I definitely play a few horny games, and don’t recommend them to anyone. In the other hand, I have actually skipped certain games, and hated some others, because they were trying to tell an engaging story and got hung up on cringey sexualization of their female leads.
As you said, it’s all up to consumer preference. It isn’t just watch-dogging and shaming of sexualization, it’s also that there’s a lot of people that find lazy sexualization to be disengaging and hardly unique. Plenty of the time getting the characters to look unique and interesting is also a challenge; and diversity often helps with that.
Supposedly the real-life SAS has had a very successful nonlethal career going many deployments without any shots fired. Their main way of operating is to flood a building with CS Gas and go in with masks - I don’t know if that makes for a good game though.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
But Infinite growth!! How do you affirm the ability for a new CEO to make tough decisions without going on insane hiring sprees to show growth, and then firing those same people to cut corners and also show growth!? The economy needs blood!
Oh wait, they’re not publically traded? I thought only corner shops were allowed to stay off the market.
I’m still glad I paid for it when it was a good deal. It’s not like I was committed. The unsubscribe button is pretty easy, and I don’t need to play a lot of those singleplayer games anymore.
I can’t claim I’ve never been part of a live service trend. I played a lot of Dead by Daylight (probably still will, just feeling it’s in a downturn) and bought into cosmetics and new characters - likely for a decent amount of money over time.
Honestly, once a dev has a formula that’s successful, it does make sense to just slowly iterate on the formula, give it out for free, and sell cosmetics, instead of trying to find a reason to write 8 new levels/characters and call it a “sequel”. But I can also admit most games have applied at least a few scummy practices to get that in place, and it victimizes a lot of players.
I will also remind people not every single DLC item is scummy. It’s worth evaluating each for yourself, as well as using basic consideration to ignore the ones you don’t want (and don’t complain about them if the game never visibly advertised them to you). For instance, Witcher 3’s extra story content would technically count as DLC - and most say it’s worth it.
I felt this way about Back 4 Blood. The game came out, it was genuinely fun and had a good amount of content, and they added DLC that expanded the game while also not ruining things for anyone who hasn’t installed it.
But there was an unending cry from gamers that it was getting “abandoned”. You can still gather 4 players, or fewer with bots, and have a good time. It’s a different appeal from Left 4 Dead with the card system, and that was fine to me.
Those are the companies that have contributed to the fast churn of creatives getting overworked and leaving the industry, leaving their projects to be driven entirely by excess man-hours and lack of innovation.
Generally, devs have felt very pressured when given multiple release date goals. By that I mean getting out a playable E3 demo, a “beta”, a demo, an early access for preorders…
It means if, say, the character has always had a clipping issue with their holster but it’s not a priority, the team can focus on important work/bugs first and their QA just kind of acknowledges the weird holster. But anytime they’re releasing, every detail like that has to be trimmed up for however many levels are coming out.
So yeah, I’m in favor of them avoiding any marketing betas if it helps them.
I’m kind of okay with them going whichever way they have creative ideas. Even RE’s action design has been really fun except when they tried to “streamline” it in RE6.
All I really know about this game is the ridiculously stylized animations in its cutscenes and fight moves, which has definitely made me want to try it out.