Making this mostly because I saw this trailer which is the third game this year I'd actually WANT to play and this video from Arch on how because the games being made are all grey goo (sorry, 'quadruple A') they are losing not just to indies but DECADE old evergreen games like GTA V.
Between the constant woke stories and characters, the piss poor game mechanics and the insistence to be 'live service games' I can't tell if it's deliberate sabotage or they were so reliant on ESG that they forgot how to make a game FOR PROFIT.
And a lot of these games COULD be fixed with mods but thanks to the war on non-narrative modders, a lot of them remain a pile of shit. It's why Fallout 4 still has an active playerbase and Starfield is largely forgotten.
I think 2024, we will see at least ONE major studio fall and a ton of cope articles saying 'gaming isn't as popular' while these guys might make the next hit allowing us to drive a Toyota into medieval knights..
Once the pozz sets in there is no coming back, it is usually death spiral, layoffs, shutdown, then the parasites find other places to embed themselves into.
Pretty much, you can fix jank, long time Bethesda players can testify to that. But you can't fix terrible writing and design if it's the very root of the game's existence.
Hence why Starfield won't have the kind of modding community Elder Scrolls did.
Ive been an active member in the modding community and done mod vids for almost a decade. Half the mod makers expressed no interest in making mods for the game.