Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?

Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation’s system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.

This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).

The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.

These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.

If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.

Thats why I love the ps1 and og consoles in general. For one. Yes, they had to work their asses off. For two, THE GAMES WERE (usually) FINISHED BY THE TIME YOU PLAYED IT.

The model of make game-test game-release game-DONE was tried and true, and something rarely experienced today.

There are amazing games today of course. But still, we have definitely shifted and I dont prefer it for the most part.

Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.

But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.

I don’t think the industry has the willpower to spend less money. They’re always going to chase the highest graphical quality.

I think Digital Extremes, at least currently, is still very aware of what made them successful.

John Bain for example spoke out about the games potential very early, earning them a big influx of players, and they’ve previously stated that Warframe wouldn’t have been a thing if not for him. I guess it can be particularly contrasted with the fact that Warframe was kind of a Hail Mary project for the studio. They’d pitched it around for a while but no publisher responded positively. When they were running out of money they just said “fuck it” and went to work on it, publisher be damned.

I’ve been playing on and off for years now, since around the release of The Second Dream. It makes me really happy to see that they’re doing well. I hope they’ll continue to do well, and do well by the community.

I don’t know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you’re not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.

Sometimes you get both. And then it’s really special (especially 8 years later when you can turn the settings up), see RDR2.

Can’t think of a game that really needed more than like 10GB of RAM. It’s all VRAM for textures and even then 8GB is enough

How does Paradox DLC work at all? The EU4 bundle with all the DLCs is on a 50% discount right now and still costs $142 CAD. Crusader Kings 2 is also over a hundred bucks at half off for all DLCs. And these are their old games that they already have sequels for. I’d literally play these games all day every day if I could but the price is prohibitively expensive and prevents me from doing so.

and rest of the budget on ads

That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!

Nightreign pretty damn good too

There’s even more than one Power over Ethernet 2s, and both of them are good games, often played by similar groups of people.

(Pillar of Eternity 2 and Path of Exile 2)

Heh, that’s correct.

This meme video about sums it up:

The answer is “you play at release and buy them over time, like a crab in slowly boiling water,” though the absolutely incredible rate they introduce bugs into the games kinda knocks you out of the habit.

It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.

Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.

All they care about is the next forknight.

They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine

Problem is that they can’t micromanage that into existence, ConcernedApe more or less created a money printing machine with Stardew Valley all by himself, at least at first. It would be so much cheaper for studios to find like 15 inspired independent devs/designers that need money to make their dream a reality, give them just a lil equity and room/time to cook and they might actually get something amazing. But ain’t no way execs and shareholders would let that happen, they’d yank the plug after year one of a three year contract.