That's exactly what happened to me. I started my career wanting to get in the video game industry and am now a devops architect making 6 figures.

Compare that to musician and writers that can't release a successful album or book. What highly marketable skill do they have to fallback on? I feel bad for them, not people like me.

Otherwise, I think its fair that once the world has more of a kind of good than we know what to do with, maybe its time to slow down a bit and free some of those people to focus on other things that are needed. I'm helping build up platforms for genomic research for the public healthcare. Maybe I'm doing more good doing that then working on yet another game...

Don't get me wrong, I love gaming, I'm still buying games (more than I have time to play) and I'd love to work on a creative project like that, but I think its important to keep things in perspective regardless.

I hope the documentation about Daedalics (Edna, Harvey, Deponia series, Gollum) downfall will be available in english at some point for you guys, the company that tried to create a AAA open world game with a main character walking on four limbs for 15 millions

Maybe. I think the NES had something like 800,000 different games in it's lifetime, although a number may be really crappy or bootlegs or sprite swaps of other games. So not sure. But even the good ones, it will take a while to become proficient enough to beat them.

Ahh right, hardware problems, yeah i'll agree. It's one reason i'm right now i'm anti-console, because unless they are going to keep making the hardware to let you keep using your own hardware from your own games (and not repurchasing digital versions for each progressive console) then you get stuck where you end up with a TON of games you can't even boot up. I got a stack of 40 something Xbox games, and 40-50 PS2/PS3 games, and even a handful of Gamecube games, and i can barely boot any of them. And it makes me sad more than anything.

Though i think in a handful of years it may become more emulator's paradise. I've seen mentions of 'get this router' and 'This Rock PI 4' and other Single Board Computers that are strong enough to play PS2 and Xbox games, and maybe PS3 and maybe 360 games. Oh sure i can emulate PS2 games now, but a 600W machine vs a 15W machine is a huge difference and $1000 machine vs $150 machine.

Sorta makes me hopeful that if the big AAA studios crash hard and disappear, the newest game thrill seekers will look inward and instead we'll see getting all the games that have already been put out to work very well and for 10-20 years we'll probably be fine going through the current set before new studios start delivering really good products and have the hardware and software and everything figured out. Or maybe the big studios gone we'll get a lot more RPG maker games and small studios and indies for 10 years before they eventually grow big. Who knows.

I'd also hope a number of people become hobbyists again and are willing to repair their own hardware or build it from recycles.

Guess i'm ranting at this point.

#Oppaiheimer would have been a much better joke :)

Part of me feels sorry for game devs, but on the other hand, the only games I feel are worth making nowadays are those with original ideas. And the good ideas are the hard part, not the development. So mainly I feel that if games can't do anything original then they shouldn't get made in the first place. And if you can't think of those ideas (and aren't contributing in some other way like art/music/etc) then maybe you are not in the right industry.

Ha ha no, it was <2000. Er, what? How about you add up the price of everything you can emulate on that $1000 machine, it will be far more than $1000. Also I sure hope your 600W machine isn't using 600W all the time. CPUs and GPUs use far less power when they're not being stressed much; right now I can see that my CPU + RAM is using ~10 watts while writing this. The hard drives are spun down so they're not using anything, and SSDs use little.

Again: ha ha no. What is this, "Absurd Statement Day" or something? Ideas are cheap, execution is hard. The joke in the industry is that everyone wants to be the "idea guy" and take 50% of the profit while doing .00001% of the work.

The Daedalic thing bums me out because I think AA hits the sweet spot right now. Would have been nice to see them successfully transfer to that realm. Oh well.

I'm afraid this one goes over my head at a safe altitude.

At least from a players perspective, I could not agree less. We've never had it this good. Incredible variety of games, something for everybody, and most classics available to run at a click of the mouse, and most of it for peanuts compared to what the prices were when I was a kid. Sure, there's a lot of bad practices, DRM, microtransaction, games-as-service bullshit, but at the end of the day the truth is that even ignoring all titles "contaminated" with such stuff, I have more games to play, and more games on my wishlist, than I would ever have thought possible a couple of decades ago.