Corporate studios keep throwing more people at big-ass projects anyway, because they want to make the kind of game only corporate studios can make. That rarified competition allows higher return on investment. They can advertise a big game all at once instead of advertising smaller games all the time. But this pushes games to seek the widest possible audience, often making them generic, formulaic, or simply overloaded. They want to have everything every other big game has, and also be the only big game that offers some exclusive thing. Making shit up is the most direct route to exclusivity.
Real-money charges have made this objectively worse. Maximum revenue now comes from getting people addicted to frustrating bullshit forever, so a fraction of them can be squeezed for thousands of dollars. Budgets follow revenue, so the scale of these projects keeps inflating, and they take forever, stagnating the market and swallowing once-promising studios. The ones that don’t simply fail and die still get roped into wasting an entire decade on one game nobody actually enjoys.
It takes one person to make a game.
Corporate studios keep throwing more people at big-ass projects anyway, because they want to make the kind of game only corporate studios can make. That rarified competition allows higher return on investment. They can advertise a big game all at once instead of advertising smaller games all the time. But this pushes games to seek the widest possible audience, often making them generic, formulaic, or simply overloaded. They want to have everything every other big game has, and also be the only big game that offers some exclusive thing. Making shit up is the most direct route to exclusivity.
Real-money charges have made this objectively worse. Maximum revenue now comes from getting people addicted to frustrating bullshit forever, so a fraction of them can be squeezed for thousands of dollars. Budgets follow revenue, so the scale of these projects keeps inflating, and they take forever, stagnating the market and swallowing once-promising studios. The ones that don’t simply fail and die still get roped into wasting an entire decade on one game nobody actually enjoys.