Aiming down sights was always a console thing. It's extremely hard to make small aiming adjustments on a joystick, so game devs added a button to move the camera in and reduce sensitivity. CoD popularized it, and every FPS shooter wanted to ride CoD's coattails so it's pretty ubiquitous now. For a game like CS it would homogenize the guns a bit, since there's a clear delineation between guns that can be scoped and those that cannot.
We're talking about Counter Strike here, it's been the same game for 20+ years at this point. Any two subsequent CS games are going to be very, very similar. Most of them didn't even feature an engine upgrade like we're getting now. Plus if you pay attention to the CS2 datamines, it looks like Valve have planning to add way more than just what they've announced so far. There most definitely will be new content.
No I agree. The fact that Final Fantasy used to outsell Zelda and now sells 1/3rd of it should speak volumes about how Square has handled the franchise. Gaming has only gotten bigger since the late 90s.
Wasn't a fan of the gameplay at all. It's in a kind of no man's land where it isn't an RPG but it's also nowhere near as good as DMC or Bayonetta. It's just so damn easy to button mash through everything. There is depth there if you want to explore it but it's a flaw in the game design that you are not actually incentivized to do that.
These are the numbers I found for 5th and 6th gen games:
FFVII: 10.0
FFVIII: 8.6
FFX: 8.5 Ocarina of Time: 7.60
Wind Waker: 6.79
Majora's Mask: 6.82
FFIX: 5.5
FFX-2: 5.4 Oracle of Seasons & Oracle of Ages: 3.99
Minish Cap: 1.76
So maybe "a lot" is an overstatement, but they did generally sell more. You have a point regarding sales-per-console, but also remember PS1 had over 1900 games to N64s 388. That's way more competition for third party FF games to get sales. Many people that buy Sony consoles don't even look twice at JRPGs, whereas most people that buy Nintendo consoles know day one they are going to get the latest Mario and Zelda.
I honestly don't know what a game can do to survive as a live service nowadays. Japanese live services games in particular are just DOA instantly, but even giants like Valve (Artifact) and Blizzard (OW2) are failing at this. Can't charge money upfront because no one would try the game. Can't go F2P with paid cosmetics/characters because people will complain about microtransactions (because these game companies are charities, right?). Can't change the game too much in updates, can't have too few updates. Seems like we are just going to be stuck with the same handful of old live service games for the rest of eternity.