Meh, if people didn’t pay or play those it wouldn’t make business sense to make em. Gaming is weird these days.

Everybody seems to have “the game” they play like OW or Valorant(?) or Fortnite, certain genres like racing and fighting games seem to have split up from mainstream gaming altogether where if you just check out what’s the new Tekken like people assume you’re like a “fighting game person” that goes to tournaments and builds your whole life around it and have since forever, back in my day it was just a game you played cuz the dudes on the cover looked cool and the game was fun.

‘Core’ games are all rip offs of souls or some other crap that I personally hate deeply, or straight up remakes of games where the original is just kinda better, consoles and GPUs cost way too much this gen and there are no real exclusives.

The trends in graphics are concerning too, everything is a TAA or AI upscale smearfest, PS5 can’t run that new Star wars game at more than DVD resolution without the same bullshit 8th gen checkerboarding or some other dynamic resolution technique alongside god damned AI trash. MSAA and SSAA seem dead and with them clarity and good visuals, all that artwork gone to waste, the only pretty games are MSFS and CP2077 with Path Tracing on max, UE5 is built from the ground up around smear and unity is enshittified, devs are cutting costs and custom engines are out, so future looks bleak

The only thing that I love about gaming nowadays is indie and AA games, from Stray (barring the awful graphics) to Sea Power, Descenders to Teardown to Airport Sim, these are games I had the most fun with this year that aren’t 5th-7th gen classics. That football game at TGA from Sifu devs seems fun tho. Tower networking looks cool too, reminds me of cozy weed shop 2 vibes with a WTTG2 style tech element and a game dev tycoon art style

Those are are the exceptions not the normal case. Look at almost anything remedy has done. Great stories but bad sales. Alan Wake 2 was still not profitable in November.

Meanwhile candy crush has generated more than 20 billion in revenue

If the leaks to be trusted, they expected to sell 10 million copies but now they’re talking about they maybe can sell 3 million copies for the lifetime of the game.

I only see that in some communities. Most of the people that hate on veilguard, from what I’ve seen, either haven’t played the game or are clipping parts out of context.

The complaints I’ve seen that aren’t “dur hur, binary qunari” talk about the shaky dialogue in the beginning, where things felt awkward and clunky, like a new team forming. I’ll give credence to the complaints about some depth being lost in the characters versus other games in the series, but I think those people feel that way because Inquisituon was a bloated mess (that I love) and they’ve played 1 and 2 so many times in different ways they’re meshing all the dialogue into one. Playing through veilguard a second time, and watching my partner take different choices than me, made the characters on par with Mass Effect 2 allies. Which, I’d say isn’t an accomplishment so much as a mild chastisement that it hasn’t improved since then.

It was tricky to find actual numbers so correct me if I am wrong, but if you look at the entire lifetime net profit (not revenue) of Elden Ring since it’s launch, it appears that Dragon Ball Bokken made all of Elden Ring’s profit in just 2024 alone.

When you read Bandai’s financial reports they always open with their mobile games, with From Software titles getting an “honorable mention” at the end.

Never said it isn’t, I said story isn’t the thing that made it and Valve popular.

I’m old enough to remember when it released, story wasn’t the focus.

LOL when Halflife came out I worked at World Opponent Network - which Valve acquired a few years later, long after I was gone.