We have to be able to learn from the garbage and why it was garbage.

Marketing cycles have gotten a lot shorter for these reasons. We used to have 2 year long marketing campaigns that are now often as short as 3 months. You do need people to know about your game, and you need them to be ready to buy it as soon as it comes out before the spotlight can be taken by something else. And in order to have reviews drop at the same time, review outlets need lead time ahead of release. Shadow dropping probably isn’t the best answer for most games.

I wasn’t rushing and info dumps weren’t my only criticism. There were some things that I could chalk up to just personal preference like my distaste for almost every character I encountered in the first 5 hours, but when it did decide to start filling me in on how its world works, I found that to be well below the standards of the praise the game gets for its writing. That’s not to say that it’s easy to do it better, but I can point to a number of other works of fiction that show how it can be done. The inner dialogue could have been a great vehicle to do it more elegantly.

It frequently gave too much info all at once about how its world works, yes.

With the praise this game regularly gets, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the story was inelegantly delivered by info dump.

Fortnite, and it’s not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.

Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.

the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios

This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.

It was a Titanfall extraction shooter, so not the Titanfall you were looking for.

People wrote in to the Giant Bombcast before to say that they were ordered to destroy code and materials at studios that were going out of business, and they instead hid drives with the files in the drop ceiling on their way out.

Genre wide? I wouldn’t say so.

I haven’t heard of addictive design in the business model of avocado toast.

When I build a new computer sometime in the next year or so, I’ll probably end up buying the second-best AMD card available at the time, because that’s where there tends to be the best bang for my buck. But in reality, I’ll be using the full power of that card for only a handful of games over the lifetime of that machine, and I’ll spend most of my time playing a 2D game that came out in 2012. Yeah, you can absolutely get away with cheaper cards and have a great time.

a backdrop of a challenging economic environment, including high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates

I think that’s all you’re going to get.

I doubt it. Maybe Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart can get away with charging more, but a lot of games asking $70 aren’t finding many customers willing to pay that price right now.

Yes, they charged for it years ago on the last gen system. This type of rerelease usually includes the DLC in the package so that they can go back to charging full price for a game that’s no longer in the zeitgeist and not worth as much as a brand new game.

That’s what happened to that cancelled TimeSplitters reboot, too.

By sheer compatibility, we’re well more than halfway there.

No one can predict the future, especially not now, but things are clearly changing. Microsoft is getting messaging out there right now to let you know the ways that they’re rolling with the punches. The next Xbox, and corresponding handhelds, will in all likelihood just be thinly disguised PCs that absolutely let you just install Steam, Epic, etc. on them if you so choose. So in that world, when you can buy an Xbox that also plays PlayStation games that have released on PC, how does Sony compete with that? That’s very up in the air.

And for all the ways that Nintendo has historically handled consoles, they’re under new management now that may be open to doing things differently. The way they’re trying to press their market advantage at the moment, which was already going to result in fewer units sold, could be even further undone at the worst possible time for them by a stupid trade war. How will they choose to respond to that? Because bleeding money by sticking to their old ways isn’t going to be what happens. If they did burn to the ground, the insurance company that owns their intellectual property would dig them out of the ashes and sell them where they can make money again.

That’s going to happen in only a few years, with the next Xbox.