There are also orders of magnitude of difference in their staff levels and budgets. Both sides of the equation are relative. I don't know of any techniques for creating good content quickly and inexpensively that only work for small indies and not for large AAA studios.

It's a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.

Not that it's Steam's fault, but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.

Yes, it's a lot of work to make a game, but the only way to extend the play time of a story-focused single-player game without having to do even more work, is to water it down with low-effort filler content that reuses the expensive assets.

I don't know that it's usually naked greed for indies, as much as it's an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.

But yes, I'd be behind delayed special editions. More than once I've found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug "Nope! I guess you should've backed it / bought it at launch, huh?"-style response.

I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you're doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.

I think it's better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.

If you buy DRM-free, then you own the games you downloaded. But if your downloaded game has to phone home to ask if it's OK to run or install, you don't own jack. You're renting.

Choro-Q High Grade 2 (a.k.a. Road Trip or Road Trip Adventure) for the PS2.

Just one more in a very long line of low-budget tie-in video games for a popular line of toy vehicles for children. Most western reviewers try to play it for the racing (which I admit is buggy and middling at best) and dismiss it as trash.

But it's not about the racing. The racing is incidental; just a bit of action to break up the rest of the game and give you an overall goal to aim for. The real game is exploring a huge open world, meeting hundreds of NPCs, getting involved in their stories, solving mysteries, and digging up every last collectible in the game.

I bought a physical copy for PC cheap on sale, and never played it (my PC at the time wouldn't run it for some reason IDR).

Now I live in Japan and it's not available for sale here, on GOG or Steam, so I hope I can get that disc to work under Linux! I see there's an official patch that removes the DRM, but there's one for North America, and another for Europe, and I bought the game in Australia, so I it's a coin flip which one I've got. Hopefully once I install it there'll be some clues.

A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.

If you play the game normally, you'll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.

If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you'll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game's universe, including linking it more directly to the developer's previous game, Ico.

For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it's hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.