I can’t speak for everyone, but the transition from one version to another loses almost as many features as it gains. It is especially crappy about its provided sprites, to the point where we keep losing entire sprite types, many sprite sets are just plain unfinished or untested, and they insisted we move from sprites that people could somewhat take seriously to chibi/moe sprites that nobody on Earth can take seriously for an adventure game.
Another issue is that the series keeps releasing new versions that are incremental improvements at best, and they want us to pay a lot of money for each installment and half-sequel with said very few improvements, and also pay for a lot of content packs. There are things that should have been added 15 years ago and still aren’t here. They can’t even allow us to customize menus, and countless other issues. Honestly the dev team seems like they’re not very good at programming or art in the first place, and they’re just raking in money from incremental improvements over many decades. People try to excuse the engines’ lack of basic features with “but you can program it in Ruby/Javascript yourself!” Which is a really bad thing to rely on for a game-creation engine of this type.
I’m sure other people are annoyed by things I’m not even thinking of right now.
You do realize indie devs consisting of one or two people are also businesses, right?
seems to me that there’s some sort of critical mass they need to achieve first before the fuckery sets in, small teams aren’t “evil” (yet) simply because they can’t be (yet)
EDIT I mean “evil” as in “we want profit above all else, let’s milk this cow dry until she dies”
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative, and paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor. You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks. If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op (because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk), but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.
They already do some crappy things. With that said, I still mostly like RPG Maker.
Any examples? I’m genuinely curious
I can’t speak for everyone, but the transition from one version to another loses almost as many features as it gains. It is especially crappy about its provided sprites, to the point where we keep losing entire sprite types, many sprite sets are just plain unfinished or untested, and they insisted we move from sprites that people could somewhat take seriously to chibi/moe sprites that nobody on Earth can take seriously for an adventure game.
Another issue is that the series keeps releasing new versions that are incremental improvements at best, and they want us to pay a lot of money for each installment and half-sequel with said very few improvements, and also pay for a lot of content packs. There are things that should have been added 15 years ago and still aren’t here. They can’t even allow us to customize menus, and countless other issues. Honestly the dev team seems like they’re not very good at programming or art in the first place, and they’re just raking in money from incremental improvements over many decades. People try to excuse the engines’ lack of basic features with “but you can program it in Ruby/Javascript yourself!” Which is a really bad thing to rely on for a game-creation engine of this type.
I’m sure other people are annoyed by things I’m not even thinking of right now.
Reading this comment seems like they cater the Japanese market and the rest of the world is an afterthought
Yeah, they are a company, their goal is profits, they will do crappy things. Go open source if you want to get away from that.
This is not an absolute.
If profits are the goal, then it is.
Yeah, every single person who makes money in the form of a “business” is a crappy person who does crappy things, sure, whatever.
You do realize indie devs consisting of one or two people are also businesses, right?
seems to me that there’s some sort of critical mass they need to achieve first before the fuckery sets in, small teams aren’t “evil” (yet) simply because they can’t be (yet)
EDIT I mean “evil” as in “we want profit above all else, let’s milk this cow dry until she dies”
They will still need to do crappy things to make profits. It’s the nature of the beast.
So what crappy things did Re-Logic do, for example?
Not pay its employees the full value of their labour. Mathematically impossible.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative, and paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor. You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks. If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op (because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk), but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.