Ludocene: Game Discovery

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ludocene/ludocene-game-discovery-from-people-you-trust/description

This popped up in my feed and I wanted to talk about it, because the more I think about it, the more it rubs me the wrong way. Discoverability is a big problem for indies (and people who play indies), but I am extremely skeptical that this approach will help. Note that the Kickstarter never actually mentions indies as a focus.

First, forget the “experts,” we know they’re useless. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. The real issue to me hinges on the fact that they are hand-curating their own database of games. They currently have 3000 games (which took them five years to collect; MobyGames has 300,000), claim to add two more per day, and - this is key - this number includes all the way up to AAA games, as the video shows huge releases like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Elden Ring, plus indie darlings like Balatro and Don’t Starve that don’t need any more exposure.

On the one hand, I get why they are including games like these. They need well-known games to reliably seed their algorithm (because it’s still just an algorithm) before they can recommend things that you haven’t heard of. But like I said, everything in the database is manually selected and inserted by the Ludocene team. If they’re including big names like these, they will naturally be trying to cover as many as possible, which in turn means that those will be the priority to sift through, not random niche indies (actual niche, not gaming press niche). It would be pretty strange if they included Elden Ring but not Resident Evil, for example. You can also count on recency bias even among major releases. It might recommend you Baldur’s Gate III, but I doubt it will recommend Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, even though it’s available on Steam.

All of this means that discoverability is a) limited to games that Ludocene knows about and deems worthy of inclusion, and b) is already going to be heavily slanted towards the big names that you already know about.

In other words, they’re just another general curator. Do we really need that?

On the other hand, let’s say hypothetically that they pulled their data from e.g. MobyGames (I don’t know how feasible it is to build a recommendation engine from that data, but let’s just go with it for a moment). It’s ultimately still just a “more like this” algorithm. Steam and Itch already have that, so what makes this one any better? I talked about Debug magazine in another thread; they cover hundreds of indies every year without any AAA dross, and yet they still rarely show me anything I’m interested in. That’s how vast gaming is now. General-purpose curation is just doomed to be shallow, I think, because there’s just too much ground to cover.

It’s implied but not directly stated that the Family Gaming Database is their data source. This site offers the following mission statement:

Yeah… I don’t think so.

In the end, though, will I give it a try? Sure, probably, once it is open to the public. If they prove me wrong and show me some cool new games, that would be a good thing. I’m not going to throw any money at them right now, though.

I was thinking about this again and trying to figure out who the target audience is. It’s probably not for me, because I doubt their ultra-curated list of 3000 games is going to scour the undiscovered depths of indie dungeon crawlers, but it must be for someone, or it wouldn’t have been funded.

I’m tempted to say that very casual players might enjoy this - folks who are just not really in the loop, can fit their entire set of favorites in a hand of cards, would benefit from being told about Elden Ring, and who might enjoy a simple swipe interface - but I don’t know about that:

  • My parents are casual players with fairly specific taste, and they would absolutely never, ever use something like this. They find new games the same way I do, more or less. But OK, they’re only two data points.
  • The “biggest coup” and supposed killer feature for the app are the expert cards. They make a big deal out of this, but people who don’t follow gaming news closely will not know who these people are, which makes their recommendations meaningless on an individual level. I don’t even know who these people are.
  • I am skeptical that ultra-casual players would download a special app just for game recommendations in the first place, let alone subscribe to it or back it on Kickstarter. If they were that invested, they wouldn’t really be casual anymore, and probably wouldn’t need this anyway.
  • Much is made of the dating app comparison and attendant interface design. People use dating apps (I assume) because actually finding and meeting people in person whom you’d like to date or even just be friends with can be really hard, for a number of reasons. It’s not because the app itself is particularly engaging. Services and mechanisms for addressing this have existed for a long time, from singles nights to lonely hearts / missed connection ads to speed dating to the dating sites that preceded the apps. Finding entertainment is really not in the same problem space as dating. My point is: does this app really make finding games like Balatro easier than just typing in “games like Balatro?”

Like, don’t get me wrong. If people actually do find this useful and it helps them discover new games, I’m all for it. I’m just not seeing how it’s going to do that. So, is it for you?

I only watched the little KS trailer video - but its so odd to me this is coming from someone whos reportedly a former games journalist, in the middle of a time where every games journalism outlet under the sun is either dying or going independent. Something like this feels like such an admission that the field is dead - I can’t help but read this as a big “screw it. the rock paper shotgun experiment failed i guess we’re just doing gamified apps now”

and yea i trust with about 90% certainty that the recommendations on board here are not going to be useful for a developer or really, anyone already spending tons of time online. i guess there may be a market here where, if your first thought of ‘where should i get gaming reccomendations’ is to look for an app to do that for you… then maybe the app is a better judge than you’d ever be lol

ok apparently they will be paying folks to do these? im really unsure how something like this would pan out. it sounds like they figured “there is no use case for an app like this to content creators that already have a finger on the pulse, so we have to incentivize this somehow”. how much money are we talking? at a certain point it would look weird for a podcaster to acknowledge or broadcast that they got paid to… suggest games on an online app. I feel like if I were approached to do this based on my status I wouldn’t accept payment, it would just feel weird