The "Good For Its Time" Defense

[DarkGrievous7145]

now, let me tell you

Will both Five Nights at Freddy's and Flappy Bird be "good for its time" 10 years later on?

I sure hope not.

Flappy Bird's core game mechanic certainly isn't even new, it just wasn't very common at the time.
FNAF is a survival/escape game, right? Which also isn't a new concept.

In my opinion, a game that's "good for its time" probably should try to push the limits of what the current technology and development infrastructure supports.

For example, creating even a "basic" 3d game like a really stripped-down Wolfestein on the GBA would probably qualify for that label. By today's standards, creating a handheld edition of Wolfenstein is trivial, and in fact, the handheld and mobile consoles have the kind of hardware to run a game considerably more complex. But, building a 3d rendering engine over the GBA (or even the original gameboy if you're not concerned about colors) would be a challenge in itself. Then to build a game over THAT. Any game or developer who can accomplish this goal, ideally when the gameboy family was much more prominent, is worthy of that game being called "good for its time" , because it pushes the absolute limits of what a gameboy system can actually do.

Not to say someone won't try anyways, but to say Flappy Bird or FNAF is "good for its time" is a pretty fallacious argument. Those games don't exactly break the mold in any way, or challenge their target platforms, etc...
They kinda just...exist, and have spawned these large fan-bases that are either totally addicted to the game and clone/re-skin it a gazillion times (Flappy Bird, and Angry Birds before it) , or inspires TONS of fan art and fan fiction, usually as grim-dark as the original game (FNAF)

That should be everything