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Fundamentally the whole video game industry is over-saturated because AAA studios make absolute garbage, hire no one with talent, and games are easier to produce at an individual level than they've ever been.
It's sad we're not getting a Halo kind of universal experience, but the video game crash needs to come to completion before we can get that again.
It's also even worse since everyone starts chasing after already oversaturated and trying to do the same kind of thing.
Not many of these teams and studios ever bother to reach back into their own gaming experiences from the past to come up with inspiration for new ideas.
And on top of that, a lot of new developers have barely played anything beyond trendy shovelware. I've heard a few anecdotal stories of this sort second hand, and it's so jaw droppingly stupid how completely clueless they are about even basic gameplay design.
I think that's an inherent problem of a small team.
If you make something that works, you want to keep developing the skills that contribute to something that works. If you make successful RPG's, you're not sure it's a good idea to spend your time developing a shooter. It's a bit risky to trade time building onto a formula that works, into time building a new formula that you haven't tested.
I think the real solution would be to basically develop different kinds of games. You'll have to build cheap shovelware to test single parts of a gameplay loop that players enjoy, rather than dumping a couple years into a game that people will not like. Meanwhile, your larger 3-5 year project will just have to keep being worked on.
That approach would merely treat a symptom, not the inherent problems that keep cropping up.
The industry's been flooded with a lot of young wannabes instead of genuine gaming enthusiasts. I can't entirely figure out what's pushing that draw though and how these people keep coming out of the woodworks.
Obviously a lot of it has to do with DEI implementations and recruiting programs (both in university programs and with employers). And some of it's bleed-over from other adjacent fields and industries like Hollywood (CGI, writers, etc) and well... artists in general.
Also, sometimes small studios are encouraged to experiment with things like game development jams, to toy around with new gameplay ideas and concepts. I can't say how common that is of course, but it is a thing I've heard of to try and bring everyone up to speed and keep the creative juices flowing.
Hipster game development, and Hipster Leftists genuinely pushing out genuine talent, and trying to bring their idiot friends in. Then, yes, add on top of the DEI bullshit.
Game Jams are super common, but this is the very thing I'm talking about. Participation in many Game Jams will have a Leftist political filter.
I'd be interested in a story in that vein
I wish I could go into more detail, but I'm a little reluctant to risk outting a friend. Plus I can't remember a lot of the details well enough to provide a complete picture.
One idea I can convey is how they'd spent an insane amount of time on things like minigames and itemization, and still hadn't bothered to implement any kind of character movement, combat, jumping, etc. Actually iirc, they were still undecided about whether or not to even include jumping.
And I say this even while being thoroughly aware that a lot of game development time does tend to be spent on the framework. Structural stuff to make a lot of the meat of a game much easier to produce (IE, things like NPC generation, damage systems, stuff that's going to be ingrained into a lot of the core gameplay, code-wise.)