Do you guys remember when the majority of the challenge with a fancy new game was finishing it? It's one of the things I find quite striking about this cancerous 'modern game design'. It's almost like with advertising online where the goal isn't to engage you with something genuinely interesting it's to practically force you to at any cost to keep you clicked onto something or watch something.
So as long as big studios see numbers go up and their player count being maintained, they're happy. Doesn't matter to them if they get 100,000 negative reviews on steam they'll just chug along going "Well those people might all be complaining but we've got 300,000 players durrr". Which is another example of how people who don't fucking play video games have taken over this industry.
The first descendent and once human seem to be classic examples of this mentality and explains to me at least a bit of why the studios refuse to give a shit. No peasant, how dare you demand good gameplay in a game, you're supposed to become a mentally ill skin addict and grind for hours to keep our numbers up or pay us money if you can't be bothered doing that.
Oh and of course I can't forget the cancer that is skill based matchmaking.
I'd add one of the biggest issues with a lot of these game makers is they don't play games EVEN theirs as there's simple QoL features A LOT of these games don't have.
Instead they rely on 'daily log in rewards, new challenges each week/day' things that are good for new players starting out but can easily burnout those who are now experienced especially veterans.
If you want to see the games where they have some good QoL, look up the ones where a designer is treated like a rockstar despite not acting like it even being very introverted. Gamers will stay with an MMO game so long as they know ONE designer who plays and gives a shit is in a position to, even slowly, improve the game.
I have a hard time doing game dev myself understanding how they manage to release projects without having played the entire project once and then I realise their daily workflow is almost certainly checking the debugger for any errors that prevent the project from running and then calling it a day. Then I remember these are people who likely don't give two shits about their job and are just like games journalists where they hate the people they're trying to sell to and generally hate the medium.
If I had to guess, it's also very much a big bunch of divided work at the mega-studios. They never really touch the whole project. What if your job was only the weapons? You'd probably spend all the game play time in a testing room shooting guns and swinging swords that the artist handed to you to implement. Then you spend the other half of the time you actually work sitting in boring meetings.
I can understand the argument for specialisation but at the end of the day every employee in the company down to the janitor and security guard should be at least somewhat aware of the product they're trying to sell. What this indicates is they write their code or do their 3D modelling work and then they fuck off for the day.
Mandatory gaming sessions should be a thing in games companies and they should especially be made to play test the games along with QA instead of outsourcing that crap to a bunch of third worlders thinking they'll do their job properly. As we've seen with CD Projekt Red, outsourcing QA especially and trusting that is a recipe for disaster as it turns out. I think this problem all stems from the fact that these devs obviously hate their jobs if they're not willing to put the time into making sure anything works.
The joke is I'm doing testing myself now in preparation for a release, it takes five fucking seconds to launch a game these days with modern PCs and just do a little play session, these big studios are full of shit. I mean I 'could' simply post up the project now if it's error free and work off peoples' angry complaints, but that would make me no better than the douchebags I'm trying to compete with.
Oh and another one that gets to me is Hollywood and the general film/tv industry too with their workflow. Game of thrones was shockingly bad with how they were telling people they tested on 8k television screens and ridiculous 5.1 whatever surround sound that most people don't have.
That is just the world of large corporations. I worked for one a long time, totally unrelated to any entertainment media. The reward for excellence and the reward for mediocrity is nearly exactly the same. Once you figure this out, it's very difficult to have any motivation to do any more than floating slightly above mediocre. So, some leave and some stay around and be mediocre.
The difference with your game is you're invested in it's success. If it's a good game and does really well you benefit greatly. If it's shit and does poorly, you benefit very little. This doesn't apply much to corporate employees, who might get a small bonus on the success of a game.
What's obnoxious too is that under modern engines, it's easier than ever for developers to dive right in and test things they're working on, which is not only great for making sure stuff works, but can be a fun and easy way to play around with new gameplay features and see how they're holding up.
I suppose it's possible that larger studios make it a pain in the ass to take advantage of such features. Maybe due to overzealous management and the soul-killing effects of working in some of these corporate environments.