Too Big to Fail (Gaming)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 14:28 (3156 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Yup, I played narbacular drop. It was a lot of fun, and yes, it needed spit & polish. The innovation didn't come from Valve, the spit & polish came from Valve, the innovation came from a small number of people with the initial concept.

I mean, the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because of Valve. It's not a classic, but a footnote. Without Valve it'd just have been forgotten. Precisely because they had an idea, but not the resources to properly execute. I am not diminishing their creativity, but simply acknowledging you also need a great deal of money plus great ideas to make a cutting edge game.

In my mind, you don't need to be publicly known (50 million users) to be a cutting edge game. That's just a bonus. I never played narbacular drop, but from what I hear, they DID execute. They had a revolutionary game that no one had thought to make and people played it! That's a revolutionary game! Valve did provide the resources to add more value to it and promote it to more people, but ultimately it's the original designers, not Valve that made it cutting edge.

Cutting edge games get played because they are cutting edge. Especially in the age of the internet, word spreads fast. People thirst for quality, and if it's out there it will be found.

So you are saying that if a game is cutting edge enough, that word of mouth is all that is needed? I have some indie dev friends that would disagree.

I agree that games can flourish with word of mouth, but most still need a marketing boost. Regardless of this, a cutting edge game isn't defined by how many people play it. It should be defined by whether it brakes the edge of how we perceive games to be played and enjoyed and so on.