It used to be that games were so massive, so complicated, so mysterious that you had to work for a studio to have a chance at making them. You had to spend years working on Super Monkey Ball over at Sega before you could pitch them Yakuza. You had to spend years working on Armored Core before you could go "Hey I've got this Demon Souls idea" and so on. Now you can just go ahead and make your Undertale (the example above), Stardew Valley, and so on directly and don't need a studio at any point.
yes and no. in some regard it was even easier to put something together on a c64 or other home computer than it is now where you need several disciplines like 3d and animation at once.
the reason people looked for a studio and inevitably a publisher is the same reason music and movies did - how would you produce your dream game? and even if you could, how do you distribute it (assuming you want people to play it and more likely pay for it)? you might know someone that could press an LP for you in a low run, but for most people getting their music out there was having the instruments, then a way to record it so it doesn't sound like absolute crap (unless you were looking for that specific sound), and then hand it out/sell it via cassettes. which meant unless you toured your city,
maybe your region. your reach to get your name out there was limited.
before the internet made it possible to reach everyone on the planet in seconds, and the technology lowering the entry to make it "easy", going with a studio/publisher was mostly a necessary business decision.
I hope so. Problem is, will they be allowed to, and where? Given the state of cancel culture, it's easy to see a booth being cancelled for having them. Plus there's no united convention space like E3 any more.
said it before, but the zeitgeist will inevitably change. thanks to the global interconnection, probably even faster than it did in the past where it had to organically spread slowly through society. I mean think about it, the whole wokeshit started to gain traction around 10 years ago and people are getting more and more sick of it already, nor was it ever sustainable. nothing happens in a vacuum, with everything else going to shit it's inevitable people and society at large are gonna react to it. wokeshit never had any staying power, just like any form of extremism and outside market influence. in some way the market and society inevitably will correct themselves one way or another, but that doesn't happen overnight. for us right in the middle of it it's slow to the point it seems nothing is happening.
tbh that's the part I'm actually concerned about, most people don't think about consequences and what it's all gonna lead to. "and then, for no reason at all..." is a funny meme, but at it's core absolutely true. look at the last elections, you can't just ignore 30-40% of the population with election shenanigans forever, that number is only gonna go up and already has.
call me blackpilled but imo we're way past the point where everything doesn't end up crashed against a wall, and given how we ended up this way I can't even imagine the reaction to it at the end.
it's probably gonna make a certain austrian painter blush...
