The hombrew scene on the Neo - A gouging greed?

Atro

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I've been thinking aout this.

While not my cup of tea (NG Dev team), I can appreciate the effort they put in their games and out of them all, I really think they did an astounding job with Gunlord.

So, in other words, NG Dev team is quite already a "player" in the Indie, post-Neo Geo era.

Now with the likes of newcommers making games (or trying to get into) for the platform such as Neotris and Galaxy Guns attempts, wouldn't it just be easier to devellop this on other systems as an alternative?

I was thinking maybe on a Jaguar for example.
Why? It's cart based. It has a decently paced 68K to do most of the job a Neo could do. And the carts would be way cheaper to (re)produce than the fatass NG carts.

Rom size would no longer be an issue nowadays, as they could use them as everdrives do.

Not only that, but a Jag packs much more juice than a Neo Geo and could pull some decent FX.

The user base is perhaps lower than the AES one, based on units sold. But a lot of AES are found as Junk and some are beynd serviceable.

I could talk about the DC as an alternative as NG Dev team used to make versions of their games for it too, but it would not be a 68K system from the starting point. One thing it shares with the Jaguar tho, it's that they both have chunky and hideous controllers. :keke:

All that said, any new "player" coming to devellop to the Neo, specially not squeezing the hardware to the boundaries, are just looking to fetch some quick $$$ on a fancy snaplock-to-be-shelved-as-display-box-never-to-be-played-game.

There are always desperate buyers for anything that comes out for this system and this is the main reason imho that some people still come to put out stuff for the Neo.

A new shmup is being develloped for the MD/Genesis and with the lack of capabilities of the system, the work on it is already showing some decent efforts.



This "Kentosama" guy could have gone the "AES route", but preferred to keep faithful to his plan for the Mega Drive.

Do you believe we will have people thinking about other alternatives outside the Neo while making Indie stuff for retro systems? Or will the greed to sell a fat shelf-to-be-added-game will still be the main focus on the Indie scene?

Discuss
 
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Heinz

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It's definitely greed driven for the most part. NGDEV are looking to make money and of course it's also a prestige thing, but they do clearly have artistic ambition and the ability to pull it off.

Shit like Neotris or Galaxy guns is a blatant cash grab. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a dope.
 

theMot

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It’s not greed. Those developers are really smart and this scene is full of cashed up man babies with a fomo complex. If I could program something I would bank off these idiots too.
 

Digmac

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I mean, if a developer can take advantage of the Neo Geo price point by making the same game and getting even more cash out of it, it makes sense why they would. Just like theMot said, the people who go rabid for these releases are enabling lackluster and even downright crap games to be sold for hundreds in artificially limited print runs for the Neo.
 

Burning Fight!!

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The Neo isn't the only platform where people do greed motivated homebrew, believe it or not... it's just the most "cost effective" (greed effective?) platform by a long margin. The NES for example had and still has a shit ton of homebrews with a good sincere to cashgrab ratio, but it still beats Neo-Geo by sheer volume. It seems there's always more than one NES kickstarter active at any point in time, and making shovelware tier games for the sole purpose of having a "numbered cart" auction used to be a staple at NintendoAge (rest in piss) where they seemed to buy everything slapped on a cart for $100 or more, just for their sweet #69 labeled cart collection. This is the most extreme example I can think of:


But yeah people are already "thinking about other alternatives outside the Neo", look around :lolz:. Plenty of great games that are sometimes released for free or for cheapo, hell that Darius port to the Genesis was done by a guy who wasn't even going to release it, it was for his own personal satisfaction, until M2 (?) saw how great it was and decided to compensate him, with Taito's blessing, for a Genesis Mini bonus release. Can't get more sincere than that.

I don't think a game has to be Metal Slug quality on the Neo to be sincere, lower budgeted games aren't always supposed to be cash grabs. But there are some pretty easy hints on the Neo of a blatant ripoff:

1. Doesn't even try to pretend it's something that could be running on a MVS cab by a legit arcade operator in a legit arcade setting: built only with AES mode in mind (or maybe a clueless dev treating it like a normal console like the SNES/Gen/PCE), poor operator softdip settings, not having a timer count down on every possible screen after a coin is deposited, ignoring coin-op oriented design in general (which is laid down so clearly and in plain english on the official Neo-Geo dev manual... it's not that difficult guys).
2. Doesn't try to blend in with licensed Neo-Geo games in terms of sound or graphics: bruteforced music as samples that sound out of place, no FM, backgrounds clearly converted from PC bitmaps, bruteforcing pixel art by throwing tons of prerendered sprite frames on the cart, low effort art direction in general.
3. Overly simplistic game design that would have been borderline unsellable to an internal SNK team as a viable project, much less to arcade operators.

Of course those 3 points are immediately ignored if the homebrew never had the pretense of being more than a ROM file release, and usually a well rounded game with clear effort put in points 1 and 3 can also trump issues in 2. The real issue is that games like Neotris seems to fail in all 3 counts much like that wobbly ship game, AND it also has the bonus of having the ultimate ripoff tell:

4. DOESN'T FUCKING LISTEN TO LEGITIMATE CRITICISM BECAUSE PEOPLE ALREADY BOUGHT OUT ALL CART PREORDERS!!!

Stop buying this shit you morons. I feel like all of this could've been excused as an amateur effort if the devs clearly marketed it as an amateur effort with low budget, but also cheap buy-in prices and/or maybe a $10 max ROM release alongside it (doesn't have to be free, itch.io exists for a reason). That's what a sincere beginner dev would do.

NG:DEV has astronomical prices and comical release schedules (for money they've already taken which makes it even funnier) but in the end, as much as I don't agree with it, their games have effort and polish put into it. Hell Kraut Buster came close to the Metal Slug pedigree, I think. It's easier to defend an expensive Neo release when the game inside the carts are actually good.

half-drunk rant over ! ! !
 

RAZO

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Yea Rui, it's a cash grab for sure. Especially when it's just for the Neo in cart form. At least with Xeno Crisis (Designed with the Genesis in mind) was released on multiple platforms and roms were also available. Alot of people were begging for a Neo Version so they made it happen.

Ngdev is guilty of this for sure but at least they put in the effort and make games worthy of being on the Neo. Ok maybe not Last Hope. That game wasn't all that.
 
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max 330 mega

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This is going to be a loooong stretch for anyone else to recall, but I remember around 10 years ago a guy showing up here wanting to gauge interest at porting a title he had made for another console to the neo. From what I remember of the game play, the characters and enemies were about the size of standard characters in NiTD, and the title seemed to focus around collecting tons of different colored gems. If I remember correctly it had a shit load of levels.
Either way, he definitely got ran out of here for wanting to port a rather polished looking title to the neo. Looking back now after fucking le cortex crouching pony bullshit, neotris, and galaxy turds.... Maybe we should have let that dude do his thing. At least the gem game looked fun.
 

Atro

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This is going to be a loooong stretch for anyone else to recall, but I remember around 10 years ago a guy showing up here wanting to gauge interest at porting a title he had made for another console to the neo. From what I remember of the game play, the characters and enemies were about the size of standard characters in NiTD, and the title seemed to focus around collecting tons of different colored gems. If I remember correctly it had a shit load of levels.
Either way, he definitely got ran out of here for wanting to port a rather polished looking title to the neo. Looking back now after fucking le cortex crouching pony bullshit, neotris, and galaxy turds.... Maybe we should have let that dude do his thing. At least the gem game looked fun.

He came for the games, didn't stayed for the drama :lolz:

So that proves he wasn't NG.com worthy! :keke:
 

pixeljunkie

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I feel like we could distill down any homebrew that looks to charge money for their product as a "cash grab". So, things like NES/Gen homebrews have a wider audience I think people feel like they'll get more recognition for working on those platforms as well (translation: personal and creative satisfaction)...mainly because there is a bigger demographic.

Neo is a scene known for "expensive games"...so, ANYONE delivering a mediocre/shitty homebrew on the system is only doing it for French money. There is no glory to be had, there isn't enough people to care or pat you on your back. You are trying to dump something onto a giant plastic cart and separate people with more money than sense from each other. End of story. NGDev and Neobitz are the only ones I've seen pull off good shit. So, big shoes to fill on Neo Geo...get out of here with your Macromedia Flash games, this isn't NES/Gen.
 

Neo Alec

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If Neotris ends up being free, you won't be able to call that a cash grab.

A lot of NES homebrew can't be run on an Everdrive.
 

Burning Fight!!

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A lot of NES homebrew can't be run on an Everdrive.

Aside from the obvious cases of homebrews without publicly available ROMs or the few that use custom hardware, I don't think your list of unrunnable games is that big. Virtually all homebrew now aims to run on hardware and usually in simple mappers such as CxROM or UNROM.
 

Finch

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my $0.02, NGDev Team's games are absolutely ridiculously priced and of terrible quality. They look like bad indie games, and from the couple I have played, they play like them too. Kraut Busters was an embarrassment. I don't think they would have any success on any platform except for the Neo Geo, because, and I am one of them, there are a lot of deep pocket collectors out there that are already ok with the drastically inflated prices that NeoGeo games go for.

