Not to derail, but I have always hated the idea that somehow Hello games redeemed themselves after "fixing" No Man's Sky after years of patches and DLC. Sean Murray lied to people's faces, faked footage, when on national television, and made up shit. This wasn't a case of a developer having to make some hard choices and scale back their ambitions and cut a ton of stuff in a desperate last attempt to get something published, these devs were caught lying about major features from some of the earliest presentations
Imagine Audi sells you a car and talks about how great it and how many gizmos it has. You buy the car and are shocked to find that they have only given you the chassis, but don't worry! Audi engineers will come round every fortnight to add more parts so that in a year or two, you have a car similar to the one you wanted. Imagine everyone on the internet then starts praising Audi because "at least they didn't leave you with the chassis and run off with your money".
The games industry is one the most fucked, immoral, and anti-consumer industries and the only reason it got this way is because "gamers" are retards that will consume any grey mediocre slop as long as there is a big enough hype train and praise companies as heroes because they at least used some spit before fucking them
Rant over.
I think there are problems on both ends, Companies keep promising the moon and the heavens with nothing to show for it except lies and half truths to generate hype but that because fans keep expecting the moon and the heavens and too munch money and too many stockholders and jobs are on the line for each single project.
Games truly plateauded around during ps3 era because we reached a major roadblock and that is, that tech allows for all kinds of amazing mindblowing possibilites but you still need the artists, the animators, the engineer, time and money to take advantage of them. The technology already exceeded what the people making the game can achieve with it, at least when it comes to this type of massive projects whose selling point is "more of everything each time" , theres only so much time, money and talent that can be exhausted on each project.
AAA production got so bloated expensive that is simply not sustainable to keep the same way of thinking "more content, more hours, more shaders and graphix, more animations, more features," yeah, cool bro, but you eventually are 5 years in production with nothing but a broken mess on your hands, way over budget, cutting corners all over, every problem is a domino effect that ruins months of work so you start going back on the promises and your small and precious pool of limited talent leaking out, but theres no looking back, sunk cost and all, you still need to put the game out there though and it needs to sell
at least 30 million fucking copies to make back the money and make a profit otherwise you end up bankrupted like all those studios that have gone bust the last 15 years after bumbling just one project.
Rather than seeing progress as a straight line where everytime you do the same but bigger and with more graphix blast processing, progress needs to start moving horizontal and just try new shit but that is too risky and expensive. Studios need to start investing in smaller projects where they can really push the artistry and craft to the maximum, there they could really exploit the tech, try new genres, new gameplay modes, amazing art styles but if they deliver a game that is 10 hour long, is not an infinite sandbox with 10000+ hours of sidequests, crafting and customizations current year normie gamers will scream that they have been ripped off because the game will still cost 60$ and it will still probably be too cheap considering production and marketing costs.
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