The hero shooter craze is one of the most clear indicators on how disconnected the games industry is from their audience, this is just a more comical example since Sony is notoriously incompetent when trying to follow a bandwagon. The industry has been funnelling billions (unsuccesfully) chasing the Overwatch fever since 2016, making basically the same game over and over again, when it has been proven without a shadow of a doubt that there isn't a viable market for it. Hell, even Blizzard couldn't keep the momentum going and Overwatch 2 killed most of the interest on the game and the genre as a whole. Even bigger hits, like Fornite and its clones, can't even compete with the sheer market saturation of the unpopular hero shooter. At some point the industry understood the lesson that you can't realistically compete with Fornite, and that games-as-a-service are apex predators than can only survive at the very top of the ecosystem. Yet this lesson was routinely ignored in the chase of the fabled El Dorado that are hero shooters.
Even if we ignore the atrocious DEI designs that are endemic in the genre, or the "how do yo do fellow kids"-energy that each single one exudes, the numbers don't lie: there's not enough space for more that a couple of those unfun copycats which, to makes things even worse, are designed to require a sizeable playerbase to even function.
In any other industry, outside of maybe Hollywood, such a string of consecutive failures one after the other would be more than enough for the people who are funding this shit to label it as money poison and a waste of time and talent, or at least try to make superficial changes in things like settings or characters to see if the market reacts more favourably. But not in the gaming industry, where seemingly it's the kids who are wrong and the dead horse beating will continue until morale improves. I can understand, even if I don't like it, the logic behind the myopic insistence on DEI bullshit and other assorted current-year trends, but for the life of me I can't fucking understand how one of the biggest markets on the world insists so vehemently on chasing a dragon that everybody else can see isn't even there.
As a little visual aid to my schizo rant, have this nice collage that shows what burning almost 2 billion dollars looks like in this industry and the delicious irony of the fact that those games so focused on "diversity" all look and play the fuckin same.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
-Joaquin Phoenix
