Acclaimed roguelike studio behind Slay the Spire releases new deckbuilder after publicly abandoning Unity over fee debacle

simple@lemm.ee to Games@lemmy.world – 515 points –
Acclaimed roguelike studio behind Slay the Spire releases new deckbuilder after publicly abandoning Unity over fee debacle
gamesradar.com

TL;DR the developers of slay the spire created a fun free card game within 3 weeks to explore and learn the Godot game engine. You can play it here: https://megacrit.itch.io/dancing-duelists

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"Hey, here's some shit we threw together without knowing what we were doing" is a weird marketing tactic.

I'm sure they're doing it more to promote Godot rather than themselves, but it looks really weird with my consumer hat on.

Edit: FFS, I wasn't trying to disparage them. The hostility in the replies here is really disappointing.

Edit 2: Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood today.

What a weird take

I know Louis CK is kinda on the out for references, but this was kinda spot on his bit about entitlement.

"Something (given out for free) that I didn't even know about until today, and is just a fun experiment to share and learn from? Not good enough!"

I didn't say it wasn't good enough. I said they way they pitched it is a strange way to entice people to play it.

Did you by any change miss that it is a free game?

Yes, I did.

But also free things can still have marketing. I assume they want people to actually play their game.

Not to mention, they literally only had a month to make it, being that it was for a contest.

It was probably meant more for the community than the consumers, two overlapping but distinct groups.

Why?

Downplaying the time and effort put into creating a product isn't usually how you hype it up.

That's because it's not a product. It's an experiment for figuring out what they as a studio might be able to do with something new and untested. This is a trial run of a new engine, and they simply decided to publish the result for others to see.

This is more like publishing research findings than trying to market and sell something for a profit. Whether the result is good or bad, it's informative either way.

I feel like you're missing the point that sometimes people make stuff for reasons besides maximizing the amount of money they make

If you put something out there, you want to maximize something. Probably attention in this case.

Or...or! They were practicing on an engine they were unfamiliar with by making a low-stakes proof of concept.

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A comment the devs made on the steam announcement (under slay the spire) regarding someone being angry that this was prioritized over slay the spire 2:

Hi there, this is just a small, free game we made in a few weeks for a game jam in order to get acquainted with the engine that our next big game is currently being ported to. We figured our fans would be interested in knowing what we're up to as we work on our upcoming title since switching from Unity has extended its development time.

We're currently back to work on our next big game, this time refreshed and with lots of new tools under our belt! Hope people have a fun time trying this out if they'd like to!

So it's not like this is a big new genre for them, but it's also not meant to be a commercial for Godot.

To your edit, you doubled down hard in later posts, so I wouldn't say the hostility isn't completely undeserved.

I think you just really expected something different from what this was supposed to be, even when people explained to you exactly what it was supposed to be.

I wasn't disparaging them in the follow up comments either.

I'm not seeing any hostility really, just disagreeing with you and explanations.

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