Spolier: Do not put 'listening to leftists' as your answer, too easy.
With the paracite hangers on of game 'journalists' the first to go, the amount of bleakness from Ubisoft, EA trying to sell itself harder than a crackwhore, we are approaching a point where we may end up with only 3-5 major ones left and a few focused on one title that's been around for decades (eve online, your DOTA games etc).
Doesn't really affect us as I think I'm safe in saying we all have backlogs that can outlast us being on Earth! So why not make this a fun opportunity to go 'you know, if you did this , you wouldn't be begging for money'. Choose whichever companies you want on what you think was a missed opportunity:
EA: Not using their IPs together enough. Seriously how hard would it have been to make a Battlefield game set in the Command and Conquer Red Alert or Tiberium franchise or even do a sports game but in the backdrop of Mass effect. They seemed to be all about processing IPs than using them effectively.
Bethesda: not using an Id engine for Fallout 4. When I played Rage, the story was lackluster but the combat and gameplay was smooth, fun with fantastic visuals. Unless there was a hidden licensing reason, why not use THAT for Fallout 4, that seemed like the perfect engine .
Nintendo: making it too difficult to buy and play older titles so creating a piracy market.
Microsoft: not letting gamers be the one to design their military AR project as they could've probably told you the dumb parts quickly.
Sony: Not embracing Japanese game devs, not leveraging their monopoly on anime with PS+ by doing, for example, free first 3 episodes of a series on Crunchyroll if you have PS+. Also on Crunchyroll, just put an adults only section for uncensored anime, have it behind a paywall of some small fee and a SECOND password and you'll probably get a lot more subscribers.
There's more I could mention like Ubisoft, Rockstar, CD projekt etc but gone on too long and let this be a collective 'I would've done this' thread.
Gonna disagree heavily on this one. In fact, if they had made that change it would just be playing into what I see as the real problem: Bethesda decided to stop making interesting (if janky) RPGs and instead make mediocre action games with increasingly stripped down RPG components. Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim does add a couple neat things to each step, but to get that the world, character progression systems, item systems, etc. get gutted on each progression. Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 to Fallout 76 does the exact same thing. Heck, even the fact that you're saying "FO4 should have been a better shooter game" points out the problem that Bethesda's games are ARPGs heavy on the A and super light on the RPG scale. And that's why I'm basically ignoring Starfield until a good 6 months or more after it is out because I'm willing to bet it will follow Skyrim and FO4 into "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" territory.
It was less on the shooting part more on when I played Rage I was thinking at the time 'imagine if this engine was used for Fallout NV, you'd have less of an issue with how janky the game runs and plays plus the story and dialogue of that series would make it legendary'
As when Fallout 76 came out it was crystal clear that they need a new engine for their rpgs as it's getting ridiculous how buggy and patchwork it is now.