Indie games are overrated, it’s still mostly crap. I don’t blame people for waiting for absurd popularity to bring actually good titles to the surface. It’s still the same general problem, I have a the time for maybe 5 games per year, and that has to compete with my existing backlog, favorites and new titles. I’m not risking that time on Indie or AAA titles without some good evidence it’s worth it.
It is to a very high standard. There’s been 14k games released this year alone which would be a .01% miss rate for malware games. If you compare against all games to account for updates that add malware after submission it’s basically 0 at .000001%
Malware creation and detection are billion dollar industries playing an eternal cat and mouse game with each other. These programs don’t just instantly try to steal every file the second they run.
Steam does scan for malware, which is why this is news. It’s notable that a game got through that was malware. You haven’t heard about other stores because it’s not worth the effort in targeting them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most stores use the same vendor for malware scanning.
That’s likely what is preventing any new subscription based mmo. Why bother with a reliable and fair price when lootbox bullshit makes you 10x the money.
Nintendo is heavily reliant on physical media and traditional retailers, they aren’t getting anywhere near 100% of most sales. Brick and mortar takes around a 50% cut, Amazon takes a cut as well. Being on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam isn’t a significant difference in what they would make.
They would still sell a lot of consoles, the super fans are going to buy Nintendo consoles. The people that actually own multiple consoles in the same generation aren’t actually that big of a group, especially compared to non-Nintendo owners that would consider buying a few games if they were available.
There’s a few titles that have relied on gimmicks that would be difficult or impossible to do on other systems. It would be a temporary learning curve to get games able to support multiple platforms, but everyone else has already done it and Nintendo consoles have been the least powerful systems so it should be easier.
How many people buy Nintendo for exclusives isn’t super relevant. The important questions are how many more games would they sell if they were multi-platform, and how many fewer consoles they would sell if their games were available elsewhere. They would very likely sell substantially more games, but also likely see a significant reduction in console sales. This would still likely be a win as the games are far higher margin than the consoles.
Procedural generation is just an earlier form of AI that’s been demystified and commercialized as a positive thing. The current generative tools aren’t at that level of adoption yet.