Jesse

Talking about the business of games

[Jesse @jessefreeland]

The lesson is developers shouldn't take their eye off of priority #1 which is to just make a good game

Whatever that looks like and whatever elements you want to incorporate after, fine, but your game has to be good before anything

[Jesse @jessefreeland]

A lot of blowback over "wokeness" in gaming lately, but the problem isn't "woke" games. The problem is BAD woke games

I played Alan Wake 2, which had some "woke" elements and credited the recently dubbed boogeyman Sweet Baby Inc, and that's one of the best games I've ever played

[Jesse @jessefreeland]

But having "woke" elements doesn't make your game bad

I've also been playing Pacific Drive lately which has a slew of "woke" cosmetics and that is still a fantastic game

[Jesse @jessefreeland]

I'm sure even big AAA publishers have seen this shift approaching because they've created indie publishing arms within their company that fund indie titles

Some may debate how "indie" these games are, but Private Division for example has published some great indie games

[Jesse @jessefreeland]

Is AAA gaming dying?

That seems to be a growing conversation, and I've heard some legit cases for why the AAA model just no longer works.

AAA games over the last few years have largely all been failures (outside of a handful of gems)

[Jesse @jessefreeland]

So I'm glad to see where indies are now. It's where all of the innovation and creativity is happening in video games, and it's been awesome to see indie games get access to real capital from VCs, and growing indie publishers like AnnaPurna