Indie Simulator Slop Games - Low quality asset flips, now with AI art

Black Man Underwear

Black Man Underwear

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Simulator games such as Factory Outlet Simulator, Aquatic Store Simulator, Corner Kitchen - Fast Food Simulator and many more have been added to Steam's catalog.

At first each seems like a new developer's first title, but there are so many of them, and they all seem interchangeable.

For the most part they are made in Unity and have identical game elements, text to speech audio, and AI promo art. I could imagine this slop being sold for $5 or so, but they sell for $15-$20 each.

What happened? Has Steam really fallen this far? Have below average Indian programmers taken over indie gaming?
 
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It's awful. They clog up searches. The Nintendo store is much the same way. It's so full of garbage like this and there's no way to really filter shovelware. It doesn't help that the store is slow and buggy as fuck regardless of what platform you use.

I assumed most of these games are of Chinese origin. I didn't think that they could be Indian as well. It's a cheap cash grab that requires little talent. Just think up theme and copy/paste the gameplay.

I took a look at Aquatic Store Simulator and an actual quality aquatic store game would be cool. This one just looks boring. I guess these scratch an itch sim fans have. But if I want to play shopkeeper I'll just open up Recettear.
 
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Dollar Store Sentai said:
Only one I've picked up was TCG simulator since I can get my dopamine hit by opening packs. At least it's getting fairly regular updates.

The rest of them look way too same-y without the card pack opening
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If it doesn’t somehow pipe in the smell of a freshly-opened pack, then it’s a poor facsimile.
 
This is what happens when your educational institutions do not teach you to excel and insist on relying on the same shit everyone else uses. Fresh college grads who want to "MaKe GaMeS!!!!111" know absolutely nothing about actual game development. None of the classics that people still talk about were slop made in what are essentially premade games like Game Maker or Unreal. They were almost always coded and programmed from scratch and they made the development tools themselves. Goes without saying that Indians and Chinese also know nothing but they get less of a choice compared to the west.

It's the same problem with art design too, that's why everything you see is flat minimalist shit and now here we are and the AI chicken has come home to roost. Perhaps if game development was gatekept again there would be less slop, but it isn't and never will be again. The floodgates are open for the shittiest slop imaginable and now it's just as bad as the mobile game market, maybe even worse. Hopefully the next crash destroys the entire industry without any possible way to recover.
 
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LifeAlert said:
This is what happens when your educational institutions do not teach you to excel and insist on relying on the same shit everyone else uses. Fresh college grads who want to "MaKe GaMeS!!!!111" know absolutely nothing about actual game development. None of the classics that people still talk about were slop made in what are essentially premade games like Game Maker or Unreal. They were almost always coded and programmed from scratch and they made the development tools themselves. Goes without saying that Indians and Chinese also know nothing but they get less of a choice compared to the west.

It's the same problem with art design too, that's why everything you see is flat minimalist shit and now here we are and the AI chicken has come home to roost. Perhaps if game development was gatekept again there would be less slop, but it isn't and never will be again. The floodgates are open for the shittiest slop imaginable and now it's just as bad as the mobile game market, maybe even worse. Hopefully the next crash destroys the entire industry without any possible way to recover.
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This is also a side effect of AAA gaming completely shitting the bed, and thus began the "it's INDIE, so it's a GOOD GAME" movement, despite Indie Games also have their share of stinkers too.
 
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Hasn't steam had an indie slop problem since 2017? I remember jim sterling bitching about greenlight back then, about how low steams standards were. Just cause the average quality of the slop has gone up, doesnt mean it isn't slop. Idk gog has been having this problem too as of late.
 
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Bruce LaLiLuLeLo said:
Hasn't steam had an indie slop problem since 2017? I remember jim sterling bitching about greenlight back then, about how low steams standards were. Just cause the average quality of the slop has gone up, doesnt mean it isn't slop. Idk gog has been having this problem too as of late.
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At least greenlight games had to get peoples votes, now theres just so much garbage. Another game store could compete with steam if they just didnt allow any shit shovelware games.
 
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Black Man Underwear said:
Has Steam really fallen this far?
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Even in times of Greenlight tons of garbage made it through due to the devs gaming the system. Now that you only need to pay $100, it's even worse.
Officer Douche said:
At least greenlight games had to get peoples votes, now theres just so much garbage. Another game store could compete with steam if they just didnt allow any shit shovelware games.
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GOG has higher quality control. Do you anyone who uses GOG?
 
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Officer Douche said:
At least greenlight games had to get peoples votes, now theres just so much garbage. Another game store could compete with steam if they just didnt allow any shit shovelware games.
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Like gog? Which wouldn't even certain indie big sellers (i think even Stardew Valley was initially denied) because it didn't fit their "vision"? How good are they doing?

What happens today isn't much different from the 80's and 90's when bedroom programmers and small studios dropped game after game and rip-off after rip-off. Shovelware was always a problem on the Computers (and of course later on the PS1 and PS2, everybody remembers Phoenix Games, right? They would drop up to 5 games on the same day and it's usually the same game just slightly modified, like when they tried to make a boxing game into a wrestling game by slightly changing the gameplay.), back then companies like Codemasters, Zeppelin or Rare/Ultimate would just flood the markets with cheaply made games that usually sucked. Codemasters for example dropped over 60 games within just 3 years on the Amiga...

And what we have with these simulator games, isn't much different to the invasion of 'doom clones' in the mid-90s: Something becomes a hit and everybody wants to make money from that by doing a quick, cheap copy. Now it's just even easier with asset libraries and AI to create something. So TCG becomes a surprise hit and there are copies (some even with the same graphics)
 
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Hardline Traditionalist said:
GOG has higher quality control. Do you anyone who uses GOG?
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Not really, it has marginally higher quality control in that it doesn't allow asset flips. It still has a lot of slop games, just go into any of the gog redistribution sites and sort by new, you'll see so much indieslop it's not even funny. Personally I think the largest chunk of indieslop are rpgs, retrobait and porn games, there's infinite amounts of this trash and most of them are not worth playing, at all. The minority of them reach the standard of mediocre, stuff like worlds of ort and kynseed, they're not terrible but just recycled retrobait.
 
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McMitch said:
If it doesn’t somehow pipe in the smell of a freshly-opened pack, then it’s a poor facsimile.
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It kind of does. You end up having a kind of tower defense set-up around your doors to spray customers with air freshener.
 
I rather like Car Mechanic Simulator as it really tickles the autism.

I saw a streamer play "Yasuke Simulator" Looked better than current Assassin's Creed, imho.
 
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I dunno. I always thought bum simulator looked pretty funny

store.steampowered.com

Bum Simulator on Steam

You live on the streets. What will you do? Adapt and survive? Take revenge on those responsible? Become an urban legend? Countless possibilities await!
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com

I mean, it looks like a shitty game but it's ridiculous.
 
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