2 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Personally I don't want a bunch of games that overstay their welcome. I don't want every game to be a live service that expects you to play for years to come. I want a good 1-4 weeks of entertainment and then I want to move on with my life.

There's a ton of games like that. :)
There are 20.000 games on Steam alone now. That is, 20.000 games released new every single year.
Yeah, most of them are tiny/obscure projects.

Still, I'd argue that's part of the overall issue, at least from a publisher's/studio's end.
Hard to get noticed.
Even harder to stand out from the rest. For everyone involed, big and small.

This isn't strictly about "quality". See my personal take on "elevator pitches" above (Obsidian rarely do as good as with Grounded here, if you ask me).
It's overall a pretty crowded market, similar to music. Everybody can totally pick their lane / personalized playlist... and outside of production values, indies can be fully competitive with bigger games now too.
Doubly so for games that don't "overstay their welcome", as producing something with a smaller scope is more viable on lower budgets.... Meanwhile, live service could be seen as desperate corporate attempt to bypass this increasingly crowded market by trapping a player forever to a single product... That's basically the true "war" going on: It's one of an increasing number of games vs finite player time.

Edited Saturday at 01:06 AM1 day by Sven_

Not news but an approach I find reasonable: https://www.pentadact.com/2026-01-08-15-years-of-indie-dev-in-4-bits-of-advice/

I hate to say this at a time when it would sure be nice if there were more jobs, but I say it to encourage more stable jobs. Staffing up doesn’t really create jobs if it leads to layoffs or closure, and it ****s with a lot of lives along the way.

I think we only get to a healthier industry for workers when more studios are sustainable, and more jobs are stable. And things get unstable very fast as you grow.

The maths of how team size affects your chance of success is brutal:

• Success is making more money than you spent

• Doubling your team size doubles the amount of money you need to make

• But as the numbers go up, vanishingly fewer games make that much money. So it’s not just half the chance of success, it might be a tenth

Admittedly, a large cost sink is the visual assets and VA, while the crowd who can spend several thousands on their hardware are also more likely to have $70 of disposable income, but there are more people with $20.

That is to say, the lower the system requirements, including the storage, the better for the production costs, the gamers, and the environment.

9 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

I don't really understand the gaming industry, I guess. Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed were extremely good games. They told a good story, they were fun to play, and I finished them. Personally I don't want a bunch of games that overstay their welcome. I don't want every game to be a live service that expects you to play for years to come. I want a good 1-4 weeks of entertainment and then I want to move on with my life.

I haven't played Outer Worlds 2, but I can tell you why I stopped playing Avowed. It's not that I didn't like the game or something - I thought the world looked nice, and I like the Pillars setting. Using sword and pistol was cool too. But something in the game didn't feel "organic" to me. It felt more like I was running through a checklist. Groups of monsters in expected places, with expected behavior, with expected paths for how I solve things. Then the expected loot chests with expected loot. At the end of the day, it felt formulaic to me, like so many other new Obsidian games. Sure it makes them less buggy, but also somewhat more boring to play.

Can't really tell you what they would need to do to make it feel less like that to me, though. Maybe I would have liked it more if it were similar in style to PoE1 and 2, though Deadfire already started with the formulaic approach. It just somehow got worse after that? No idea. Maybe not every quest needs to have the same different 4 approaches to solve them. It's ok if there's stories that can't be solved by everyone or only a certain way - as long as it feels like it makes sense.

I should go back and finish Avowed before my Game Pass expires later this year. I tend to find I lose momentum in dark, gloomy zones and such was the case in the second region of the game.

I do agree with the criticism that it's a bit formulaic though - I understand it's not meant to be a game with grand ambitions and multiple ways to tackle every quest, but precious few quests were resolvable with anything but combat, and stealth merely existed as a means to open combat, rather than to bypass it. I get that it's a lot of effort for a mechanic relatively few players even engage with, but it's the only reason I persisted with Cyberpunk, for example.

I didn't buy Avowed/Outer Worlds 2 because I never played much of Outerworlds 1 so I figured I'd end up doing the same with those. They all kinda looked the same to me. Not games I'd spend a lot of time with. I don't need games to last forever ala live service (UGH) but I do want it to be something I'll like enough to have tons of replay factor. EDIT: and that's my issue with a lot of "modern" gaming - either they're online/live etc or more and more world/quest etc design aren't very conducive to wanting to replay. The masses apparently want to be able to play their one save forever and ever so the new norm is constant "new content."

Kotor2/FO:NV and at least initially, POE1 were mainly the games I liked re: Obsidian. For some reason I did kinda like Dungeon Siege 3 (but once and done, mostly), but I was less jaded back then. ;p

They didn't have the luck or game design appeal or whatever else (I guess) of Larian/maybe some others, so not surprising they switched tactics. And ofc now with MS, more general audience appeal notions. I'm glad it seems to so far be working out for them, even if I'm not overly interested in their titles.

