AAA devs and publishers are killing the industry and as long as there’s whales to keep buying digital ones and zeros with no real world value it’s only going to get worse
Honestly, I think the consumer is to blame for a lot of AAA games not being featured complete and shady on launch. I hate to say it, but really if you can sell a game that's half done, fill it with micro transactions, and then abandon it a year later, why wouldn't you? Because it ruins the faith of fans? Yeah, but most consumers are 1 good trailer away from forgiving every bad thing a company has done. Diablo 4 is a good example. When that was going through the announcement and marketing phase, Blizzard was coming off of Diablo Immortal, a bunch of sexual assault charges, and they have been making poor decisions in WoW. But then the CGI trailers dropped, and people got hyped. Gameplay trailers more so and end the end people are preordering it. Bethesda and Fallout 76. Bethesda has never released a game that wasn't buggy, and they pretty much never fix them. So, they announce an mmo lite and every Bethesda fan said, "I like the thing they made so I preorder." On the other hand, games that are feature complete and don't have these systems are pretty much throwing money away. Like Armored Core 6 came out recently and it has cosmetic features to paint your mech. It just gave you a true color, color wheel and said go nuts. You look at a game like Destiny and they would charge you some 10-20 dollars for a few colors. AC6 gives you 16.7 million for free. it even gives emblems you can earn in game or make your own. No loot boxes or anything. But if you're an investor and you knew players would pay for that, you might have words with the company. But if we players stopped buying these things and giving into features, we hate on mass then they would stop making them. I mean if for example a game wasn't feature complete at launch and they swear they'll fix it in a year and we all said, "cool, we'll all buy it in a year then." Then I think you would see more feature complete games.
AAA devs and publishers are killing the industry and as long as there’s whales to keep buying digital ones and zeros with no real world value it’s only going to get worse
Honestly, I think the consumer is to blame for a lot of AAA games not being featured complete and shady on launch. I hate to say it, but really if you can sell a game that's half done, fill it with micro transactions, and then abandon it a year later, why wouldn't you? Because it ruins the faith of fans? Yeah, but most consumers are 1 good trailer away from forgiving every bad thing a company has done. Diablo 4 is a good example. When that was going through the announcement and marketing phase, Blizzard was coming off of Diablo Immortal, a bunch of sexual assault charges, and they have been making poor decisions in WoW. But then the CGI trailers dropped, and people got hyped. Gameplay trailers more so and end the end people are preordering it. Bethesda and Fallout 76. Bethesda has never released a game that wasn't buggy, and they pretty much never fix them. So, they announce an mmo lite and every Bethesda fan said, "I like the thing they made so I preorder."
On the other hand, games that are feature complete and don't have these systems are pretty much throwing money away. Like Armored Core 6 came out recently and it has cosmetic features to paint your mech. It just gave you a true color, color wheel and said go nuts. You look at a game like Destiny and they would charge you some 10-20 dollars for a few colors. AC6 gives you 16.7 million for free. it even gives emblems you can earn in game or make your own. No loot boxes or anything. But if you're an investor and you knew players would pay for that, you might have words with the company.
But if we players stopped buying these things and giving into features, we hate on mass then they would stop making them. I mean if for example a game wasn't feature complete at launch and they swear they'll fix it in a year and we all said, "cool, we'll all buy it in a year then." Then I think you would see more feature complete games.