As far as I understand Bethesda have actually got a relatively small team for the size of games they make but it’s made up of lots of people who have been there for a long time so they have a good knowledge base with less people, rather than just brute forcing it by throwing 5000 people at a game like Ubisoft. Also we have no way of knowing what their contacts with Zenimax/MS say about sales bonuses.
When were games ever like that. Even in the microcomputer era sole bedroom coders were still selling their titles to publishers to make some money out of it. What your suggesting sounds like a horrible experience where everything is stuck in early access forever but with less reason for people to finish their project as no one has put money down.
Do you not understand how IP we works? MS publish a minimal amount of the actual titles on the 360, the remainder belong to third party publishers that woukd never agree to this. MS have already tried to bring the whole 360 catalogue to the S/X back cat but can’t get a lot of these publishers to sign off on the adaptations needed to get them running.
Wasn’t the general idea that direct storage means data moves from the SDD to the GPU skipping RAM, hence the need for less. It’s possible Larian aren’t used to dealing with direct storage since the PC doesn’t have it in most systems even now and so just brute forced things the old way on PS5? That’s why MS engineers have to go and show them how to use the new architecture.
Given that there’s plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S they still need to scale their game for, I doubt it will be as big an issue as people make out. BG3 is an odd outlier as they’ve put a splitscreenode in the console game that the PC version doesn’t have and that’s what’s holding things up.