ampersandrew

What are you talking about? Indie development studios spring up out of mistreatment at AAA studios all the time. Where do you think Supergiant, Second Dinner, and Frost Giant came from, for instance?

As in most RPGs, having more actions was always beneficial, so I for sure always had companions in Fallout, even though they were AI controlled and often got in the way. At least Wasteland just gives you control of them.

I think you're looking for Wasteland. They shared a lot of DNA already, and they've got different senses of humor, but Wasteland still has a black comedy angle.

It has been a trend that we see fewer AAA games per year, for a very long time. I think that can easily stabilize at a number of AAA games similar to what we saw last year, when we stop designing games that take up infinite time to play. Likewise, a great year for games doesn't mean that so many of them are concentrated in the AAA space. Hollow Knight Silksong, Mina the Hollower, and Penny's Big Breakaway could, potentially, all be some of the best games we've ever played, and not one of them will have come close to a $100M budget. (I don't think this year will top last year, but my point is that it doesn't require massive budgets to do so.)

As said in the last thread, these aren't revelations. This is someone's opinion.

Nah. I remain hopeful that this is a market correction against live service investment. Devs will be hurt in the interim, but think about how something like Redfall happened. The suits said they had to make a live service game at Arkane. Arkane devs had no passion for that. 70% of the studio left, leaving Redfall's development to inexperienced new hires that replaced them, and they essentially set those development funds on fire making that game that no one wanted to spend money on. Sega made Hyenas for $70M, their most expensive project to date, and decided it was better to just not release it than to continue to run infrastructure to enable it. A similar story to Hyenas over at Sony, where they cut their live service portfolio down from 12 games to 6, seeing that the well had run dry. There have been a lot of these bets made, and they've been big bets, with the assumption that they'd see all the success that their predecessors in live service games had, without realizing that there aren't enough customers out there for you to be lucky enough to capture that success from when they're busy playing other games.

So what do all of these devs make instead? Video games that people actually want to play and spend money on, that can be made with budgets they can afford.

The method of delivery for movies can be accomplished more independently too, if the movie studios hadn't formed enormous cartels.

Even without any cynicism, I think the government was more interested in there being tighter competition among cell carriers than they were with the people who will lose their jobs in a merger. With all due respect to those who fall on tough times as a result of that kind of merger, it's a more short term and small scale problem than there being fewer viable competitors in an important sector of the market.

You're right. TCGs with blind draw boosters are also bad. I didn't complain about Pokemon cards back in 2000 because I was a child and didn't comprehend that that was what I was doing. I definitely stopped partaking in Magic: The Gathering as an adult though when I realized it was a neverending gambling treadmill. Today I frequent fighting game locals that are kept afloat by Yu Gi Oh gambling addicts who fill the trash cans with booster wrappers as they go back to the counter over and over again to buy more packs.

Or they've been dying for a different way to play Pokemon than what Nintendo's been selling them for decades.

A character action game is something like God of War, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or Hi-Fi Rush. Combo-based, juggle-based, score chasers, but different than the rhythm-based combat in Batman: Arkham or Spider-Man.

Having seat belts is objectively better than not having seat belts. It doesn't mean that the way transportation is structured around cars in the US, for instance, is safe enough. Having kernel level anti-cheat may result in fewer cheaters or less obvious cheaters, but it doesn't mean it's worth giving that company such deep access to your computer, as the video shows.