I expect media companies to be greedy. What feels absurd is when they act out of blind, unmonetized efforts of control that seem to hurt their bottom line - like forcing employees to commute instead of work from home.
There’s a Smash Bros mechanic called Stale Moves where repeating the same move many times causes it to deal less damage. It feels like a worthwhile topic to delve on for more interesting fights, but given the way knockback works there could be a better target than just damage adjustment.
Let’s say that I’m a game developer, and also a terrible person. After beating my game, it shows a victory screen that says “You know, Hitler might have been right!” Everyone will shit on the game; and that’s just normal player reaction.
Now, it’s easy to predict that no one would be so negative towards giant exposed breasts - except yes, plenty of people are. For all the porn-obsessed pervs out there, tons of people just want to enjoy an action adventure game without cringing distractions.
Don’t believe me? Look at Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The game lost a bunch of its potential sales to players that might enjoy a sweeping JRPG, but couldn’t stand frequent boob/butt shots of its overendowed and subservient female main character.
If you’ve ever seen isometric pixel sprites, authors often draw those first “naked” to get the shape right. If they show an in development model that’s naked, and later have added clothes, is that then “censorship”? No of course it fucking isn’t.
There’s potentially some cloud-based options for this, if someone doesn’t want to maintain a gaming device.
Basically, it seems like Game Pass Ultimate will let you play games like The Sims 4 and Minecraft using a constant video connection to an Xbox server. If I’m right, these are in fact the mouse/keyboard version of the game. Probably not as moddable though.
It’s not a great option especially considering the subscription, but it sometimes feels more hassle-free depending on the user.
No matter how much hobbyists liked selling their games back to GameStop so the store can mark them up 500%, I have always hated that the industry of used games punished releasing fantastic short singleplayer games much much more than perpetual 2000-hour microtransaction live service games.
That crowd of gamers absolutely contributed to the fall. The general distrust of digital is acknowledged, but if people were just paying low/moderate sale prices for each SP game and keeping them, instead of paying used prices, we’d probably have fewer publishers moving this way.
One ethics quandary is AI child porn. It at least provides a non-harmful outlet for an otherwise harmful act, but it could also feed addictions and feel insufficient.
Worse, it might depend on licensed infrastructure. Maybe a company can stand giving away their proprietary server, but they can’t legally give away a library toolkit they purchased a $300,000 non-transferable license for. That kind of middleware is extremely common in the industry.
Since you mention FPS and open world, you could try some of the Far Cry games. AAA but often fall out of public eye fast. They’re all the same but do what they do pretty well.
Another interesting AA is In Sound Mind. Shooter-puzzler about a psychiatrist trapped in the minds of his patients.