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.
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.
I hate having my prejudices confirmed like this because what you're telling me is that game studio employees deserve what they're getting and then some lol, they have absolutely no right to be playing the victims if that's their average work day.
I mean I've never worked for a game studio, but I've done the corporate world in a technical job. There's a reason they want people back in the office, because at least they control their time then. There's a long list of jobs I know of that can easily be phoned in 20 hours a week or less if you get to being able to avoid meetings. It was never uncommon for me to work half the day on personal stuff anything from investments to dev projects when I worked from home, and still get everything done I was supposed to at work on time and with a high level of quality (I did still care about doing things right, I preferred to avoid fixing my screw-ups later). If I hadn't left that job, I was in the middle of a little Python/SQL project to automate an easy 5-10 hours a week of work away.
The bar is just so low at mega corps.