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.
Which isn't even entirely an industry pushing down problem. Plenty of people go look at things like Steam Charts and see "this single player game has lost 75% of its players after 2 months LOL DEAD GAME COMPLETE FLOP" and dance around it.
I won't even go back to a game I've finished when huge content drops that I've already paid for (still ain't played Torna from XB2 despite having the season pass) until a replay strikes me however many years later.
I think that is why they become so obsessed with retention. Their DLC model requires players to come back every few months to pay for more content, but if they aren't still playing the game anyway that chance drops a whole lot. So they need to Skinner Box you along until each drop happens, and that's how "Seasons" became a thing.
Those are normies, normies do that because they're normies and don't understand gaming.
If we have reached the point where /v/tards are normies, then I can only imagine how irrelevant and boring the guys playing CoD and NBA 2k24 are.
That's a whole other fascinating market I could do a several page autism thread on.