doeinthewoods

This complaint feels like 2009 again. It was entertaining to me the period of time of younger people complaining about millennial grey/beige. A complete rejection of millennial minimalism to make way for popping colors and crowded tables of purchased knick knacks. Now it's back to minimalism, spending won't make you happy. Whatever the latest cope trend is

Sparking Zero had huge buzz around it. It was hyped up as the successor to Budokai Tenkaichi. It was pretty popular on social media. It had meme-y meta moments like using Yajirobe online for a while. Huge playable roster really added to the hype. Dragonball is incredibly popular. Dragonball may actually be more popular today than the early 2000s. It's had a huge resurgence since the series canon resumed with the battle of the gods movie

Parents I know are very active users of parental controls from what I've seen

It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn't seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market

Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren't front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms

Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it's Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can't just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it's not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game

Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it's highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That's how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.

Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I'm not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It's even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/

Always remember

Garp can be heroic but can't make up for how old he his while all this evil is happening while seemingly being a top combatant for decades. His son is out there successfully liberating nations and Garp is eating crackers and talking about training the future of the navy. He could have done more good with his son I bet and if Oda tries to shoe in some justification in how Garp had to stay in the Navy to help his son succeed, I'm rolling my eyes

I'm certain Valve has something cooking to make all these third party emulators redundant. These are already pretty consistent with playing 2D games and older 3D games (not even that old). It's a potential market of users way bigger than a Steam Deck will ever be

Rocks pirates favorite in the series so far. Rocks, Whitebeard, Big Mom, Shiki, ... golden. Garp and Roger stocks further in the gutters with every reveal