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..
No, there's no fixing them.
The problem is that the industry is plagued with people who got their starts working in San Francisco and educated, socialized, all within it. The media and corporations linked themselves together to be staunch Leftist evangelists.
This is actually the fundamental cultural relevance of GamerGate. The consumer uprising never ended, and was already starting prior to 2014. Not even for cultural reasons, but because the corporate industry has been a problem for decades. Gaming, as an industry, has a long habit of being a corrupt industry, but people actually did rebel against it.
GamerGate partly started as a result of the corporate media being threatened by YouTubers who were both doing reviews and walkthroughs. Truth is, they really did lose that fight. That same mechanism of decentralization has been stuck in the industry, and instead of trying to purge it, companies are trying to recruit or manipulate it. Same with the political activists.
The thing that no dissident was able to do, was to actually form game companies. Nor was there an external cultural influence (Gaming was divided between Leftists and Libertarians). As such, Leftism permeated both education and IT, and was the next generation of developers are useless, resentful, mutants who are either from other industries and hate games; or hate games as a "capitalist product".
As such, we will have to continue to build anti-parallel systems, and more explicitly, anti-parallel institutions. As we do so, we will build up people and skillsets (the logistics of a civilization) that is anti-parallel to the intuitions we are subjugated by.