I'm not saying story is a bad thing. It's not, but it seems like a lot of devs focus so heavily on coming up with an engaging story and good visuals that they forget to actually make the game fun to play.
I think about some of the games I've played over the years, and a lot of my favorites either had fairly limited or even downright absurd plots that basically boil down to an excuse to make the gameplay loop happen.
Just a random musing.
When wow came out the devs working on the game wanted to got home to play wow. Today you have diablo 4 devs that have no idea how to play the game while someone thought a lets play video is a good idea because she was a fat lesbian.
You can't make a fun game if the ones that are making it don't have passion and have no idea what makes a game fun.
You only have templates and checkboxes. Make good graphics, make sure is inclusive, long cinematics, add an Ubisoft tower, lockpicking minigame, card minigame, fast travel, block or/and dodge mechanics, crafting etc.
Want to know what is worse? Before, in the 90s and early 2000s, we had innocence, optimism and passion. There is no optimism or innocence anymore, everyone is terminally online, everyone is deep in to politics. You can't make fun games anymore, even if I was to lead a game I'm way to blackpilled to make a fun one.
Shigeru Miyamoto liked to explore the countryside and nearby caves as a child.
Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokemon, loved to collect bugs.
What hobbies or experiences do nu-devs have that isn't just school and consume slop?
Their hobbies include:
Grooming kids
Dilate and seethe
I agree with your other points, but this part is simply wrong. 2024 has had some great releases this year: Unicorn Overlord, Balatro, Black Myth Wukong, Rise of the Ronin for starters. Palworld and Helldivers 2 dominated the first quarter of this year, and despite the current day complaining, gamers certainly got their $40's worth of fun on release.
Asians are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
They always had.
Bakuro got an American release.
this is the enshitification of process and templating. corporate world does this now with "product managers", people with rarely any good ideas of their own, just following a risk mitigation formula. these people will be replaced by AI.
Here's hoping -Guy who uses AI to speed creative process up
What a product manager does can easily be replaced by AI but they are also there to put pressure on devs. AI can't do that.
the boss of any dev would have that responsibility though.
the role of the product manager is to figure out what to build and when. my point is that the people who are there because they have that spark are coming up with great stuff. then there are people there because they couldn't code, but wanted to be away from sales/recruiting/etc.
at my last company, we hired 5 PMs each with 5+ years experience, and after a year, only 1 was anywhere near ideation to the dev leads. i was ready to fire them but other partners wanted to keep them simply because they thought it reduced reliance on key people.