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.
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.