pretty good video only thing he misses with qc imo is how broken the queue system is
it takes way too long to get into games that are way too short to really warrant wanting to play
also the game is really slow to update but that kinda ties into one of his later points

I still think there's a pretty sizeable, untapped market around if something comes that's actually a pretty good game tho

i don't really think the average gaming populous (read: the part of gaming population that makes game companies money) has any interest in extremely high skill ceiling games that have a large barrier to entry

It would also need a big publisher behind it tho, which won't happen cause these publishers always want all the money...
I mean wasnt reflex a really good arena shooter (aside from some balancing issues) and it went no where? or did I miss some drama or something else that prevented it from getting big?

no drama, small indie game with small public exposure and huge skill gap between new afps players and ql/cpm veterans outweighed things like matchmaking, steam workshop and mod support, really good hitreg etc
also didnt catch on with good ql players because it didnt have money and with cpm players because it's slower and more about item control
still best made afps to this date

the number of players interested in such games makes a niche whatsoever, and a niche market can still be profitable.

For example paradox games like crusader kings/hearts of iron target a specific niche much smaller than fortnite audience and they still make money.

With esports games, the publishers need a lot of viewership probably because of the advertisement business around tournaments. Also recent games need constant income to maintain servers whereas in the past the community provided all the servers.

If someone makes a game on a small scale without any infrastructure (like reflex) that is somehow fun enough to be played in a non-competitive way (like tf2 or unreal tournament with all its custom maps and mods), there is room for an indie-scale success.

so we need to mod 9 classes and pubs into reflex and call that its own game?

Yeah ok but he didn't mention Team Fortress 2 or account for what made it so successful despite having the highest movement skill cap of the games in this video bar for maybe Quake.

Quake Champions also has a plethora of issues other than the balancing, but the balancing is arguably the most glaring issue with the game.

quake champions is getting ditched as soon as diabotical comes out

quake champions took like over a year to fix the fact that all abilities were massively op, and the netcode/queuing is still shit. very excited for diabotical

pretty sure the point of not including it showed that the game achieved the 4 points that he stated that the genre needs in able to be successful

some of the pros and semi-pros are jumping ship to diabotical but myself and a lot of other people fear that it’s gonna end up like reflex because without the quake name attached to them arena fps games tend to fall off very quickly and end up dead

as for quake champions, the fps issues, engine and netcode issues, balancing issues, and the fact that no ctf events have been announced two months into 2019 have most of us losing hope

hats off the funke! one of the best content creators to come from this community.

bethesda's fiscal year ends in march so don't expect any announcements for another month at least

it's less of bethesda not announcing anything and more of 0 community events for ctf taking place

QOL and battlefy haven't even tried to do anything for ctf and dreamhack hasn't told anyone what's gonna be at dreamhack summer or dreamhack winter in terms of quake champions

sad that there seems to be a see-saw relationship between good mechanics and good marketability. tbqh for me QC's visuals were immediately offputting. people who like antiquated games just get to go fuck themselves now i guess

pretty much m8

I don't work in the sales department of the video game industry, so it's likely i'm missing something, but from my perspective there's a weird relationship between mechanics and marketability that seems almost entirely contrived. i think if tf2 came out a couple of years ago in the state it's in now, it would've been huge. there are a lot of things developers can add to games to make them more appealing to a casual audience. for example, fortnite actually has quite a lot of mechanical depth in its building/editing and the speed at which you're required to do it, but the average 12 year old only really cares that they can run around in a chicken costume and shoot grenades. and even in the fortnite world, where you're playing a battle royale with hardly any (if any at all) skill-based matchmaking algorithms, these casual players are sometimes getting smacked around by players like tfue without even realizing it. and they're still logging in to play everyday.

a game like melee had an incredible underground scene that learned all of the crazy techniques you see people still mastering and utilizing 2 decades later, but from a casual standpoint the game was a massive success. for some reason people/nintendo seem to think otherwise? i'm pretty sure the sales for melee were monumental, and there was no need to make brawl a game that tried its hardest to eradicate the competitive side of the franchise.

i would imagine that if you're really new and have a casual approach to games, most of the mechanical depth in melee, csgo, quake, tf2, etc. will go entirely over your head and you won't even have to experience much of it, because you'll play with and get matched against people in that same bracket. it seems like the key in the development of mechanically deep games is to have a very friendly and shallow base to your game that everyone can enjoy for what it is, while supplementing that with cosmetics and extra content.

yeah definitely. if you want new players to continue playing a game that has a high barrier to entry/skill ceiling, you've got to engineer an enjoyable and less intense side to it. tf2 is so good in that respect, must be why to this day it's only 97% dead.

yup. unfortunate that the wheel has to be reinvented without any mechanical or even graphical need, just to garner attention

i understand that in order to be marketable now new games have to have modern flashy AAA visuals but the sheer visual noise of qc is such a detriment to the already broken gameplay, yeah it looks pretty but its also incredibly distracting and confusing at times

the limited hardware capabilities of pcs 20 years ago really benefited the games that were being made then

Barrier to entry isn't as much of an issue in videogames with a large playerbase because if you're bad at the game and the matchmaking works then everyone you're playing against is also bad at the game.

Quake's going to struggle when it doesn't immediately retain a large playerbase because you've got people playing that game who've been doing it for 2 decades.

I still think it's good to streamline some mechanics in games to make them easier to lower the skill floor (e.g. stuff that takes extremely precise inputs) as long as you don't then limit what you can do with that stuff at a higher level. Problem with most games is they tend to lower the skill ceiling at the same time as the skill floor or they keep both high.