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CivPlayers, WePlayCiv and Apolyton are dead

Sulla's got a YouTube channel. I'm the one who's harder to find.

- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
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For all the advantages of YouTube, I feel like it's also killed a lot of games writing for good. Almost every review is video now, same with playthroughs and so on. It's come to a point where video is the main way to deliver content, and 90% of the time I prefer text. 100% of the time if I am the one making the content.
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Aye. There are times when a video can be really helpful, but if you only need or want specific info, watching a whole videa when you wanted to look up one or two items is a no-go. Time is way too precious for that. I want the chance to narrow down the info I'm consuming to what I came there looking for.

As a result, though, I consume written info and skip most videos. Is that an older person's clinging to newspapers instead of watching TV news? Just applied to gaming? Perhaps.

Sulla's videos are mostly livestream recordings, so from an information intensity perspective, there are plenty of quiet points. And I think he does a better job of voicing his thoughts and popping out keen insights far more than most. But he also still writes written reports. Some of these video channel jockeys don't seem to have good insights. And the flood of voices out there now drowns out some of the better ones.


Indie gaming had a bit of a heyday a couple of years ago, but now I can't seem to find many games that interest me on Steam or in any other marketplace. Nor have I found communities on forums that have content I want to spend a lot of time consuming and participating in. The games themselves mostly went more shallow. But players do not tend to consume pure junk in high volume, so the market still rewards great games some of the time and sinks poor ones most of the time.

Too many games are running Early Access. Feedback is good, but-- not always productive. It's one thing to take feedback and mine through it for ideas to improve a game. It's another to run public popularity contests and implement ideas based on loudest voices or largest lobbies. There's a sweet zone between taking too little feedback and having too little vision, and evidence suggests it's a narrow space.

So what have you been up to lately?


- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
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I still find there are games out there that interest me, but the gaming communities themselves are now less up my alley. With the move towards live-streaming and videos, as well as the general death of forums in favour of social networking sites, I have found it increasingly difficult to have (or even read) the kind of discussions that I prefer. Here I can definitely relate to what you say. Gives me the same feeling of old man clinging to newspaper.

On the other hand, I find Civ6 to be good. It was my pleasure to be part of Frankenstein for this game as well, even if less active than I used to, and I think the initial release of Civ6 is at least on par with the final version of Civ5 in terms of fun, a welcome upgrade. I've been quite heavily involved, in a semi-professional capacity as well, with Xenonauts, a very faithful followup to the original XCOM, the one from the 90s. As an indie game, it suffers from technical and production quality issues, but I had previously given up on seeing a faithful XCOM-style game, so that's been quite good.

Steam's Early Access policies are, from what I heard, soon to change. Valve has been very hands-off, and it has resulted in numerous games not merely suffering from the popularity contest syndrome, but even worse, pushing a game out into Early Access with the intention of making money and no intention of actually providing a finished product. It's almost come to a point where Early Access is a red flag, and that's a shame, so I hope that trend will be reversed.
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(July 15th, 2017, 15:03)Solver Wrote: For all the advantages of YouTube, I feel like it's also killed a lot of games writing for good. Almost every review is video now, same with playthroughs and so on. It's come to a point where video is the main way to deliver content, and 90% of the time I prefer text. 100% of the time if I am the one making the content.

Yeah, I don't really like video, except:

  1. when I'm watching a speedrun, or
  2. when I'm watching a gaming instructional video.

In all other cases I can think of, I find text interspersed with pictures to be superior.

I still cherish all the dead-tree reviews I have of older computer games.  That's more old-fashioned than merely asking for text.  lol
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I've found that different types of games respond better to different types of reporting. When I was playing League of Legends, I found that it wasn't a game that suited itself to written reports. The fast pace and constant interaction with other players was much better suited to working through video as a medium. Conversely, turn-based strategy games like Civilization are poor fits for a video format. There's no reason to watch hour after hour on end of managing workers and moving units around when a good written report can distill the interesting bits down to a 10 minute read. Different styles work best for different games.

The problem is that videos are very easy to make in this day and age, while written reports are difficult to do well. As a result, everyone seems to record themselves no matter what game they might be playing, and written reports have largely withered on the vine. The forum discussions that I see for Civ6 are a pale shadow of what used to take place for Civ3 or Civ4, since the limitation of the Internet practically forced everyone to communicate through text at the time. Few people are willing to put in the much greater effort it takes to craft a good piece of writing. I've tried to maintain a balance over the years and continue to produce content in different formats, but I wish there were more things to read. We have excellent turn reporting here for the Pitboss/PBEM games, T-Hawk continues to push Civ5 its limits, and there's sporadic other non-Civ games that often have some activity going on. Otherwise, I see very little being written these days about the turn-based strategy genre, and it's a bit sad. Still, life moves on, and there's no sense ranting about the past. I wouldn't really want to go back to dial-up Internet after all. smile
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Players used to run the communities. Today, corporations host most of the content.

