Forget fake scarcity, the REAL scarcity of pre-acquisition Nintendo games and consoles would skyrocket. Microsoft is only consumer-friendly now because they're still in the phase of acquiring a critical mass of content and users. Once they have both, and everything is on Game Pass, they'll jack up the price as high as they want knowing you'd lose access to all your games if you don't pay.
I was referring to the Armored Core games that From developed starting with the original PlayStation in 1997. But to your point, it speaks to their flexibility in using the same engine to make games of two fairly different genres.
Those are in fact all objective measures of a game's quality. FPS on certain hardware, game length, frequency of crashes, the presence of microstuttering, lists of features, these are all things that can be quantified, and by being quantified they are made objective. You can take this information and compare games against each other to make purchasing decisions, critique them, etc. Those decisions are subjective, yet they are based on objective data.
But I didn't say that we should only use objective measures to evaluate games, nor do I agree that we can only evaluate games subjectively. We need both, gaming media should give us both, but we both need to be able to distinguish between them.
Gaming media has a difficult time differentiating their thoughts on games as a consumer product and games as art. For the former, it's useful to have objective measures. For the latter, subjective.
an ancient game engine that’s probably barely hanging together
I think Bethesda is a company full of people at the terminus of their careers - they don't know how to make any other kind of game than "Bethesda RPG," they don't know how to use any other game engine, and they are unable to learn either of those skills. Many other game studios have learned to evolve and shift their resources and assets - Naughty Dog doesn't still use the Jak and Daxter engine, From Software went from making mecha games like Armored Core to defining an entire genre with Dark Souls. It seems like Bethesda doesn't have the capacity to change like other companies.
I mean, what does he think makes a good game, if not sorry, characters, and world? Must a game only be evaluated by it's rules and systems? Then guess what, BG3 is built on DND 5e, arguably the most successful RPG system of all time. What even is his complaint?