Just minutes before it was set to deliver its financial results for the first half of its 2025-26 fiscal year, Ubisoft mashed the brakes on the whole thing, postponing the release of its results to an unspecified future date. The company also requested that European exchange Euronext halt trading of the company’s shares and bonds from November 14 until the publication of its results.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products
Don’t forget AA, doing pretty good too.
I suggest you play some classics.
Indie games pale in comparison.
What are some examples of classics and indies you have in mind?
Play Symphony of the Night instead of the indie knockoff.
The indie market is just another tool to reduce people’s standards.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
No, I’m still talking about indies in general.
I gave 1 example because giving more isn’t worth my time.
Okay, buddy.
Right, Terraria and Stardew Valley constantly releasing new content for free is lowering standards… 🙄
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
Genuine curiosity: does 3D really give more opportunities for asset reuse than 2D does?
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.