u/FruitTigerAero

I think this was obvious from all the popular theories about episode 9 that started spawning in right after the conclusion of episode 8. Every major theory about what would go down in the episode went something like "dude, all of the abstracted characters from the cellar are gonna come out and start attacking, and it's gonna be super scary, and they're going to learn the truth about C&A and how it's obviously an evil corporation that runs crazy science experiments with people in tubes, and they're going to make a badass escape out of the circus!!"

It's not hard to see why fans of Internet indies have been conditioned to think like this. When Five Nights at Freddys became popular thanks to all of the theories about its universe, it didn't lean into analyzing the psyche and backstory of Micheal or William or the kid victims, nor did it give us a detailed recalling of events like the Bite of 87. It just started adding new parts to the universe, and now we have all sorts of things to chew on like the existence of Agony and Remnant, or Fazbear Entertainment being a more actively involved entity with their finger in every pie, or Faz-Goo and all of the other crazy stuff from the books. We just got more shocking revelations about the mechanics of the FNAF universe, and every new game promises an answer to the One Big Question everyone has on their mind. This sort of attitude carried over to other popular indies online (especially in horror) and is the reason they're so wildly popular and why the Theorist channels make so much bank.

Despite making it somewhat clear that the series was headed in a character-centric direction from the start, TADC was assigned these expectations from the very first episode. Despite it wearing its inspiration from IHNMAIMS from the very beginning - a story where a majority of the horror and drama came from the humans' psychological fears and troubled pasts - TADC was still expected to become a "lore show." It's also very arguable that these sort of expectations were lampooned in Episode 7, where the supposed shocking lore drops about C&A and "Abel" were just a ploy to further Caine's development in drifting apart from the cast and make the audience further question Jax's history and psyche. And once again, despite all of this, a significant chunk of the fanbase expected the finale to answer everyone's theories.

Then the finale comes out, and the Big Lore Reveal is said plainly by Kinger in the first few minutes. We don't learn every detail about C&A, we don't see the cast fighting for their life from spooky abstractions, we don't have the awesome escape sequence where they fight their way to the exit. The rest of the episode is focused on finishing off character arcs for each member of the circus (this is done very plainly by the end, where we see that their real-world counterparts have gotten over the issues that defined the growth and development of their Circus counterparts.) Mainly, it's focused on Jax, who has very obviously been built up as the deuteragonist whose psyche and history remained a mystery until now to Pomni and the viewer. While there's definitely points to be made about whether the Jax focus was excessive or if it was justified considering his story points to the greater themes of the series as a whole, it seems what left people unsatisfied is that we spent more time in the grand finale with the characters than the world and the lore.

Note that all of this isn't to say that lore-centric stories common in indies are bad: I enjoy them a lot! It's just that TADC made it very clear from the beginning that it wanted to focus on characters and their personalities rather than the structure of the Circus itself, and that flew over the heads of lots of viewers who are used to indies focusing on big world expansions and cryptic lore. While I think the finale will overall see warmer reception in the future, I think the attitude of "indie series should focus on lore' could continue to hurt the reception of future indie series.

Back in 2014, an indie game called Meme Run hit the Wii U eShop. Meme Run was nothing more than a standard endless runner game, with its “unique” charm deriving from its unrestrained usage of memes that were popular at the time being plastered over every gameplay element (mostly the troll face, Lenny faces, and that one rainbow frog meme I can’t ever remember the name of.) The explicitly simple gameplay and overwhelming visual theme made it pretty obvious that Meme Run was no more than a low effort joke. That nature was why Meme Run had garnered a significant amount of attention in gaming communities at the time. After all, isn’t it fascinating that such a poor quality game could be sold and marketed alongside Nintendo’s top franchises on the eShop? Meme Run’s short existence before being taken out back for copyright infringement was covered by multiple major game outlets for that reason: the standard at the time required games being sold on major platforms to meet -some- sort of quality control checks.

12 years later and Nintendo has released two successors to the Wii U: the Switch and the Switch 2. Crack open the eShop on either one and after scrolling past entries in franchises like Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon, you’ll be sucked into a vortex of AI generated hentai puzzle games. Unlike Meme Run, these games propagated without any resistance, and their existence is regarded with apathy by the console’s user base.

Considering this has been an issue for years, it seems that we all changed our mindset about these games existence on digital stores almost overnight. Why is that?

Valve went about welcoming this deluge of shovelware in a way not too dissimilar from Nintendo. In the past, new games by fresh-faced devs had to face trial by Steam Greenlight. This great filter allowed Steam’s userbase to vote on whether your game deserved to make it onto the platform and stand alongside the latest AAA releases and indie favorites. Any Meme Run-esque games that did weasel their way into the platform were immediately singled out and made objects of ridicule. Almost a decade ago, however, Valve retired this system for Steam Direct - just hand over a Benjamin and your game has a new home on Steam. While the system was generally accepted at first, the vastly lowered barrier to entry was quickly exploited. It’s not going to be a shock to anyone reading this that Steam probably has it worse than the eShop: Unity asset flips and NSFW versions of Bejeweled now comprise a majority of the platform’s published games. Many of these lovely shovelware games have contained malware, and many more have been designed to explicitly abuse Steam’s features like the Community Market. And like the eShop, everyone is largely apathetic, until a game is terrible or malicious enough to make it into a MoistCritikal video.

Looking back on how Meme Run shook the Internet and the gaming community as a whole can be disorientating. Practically hundreds of Meme Runs are published to Steam and the three major console’s digital shops weekly nowadays. Gamers of the early-mid 2010s had such a hate for low-quality, low-effort games that one of the most prolific gaming YouTubers was a guy who went into over-the-top fits of rage about their existence (albeit his focus was on retro examples.) Shovelware went from both a novelty and a point of pain to something that’s just a part of the gaming ecosystem now.

I find this shift in attitude to be a fascinating and under discussed part of gaming, especially with how it’s getting easier and easier to just “make a game.” I see a lot of people call for heightening quality control, but setting the barrier too high could block out some aspiring devs and their passion projects. Something I’m still thinking about is what it would take for a game to be so abominable in quality it that it enthralls the gaming community in the same way Meme Run did. Regardless, I think it might be a shock to a lot of people newer to the gaming scene that our digital storefronts used to be pretty selective about what could be published.