If you made seriously good games, why limit yourself to one weird platform hardly anybody owns? I haven't played Xeno Crisis, but it looks decently fun, and while I would argue it is definitely not taking advantage of the Neo Geo hardware (Obviously, it was made for Genesis) it's been reelased on Genesis for a respectable price, steam for dirt cheap, and as a rom for cheap. Is the extra $200 they cahrge for the MVS version really what it costs to produce a Neo Geo cart? I don't know, but it does seem expensive. That said, It's nothing compared to the stupid prices of NGDev Team's games.

I would love for some really good indie developers to make Neo Geo games, but with how small the user base is, why would they? The time and effort of creating a NeoGeo port of an indie game must be significant. I wonder how happy the Xeno Crisis devs are with their NeoGeo offering, as it's still availble and didn't sell out. If they pumped a lot of money into producing Neo Geo carts, looks like they still have a fair number of them left over. I've been tempted to buy it because it does look like a decent collectors item, but then again, I could just buy the Genesis version for way less.
 

Atro

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I would love for some really good indie developers to make Neo Geo games, but with how small the user base is, why would they?

I don't think the user base for the Neo Geo is that small. It's big enough for the quantities produced. And if we talk about AES + MVS userbase, then it gets a log bigger and respectable.
 

NeoSneth

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my $0.02, NGDev Team's games are absolutely ridiculously priced and of terrible quality. They look like bad indie games, and from the couple I have played, they play like them too. Kraut Busters was an embarrassment. I don't think they would have any success on any platform except for the Neo Geo, because, and I am one of them, there are a lot of deep pocket collectors out there that are already ok with the drastically inflated prices that NeoGeo games go for.

You have ridiculous standards if you think NGdev stuff is trash? NGDev was creating homebrew games and boards on their own over a decade ago. Kraut Busters an embarrassment? Maybe when you compare it to Metal Slug, but it's a fraction of a fraction of the resources.

You might be better off playing modern 2d games instead of homebrew if your expectations are that high.
 

yagamikun

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I don't think the user base for the Neo Geo is that small. It's big enough for the quantities produced. And if we talk about AES + MVS userbase, then it gets a log bigger and respectable.

Agreed. Also, if larger indy devs create a game for the Neo, they can also release on Steam, etc so the plebs can enjoy too! NGDev is just stingy with their games - which doesn't make a ton of sense considering they could put more resources into creating more/higher quality games with more revenue coming in. I think Gunlord is the only one that got a wide release?
 

theMot

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my $0.02, NGDev Team's games are absolutely ridiculously priced and of terrible quality. They look like bad indie games, and from the couple I have played, they play like them too. Kraut Busters was an embarrassment. I don't think they would have any success on any platform except for the Neo Geo, because, and I am one of them, there are a lot of deep pocket collectors out there that are already ok with the drastically inflated prices that NeoGeo games go for.

If you made seriously good games, why limit yourself to one weird platform hardly anybody owns? I haven't played Xeno Crisis, but it looks decently fun, and while I would argue it is definitely not taking advantage of the Neo Geo hardware (Obviously, it was made for Genesis) it's been reelased on Genesis for a respectable price, steam for dirt cheap, and as a rom for cheap. Is the extra $200 they cahrge for the MVS version really what it costs to produce a Neo Geo cart? I don't know, but it does seem expensive. That said, It's nothing compared to the stupid prices of NGDev Team's games.

I would love for some really good indie developers to make Neo Geo games, but with how small the user base is, why would they? The time and effort of creating a NeoGeo port of an indie game must be significant. I wonder how happy the Xeno Crisis devs are with their NeoGeo offering, as it's still availble and didn't sell out. If they pumped a lot of money into producing Neo Geo carts, looks like they still have a fair number of them left over. I've been tempted to buy it because it does look like a decent collectors item, but then again, I could just buy the Genesis version for way less.

Largely agree although I do think some NGDEV games are decent quality, they are nothing spectacular.

Wait....they fit perfectly in the NEO GEO library then!
 

Atro

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Largely agree although I do think some NGDEV games are decent quality, they are nothing spectacular.

Wait....they fit perfectly in the NEO GEO library then!

Neo XYZ isn't a bad game at all. It looks like a blend of Toaplan on a Amiga machine. Shame it lacks graphical depth (layers, parallax, etc).

I actually think this one and Gunlord are actually worth having... at a reasonable price.
 

titchgamer

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Neo XYZ isn't a bad game at all. It looks like a blend of Toaplan on a Amiga machine. Shame it lacks graphical depth (layers, parallax, etc).

I actually think this one and Gunlord are actually worth having... at a reasonable price.

I really like KB and Gunlord.

Last hope is ok but not really my thing.

Never played any of their other titles though.
 
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