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retsibsi • today at 1:56 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

> We have this massive hits like balatro, vampire survivors, that easily could be made in the era of SNES or N64. But somehow we have to wait 30 years to get them.

> It clearly wasn't technical side of things that prevented that, but also I don't believe it was lack of creativity.

I don't know those specific games, but I think this often happens because, although the thing has been technically possible for decades, it used to be relatively difficult/expensive/obscure, and now it's far more accessible.

In those days, writing and publishing a SNES game was something that relatively very few people would have even thought to attempt, let alone had the knowledge and skills and capital to pull off successfully. Nowadays, creating and publishing a SNES-level game is comparatively very easy (at the technical level, that is; making a good original game is of course still hard), and so a large portion of the people with an idea and some motivation can actually go ahead and do it. And now that games are fully mainstream, there will be more of those people in the first place. Many of the resulting games won't be very interesting, but collectively we're exploring the design space much more quickly.

edit: I was probably silly to focus on literal SNES games instead of 'SNES era' games, but the point still stands: creating games for any platform back then was harder and more obscure than it is now (especially given that we're talking about a technical level that required quite efficient use of the hardware back then, but can be done with extremely inefficient use of the hardware now).


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swiftcoder • today at 2:39 PM

> it used to be relatively difficult/expensive/obscure

I don't know I fully agree with this. Consoles always had the "walled garden" thing going for them, but on the other side of things, developing games became so cheap and easy during the personal computer revolution that whole industry collapsed in '83 under a massive flood of shovelware...

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