Steam has a discussion board for every game it offers, and that soaks up some of the attention of players. Blizzard has its own board system. Can anyone even name a game whose studio or publisher does NOT host a discussion board, these days?

* The companies censor a lot of feedback. They control topics, close threads. It's not draconian, in most cases, as games worthy of ongoing support don't generally attract determined criticism in large volume.
* Players hunger for at least the perception of interacting directly with developers, and that has replaced the old priority of interacting with one another, back when developers were inaccessible.
* Games often have in-game metrics, which has tamped down the hunger for players to create their own metrics.
* Trolls killed a lot of indie communities.
* And as Sulla said, video is just easier. There are some communities on YouTube, but they are less participatory and more cultish or celebrity-fan interaction, as there is a central figure making the videos and others just watch or comment. (I confess to spending next to zero time reading YouTube comments attached to videos. The minutes I did spend seemed completely wasted. Comments worth reading, to someone other than the video maker, did not seem to exist.)

With these strikes running against the type of community we remember from 15 or 20 years ago, I think it's safe to say that more than WePlayCiv and Apolyton are dead. That style of community isn't coming back, either.


- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
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(July 16th, 2017, 08:05)Sirian Wrote: Indie gaming had a bit of a heyday a couple of years ago, but now I can't seem to find many games that interest me on Steam or in any other marketplace.

Did you ever get into FTL?  That's still worth it if you haven't, as probably the leading example of that indie heyday.  Its reputation is well deserved, with the tightest balance and highest skill ceiling we've ever seen for a solo strategy game.  (I'm still tempted to boot up FTL for just-one-game between my Civ 5 runs, except I know it'd turn into a months-long project of trying all the ships all over again...)

The indie heyday splintered more so than it ended.  There's still a lot of great games being produced... but so incredibly many that none stand out and reach the critical mass to sustain a community.  And they all burn out their hype cycles too early by being on Kickstarter.

Reddit seems to be the best place to find player communities for most of these games. FTL's best community is there, also the likes of Undertale, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, Kerbal Space Program.  Developers often participate but don't run and censor things. Much of the material for these is in video format too, but there are some written guides and reports.
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I think Sirian's spot-on there, the shift towards corporate-run communities has been massive. The corps are not necessarily killing feedback through censorship, but they run communities very differently than true fan sites, and the community leaders are hired employees and not volunteer fans, which is also a big difference. The gaming industry has grown dramatically as a business sector. Somewhere along the way, communities also turned into an aspect of the business.

Then there are the big changes in fan communities. YouTube dominates, as does Reddit - T-Hawk is right in saying many games have their best communities there. But YouTube isn't a discussion medium. Aside from my preference for text over video (which I understand has become a minority view), there's the simple fact that YouTube is a content delivery platform, from the video maker to their audience.

Reddit is where things get interesting because it's kind of an anti-forum. Traditional forums are built for long, slow discussions, as anyone who's used them knows. And I'm sure all of us remember Civ3/Civ4 threads that would carry on for weeks and even longer. Reddit is built to provide very much the opposite. It prioritizes new content and then things drop off, it doesn't support deep threads very well, it has the most rudimentary search capabilities. So Reddit is great for commenting on the news, and for discussions that take place across hours, but absolutely not for forum-style discussions.
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I think some of the dominance of video over text is the discover-ability of video. If I want a video of even an obscure game, I can just punch that into YouTube and it'll happily drop plenty of video on me, though the SNR of that video is going to be terrible. On the other hand, trying to find a good write-up on google is pretty hopeless, since the front page will consist of, in order: low quality threads from the steam forum, some reddit discussions that don't really dig into anything, and then gobs of review articles, typically copy-pastes of each other and posted across 10 - 20 different websites that are just ad-platforms.

Some of this might be my changing circumstances as well (single -> married near family, grad-school -> full-time work). In the last couple years there have been great games that I enjoyed (XCOM1 & 2, Offworld Trading Company, Big Pharma, Total War: Warhammer), that just never got the hours that CIV IV did, or the level of analysis. Are the games just less deep? I solved out Big Pharma, and XCOM1 & 2, after you have a sense of the expected pace only require tactic level optimization, there aren't that many branching play-styles to explore. OTC is a bright spot here, I'm still learning more about that all the time watching the community streams. I'd love to read writeups, but the community only seems to be focused on the discord + twitch, two platforms that don't really lend themselves to long-form discussion and analysis. Also, I find when I get home from work and after dinner, I've got about 2 hrs before I go to sleep, and often I just won't play anything except Twilight Struggle (I have a friend I have a constant game up with), even though the time section is big enough for 3 rounds of OTC, or a couple of XCOM 2 missions (or one XCOM 1 mission).
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