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..
MegaCorps themselves also suffer from the "gray goo" problem in that working for one is the same as working for another. So that being the case, why not just chase the money?
But if the games companies offered something interesting/different in exchange for working for them, then people might be willing to take the pay cut. Obvious one would be "we don't have an HR department; we just have Kelly who manages the benefits". Or barring that, put the head of HR extremely low on the org chart so the damage they can cause is minimized.