I sometimes play GTA 5 (because I have over 100 million in that game, I have I don't give a fuck money) and they've released a new update. Nothing major just a few additions and changes.
Since the update however, there's been two bugs, one that could delete ANY personal vehicles and the current one that randomly removes insurance so if your vehicle is destroyed you lose it for good.
Between Rockstar with this, Activision not knowing when to just shut the fuck up and Fable looking like their character artists use downs syndrome patients as their models it seems all the talent has gone out of the western video game market, at least in a major studio sense.
So which ones do you think are the biggest fuck ups that you're surprised hasn't burned down their own studio by now?
I don't know if that's incompetent or laziness as they know the modders will fix it
It's like having a slouch older brother who has a responsible younger brother that will clean up his mess. Actually the one thing that really ticks me off is how they made it that mods disable the trophy system as your games pretty much REQUIRE mods to be good!
Edit: that's probably one of the reasons why Fallout 76 had such a bad release, it was a live game so they couldn't fall back on mods and their staff had to keep it running daily.
It was also their first attempt at giving a game on that engine multiplayer support. Never underestimate the challenges in adding netcode to a long established singleplayer game.
I know a fair bit on this topic as well, and you're "slightly" oversimplifying the technical hurdles for the alternative solutions you're suggesting. IE, porting to another engine. Assets only account for a tiny fraction of how much work that involves. There is a fuckton of framework and functionality that you'd have to redo on another engine, especially given just how the Creative engine was designed to handle cells (my memory fails me on more specific details than that, and I haven't exactly slept well).
Netcode-wise, the rule of thumb, as I learned years ago, is that if you're going to make a multiplayer game, implement the netcode from the get-go to save yourself massive trouble and headaches later on. The game they were basing this on had gone on for over a decade without so much as a even stepping foot into multiplayer support, so obviously it was going to be a trainwreck, especially when it's rushed.
I WILL agree though that they fucked up. The project was doomed to failure based on their intended objectives. They wanted to make it a quick easy to do multiplayer project with minimal development time, and keep it as close to Fallout 4 as possible. They released it early, before they even had proper PVE content available, and then ended up stuck with a half-complete game with no long-term vision for what the game was supposed to be, resorting to pathetic microtransactions to justify its continued existence.
I'd say it's probably a little of both.