I’m not sneering at all. I’m being lighthearted. KOTOR and Dragon Age are two of my all-time favourite games. Also, PoE1 was great.

“they havent had a CRPG since 2000.”

I think the original BG games were smart to be set in an already well-established setting. The writers clearly didn’t feel as much pressure to dump exposition and had a little more fun with it while still taking itself seriously. PoE, as I remember, was kinda up its own ass and clearly very proud of its world’s…

I mean it literally looks like Baldur’s Gate, their first big break. You could maybe call it a “Black Isle cRPG” but I imagine that if you don’t remember Baldur’s Gate, that one’s gonna mean even less to you.

Its been depressing watching the Playstation Store get shittier and shittier over the years, its a complete clusterfuck compared to the PS3 days. It especially makes checking out the Sales super frustrating, because you have multiple different sales with different sections (Plus Sale, Spring Sale, Indie Sale, etc),…

“We’re also told that Microsoft runs similar payment schemes for the Xbox store.” I like how you’ve managed to write what amounts to a smear article towards the PSN while stating that XBL does the exact same thing. This is not a Sony problem, and I feel like a little more could have been done to make that clear. 

I don’t understand, Sony isn’t actively pushing their game down. If they want marketing, that costs money. They can market the game their selves and put links to the store in places where people will have easy access to them, which you can totally do.

It’s like any other media market. There are thousands of books, musicians, actors, indie films, and artists of all types that have gone unnoticed for centuries. I would be absolutely willing to bet that if some director actually took the time to audition 100% of the starving actors waiting tables in LA, at least one…

So how much does MS charge?

Seems like a fair price. It would cost thousands of dollars to advertise a game to a much smaller, less targeted audience via a television ad or billboard. Only 25k to advertise your game to every gamer who visits the playstation store sounds like a steal.

I don’t see how subjective curation would be any better. Humans are subject to all kinds of biases and influences. And how long do you think it would take before the curators start getting paid under the table to promote certain titles?

I feel like comparing video games to healthcare doesn’t make for a strong analogy.

I checked out his games and none look particularly unique with most copying art/gameplay styles from other more popular games.

I do find it funny that one of his complaints is that if they don’t like your game they don’t feature it.  Why would anyone purposely advertise a game for free if they didn’t think it was good?

I get that having to pay for promotion sucks and that Sony’s price is exhorbitant for an indie developer.  But I don’t know what the solution is to 10,000 game developers who all shout the system is broken because it doesn’t promote their game more prominently than the other 9,999.

It’s kind of strange for an indie to be so upset about the requirements to get on the front page though. On the PlayStation Store, no less.

Kinda sounds like he’s an indie dev who chose to go it alone, and is kind of paying the price to do so. I know nothing about how publishers work, but it kind of sounds like this is what a publisher would be for.

I’m confused, the beginning of the article references how he says Microsoft doesn’t charge for prominent promotion, but then later it says sources indicate Xbox does charge for prominent promotion.

I guess his complaining worked on some level, because he got featured on Kotaku.

If he’s not happy I suggest he releases his game on Steam or the Nintendo e-shop, where his game will immediately disappear in an incredible mass of shovelware, never to be seen again. Since when is visibility and advertisement free?