Edited Saturday at 10:29 PM1 day by LadyCrimson

I pretty much agree with him (he's talking about larger big-name publishers/devs). Quarterly report pleasing shareholders models, Covid period breeding more inflated expectations, short sighted decisions. Consumers having gazillions of games and backlogs to choose from vs. spending new/full-price. Consumers being fed up with various things (mass current loss of consumer trust), leading to much more "I'll wait for a year, when it's fixed/done and on sale" which cycles into not getting pleasing quarterly reports for new releases, and so on.

Edited 15 hours ago15 hr by LadyCrimson

4 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Consumers having gazillions of games and backlogs to choose from vs. spending new/full-price. Consumers being fed up with various things (mass current loss of consumer trust), leading to much more "I'll wait for a year, when it's fixed/done and on sale"

But this also means that the game developers and publishers aren't solely to blame for where we are today. The gaming public bears a good proportion of the blame as well. People these days, generally, have ridiculously unrealistic expectations and demands, are very entitled, and are intolerantly opinionated (as in, everything should be what I want and not what someone else wants, or else ...!).

The bigger issue is that somehow the gaming industry is supposed to turn an enormous profit margin. Whichever company has profit as their goal, instead of making a good game, deserves to fail. As far as I am concerned the whole industry can fail, passionate people will still try to make games, thus games will always be made, probably even better games.

22 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

But this also means that the game developers and publishers aren't solely to blame for where we are today. The gaming public bears a good proportion of the blame as well. People these days, generally, have ridiculously unrealistic expectations and demands, are very entitled, and are intolerantly opinionated (as in, everything should be what I want and not what someone else wants, or else ...!).

That's what happens to fragmented markets: There's fewer space for "one size fits all product". Same as in music and the decline of the omnipresent super star that everybody agrees on.
Or as a wise dev once put it: "A game made for everyone is a game made for no one."

Personally, I think that's a good thing. Whilst there's overall TOO many releases now even to keep track of, there is a game and a catalogue to build for pretty much everyone.

Back in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, that plain wasn't the case. As the increasingly fewer monolithic publishers and even physical stores dictated what got funded, made -- and eventually played...
RPG devs stopped making games like Baldur's Gate 'because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them', says New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity director Josh Sawyer | PC Gamer

5 hours ago, kanisatha said:

But this also means that the game developers and publishers aren't solely to blame for where we are today. The gaming public bears a good proportion of the blame as well. People these days, generally, have ridiculously unrealistic expectations and demands, are very entitled, and are intolerantly opinionated (as in, everything should be what I want and not what someone else wants, or else ...!).

That's sorta true of everything retail/entertainment, not just games. I do mostly agree with it, mind - I mean, public likes to save money and get a good deal and hates when prices go up even one mircon ever, vs big companies wanting constant upswing profits (consistent profits not good enough, must go up/expand). And ofc there's the over-spending/inflated budgets of the "big ones."

In terms of entitlement specifically, one of my views is that the dev's (or publisher pressure and so on, I really don't know which) has fed too long into the demands vs. sticking to their guns/visions, hoping for more success if they did (understandable) which also contributes to the vanilla feeling of so many releases. With lightning speed social media pressure, the internet in general, Steam/other/instant updates and especially crowd-funding/early access, many games feel like they're made by public committee, which imo is one reason for mass feeling of entitlement. Like giving in to children's demands for candy or toys 24/7 - of course they're going to throw a tantrum if one suddenly stops/they don't get what they want, as well as apply the entitlement even outside of stuff like early access.

LATE EDIT: the internet is also (probably, maybe) one of the big reasons why, for at least the near or chronically online, more and more can't seem to just shrug and go "oh well, didn't like that thing/didn't work out, on to the next thing" - instead it festers/constant reminders and turns to some kind of moral outrage. I'm sure I've at least semi-fallen into that state, briefly, a few times, myself.

The conflict between PC/game consumer/business is especially bad right now ofc, with a lot of economic factors (hardware, general economy/inflation)

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by LadyCrimson

4 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

The conflict between PC/game consumer/business is especially bad right now ofc, with a lot of economic factors (hardware, general economy/inflation)

Then again, outside of Star Citizen, there are zero "PC showcases" anyway. Which means even the Ryzen 5600/RTX3060/16GB DDR4 combo can technically still play everything. Plus, as consoles are affected too, there are speculations about the longest CrossGen period in existence once the PS6 hits. E.g. PS5 2020 tier hardware still being supposted for years to come. Bad news for tech enthusiasts, I guess. If that comes to pass, they may get a few additional bells and whistles. But games at their very core will be made with then lower end hardware still in mind.

Overall, the most traditional business practice for the past decades may be cooked though. Which can be summed up like this: "Buy Ass Creed XIV! It's even prettier than the last one, promise!"
I mean, it was fun for as long as it yielded net positive returns (and genuine ooohs and aaahs). But else: Good riddance. :-) Tech would naturally still advance. But it won't be the main/major selling point. And who knows, Nvidia may have long anticipated this, hence their "exit" to AI. ;)

Doom, Quake & Wolfenstein: 30 years of id Tech graphics evolution 1993-2025

Edited 56 minutes ago56 min by Sven_