> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time...
Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.
> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.
And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.
Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.
It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.
[0] ...but definitely not all of them...
[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.
Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.
> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.
And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.
Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.
It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.
[0] ...but definitely not all of them...
[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.