Oh no doubt. It’s a shame too. We saw the death of the mid-level developer long ago.
When I go to cons I try to buy any smaller self-published titles I see, but wish the market could support smaller devs while remaining consumer-friendly with a “coop” publisher. An entity that can eat a loss while still finding gems that would be lost to time if stuck on a digital store.
That isn’t to say that smaller titles are dead. Currently I look out for stuff published by Soedesco, GS2 Games, Team17, Microids, EastAsiaSoft, etc etc.
I wish we had more small publishers. It’s so rare to go into a store now and see a $20-$40 title from some rando. Cheap enough that I can go “Oh, that’s interesting looking I’ll grab it”. Limited Run is great and all, but there’s no magic when you pre-order something 8 months out.
Microsoft has pushed and pushed and pushed and finally achieved their goal of going digital-only with Game Pass. I’m 100% confident that the next console won’t have physical media options, so I probably won’t be getting it as I don’t want Microsoft dictating whether I own something or not.
I’m really curious when Microsoft will start seeing the fruits of all their purchases. They’ve bought up a lot of game devs. Seems modern games cook for 3-4 years before publishing, so some might be turning up soon.
I hope Fallout London won’t have to push their release date back to cope with this change. If Skyrim updates are any indication, this might not bode well.
I’d love to see the process they used when they decided to throw away backward compatibility with PSVR1 software. Surely at least one person on the team said it was a bad idea.
I thought out of all the VR hardware manufactures out there… Sony would be the one who had the best chance to get it right. They’ve got a static SKU of hardware for all software devs to target. They’ve got multiple organizations in every known type of electronic device. Yet here we are on round two of them flubbing the potential.