I miss when games had a scope and scale that they were actually trying to achieve rather than iteration for iterations sake. Everything that's remotely successful seems to be updated, sequeled, or remastered to death, just to add meaningless improvements in graphics, marginal balancing changes, and depth to mechanics beyond comprehension.
The endless sequelization of games, and media in general, has cheapened a lot of what I used to love. Call of duty black ops gorrillion sure looks nice, but it's a shame that it'll take a petabyte to store so that I can look at dogs asshole wrinkles down to the micrometer.
Realism in graphics is clearly the biggest concern to every single gamer ever, that's why minecraft now and previously tetris were the best selling games of all time. True mechanical innovation, genre creation and re-invention, and performance are for fools. Oh and the games are $70 now, $60 just wasn't enough to pay for all those polygons.
Games as a live service doesn't help either, Warthunder is going to have to start sending Belorussian шпионки-шлюхи to skunkworks' engineers to leak yf-53's stats if they want new content in the game soon. You can't just make one game with a defined time period set from one year to another to explore the interactions of technology at the time: no, you have to be tortured grinding vehicle after vehicle to progress through the ages If you really want that one particular vehicle, why not shell out some cash for premium? Why not just buy a premium? Oh and the higher the tier of premium vehicle the more vehicles it can efficiently research... what about $80 for that premium plane for your grind?
Tarkov is coming up on a decade in beta. To quote wikipedia 'Beta is a feature and asset complete version of the game, where only bugs are being fixed.' This statement is clearly untrue in modern game dev, beta just means 'eh, if it runs like shit and doesn't fucking work don't blame us.' At least the Russian devs could be bullied into giving the people who payed $150 for the game before, the same thing they charge $250 for now - PvE.
And the worst part about all of this - it's just economics. Shipping out a finished product is risky and has a lower potential for earnings. Why put in the development time for a game that might just not sell well? Why not sell horse armor for $2.50? Why not charge $430 for a coomer skin? Every bit of this complaint would have been called a slippery slope fallacy a decade ago, but here we are falling off a cliff. Most of what I said could be refuted by pointing out that indie games avoid all of these issues, but that's only true until they're successful - the moment anyone on an indie development team develops some business sense they're going to update and try to charge you in some way, sequelize, or remaster. Remember PUBG, Insurgency, or KSP when they were released? Remember them a year after release? Updated, sequelized, remastered.
