![]() ![]() Those expectations are bound to lead to disappointment, and we’ve seen too often how quickly that disappointment about a game not being everything players hoped for leads to toxicity towards developers and other players. That one should maintain a certain healthy skepticism when following games in early development applies to all genres, but in a niche as starved for quality projects as ours, I see a bit of an additional tendency for people to get overly attached to ultra early prototype footage. What that means for us as an audience is that we should temper our expectations: that we should follow and support these games, but ease up on the hope that any individual upcoming game will be the perfect horse game many people dream of, with realistic animations, complex equine personalities, a huge open world, online multiplayer, genetically accurate breeding, competitions in every discipline, and fifty hours of quests on top. They may well be buggy, unstable, unpolished, badly tutorialized or otherwise janky, because all of those things are just incredibly common in debut games made by inexperienced teams.Įven the ones that have successful crowdfunding behind them are almost certainly underfunded for what they want to achieve and only getting made because the people making them really want to make them. The concerns I have apply to almost all of them: They’re highly ambitious projects, made by first time developers – Rivershine being the notable exception as mentioned – and they often don’t have a very clear scope or focus beyond “horse game”, which will make it harder for the team to find their market in the wider industry. That does not mean that I have complete faith in all the projects on this list, however. On the contrary, I’d actually be very surprised if more than half the games on here are playable in their promised scope within the next three years. I love to watch these projects grow and evolve and I gladly give them exposure on here. Let’s have a look at what’s out there: The Games ![]() To the best of my knowledge, all the games in this list are planned to be pay-to-play PC releases, with some of them having console ambitions later down the road. These projects are made possible by the wider democratization of game development that has taken place over the past decade or so: game making tools that are widely available and well-documented and digital storefronts that allow self-publishing. Instead of having edutainment game veterans at their helms, they are led by passionate young industry newbies who try to make up for what they lack in experience in sheer dedication. They don’t have industry funding but run crowd-backing campaigns on Patreon and Kickstarter. Rather than aiming at the parent-and-child retail audience, these games mostly target teen and adult horse game players through digital downloads. As regular readers will know from my reviews and dev features, these games have been seeing some improvements over the years in their own right, but still one cannot help but wonder… What if instead, there were horse games made by people who really cared? Games made not for kids but for equestrians? A new Generation of Horse GamesĪnd that is where the projects on today’s list come in: six work-in-progress horse games in various stages of development, made by people who really like horses and who want this niche to offer more. These games - examples include My Riding Stables, Horse Club Adventures, the Windstorm games - are usually created with a fixed development budget and release date in mind from the start, and efforts to include player feedback and engage with the target audience are absolutely minimal more often than not. The vast majority of what we call “horse games” belong into one very specific niche: they are traditionally published, retail market oriented adventure or simulation games with a target audience of girls between ages 8 and 12, give or take. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |