I’d say a big part of that is that no major player in the video game industry is still interested in investing long-term into building something. Games like FFXIV started out with huge losses, and they kept with it. Any worthwhile MMO is going to have falterings like that at some point in its life, and they’d need investors that can actually stay calm about that. In today’s markets, where they expect development time to be something like 1-2 years for something that must follow every monetizing trend (battle pass, loot boxes, etc) it’s extremely unlikely. It’s probably not consumer expectations making it impossible.
I think Valve does get some say in the amount and timing of sales. It’s something they need to control to arrange the big seasonal sales, and something publishers must agree to, or set an acceptable range, when first signing up.
Sure, you could say that, but Windows is also a general distribution. Much as people say they’d like a “Gaming OS”, it should be usable for everything else too. Bazzite wasn’t necessarily “incapable” of the other things I tried to do with it, but the UI remained a bit obtuse.
I recently published my novel, and at the last minute I had this panic about what was appropriate. There’s one bigoted character who calls gay people “f***ot” multiple times, as well as many characters that drop F-bombs on numerous occasions. There’s a (semi-magical) event similar to a mass shooting, many references to torture, and someone’s hand is chopped off. To be really safe, I put a content warning on the first page just to make some of that clear. Surely, that puts it a level beyond the Young Adult region, right? But…possibly not, given what I tend to hear offhand of some series.
Other cases that have happened relate to failure to upkeep services needed to access content. Companies stop supporting devices, close down servers, etc. Many consumer rights orgs fail to protect in those cases, but they could easily defeat any measure to introduce a conscious, intentional, mandatory monthly fee.
On Linux, running an exe isn’t often as simple as “wine frog-fracker.exe”. It’s usually “proton PREFIX=~/steam-proton-10/ TRICKS=b DXIMPL=1.7.8 blah blah … frog-fracker.exe”
As a result, Linux gamers tend to have launchers even for hobby games they downloaded. Arcade launchers for emulated games are especially common now.
GOG offers them, but they’re inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don’t transfer saves over to my PC.
Tbf, I don’t think Apex Legends was completely new either. It refined and combined a lot of good ideas in other games into a battle royale. I think they’re trying to do that with this type of hero shooter vibe, having taken some ideas from Rainbow 6 Siege and a few other games. Doesn’t seem to have worked as well this time.
Ichiban walks into the Abandoned Replacement Protagonists bar, and sits down despondently alongside Apollo Justice, Raiden, and Nero.
It’s saddest that this is a repeating pattern. We get a great sequel where the beloved protagonist gives a sendoff like “This is the new generation’s story now”. And then the next game is a remake of one of their past games.
I’ve found the same thing with survival games camera controls. The originals were made with odd camera angles in mind for scenic purposes for better or worse. Tank controls mean that your direction doesn’t change when the camera suddenly shifts.
Fatal Frame had a median scheme that was tricky to work out but useful. You move relative to the camera. If the camera changed, but you didn’t change your thumbstick direction past a few degrees, your character would keep moving in a straight line.
I’m still sad this is my one game that doesn’t run well on Proton. With development winding down, I can only hope for some modder to work out what the occasional slowdowns are.
There’s a gacha I have a lot of fun with, thanks to some very detailed animation work and visuals, but I haven’t spent a penny on it and don’t intend to. You really do have to be acutely aware of every effort to get you to spend, and how much those efforts can inflate. Gambling fallacies, sudden power creep, etc.