got to watching the henry stickmin franchise again, I realised how true this still holds. think about your favorite game franchises of all time; Mario, Mortal Kombat, Doom, even plot-heavy franchises like metal gear or COD started relatively simple. simple mechanics, simple stories, a simple gameloop.
This lowers the cost of development and in turn the cost to the player to try something new. If players see something they like, they'll be more likely to spend more on the sequel, and in the meantime, word of mouth advertising can get the game going.
rather than spending literal billions trying to get a new ip off the ground, studios can spend significantly less money trying new concepts and introduce more complexity as time goes on, rather than trying to hit the ground running.
I completely agree. Problem comes from a very bloated system. Companies have resources and they need to use those resources, the resources cost money so the end product must be some bloated, soulless, appeal to everyone slop that justifies having hundreds of people working on it.
Before you had a small team with passion. Bethesda went from a 34 Devs for Morrowind to 1.3k devs for Starfield.
Worse part is that once it gets bloated there is no scaling back. If you want to fire people it makes them look bad, investors get scared so management just leech off it and then move away.