It becomes even more confusing when you think about the fact that the Xbox One is not the Xbox 1, which was just the Xbox. And that the Xbox One X, the souped up version of the Xbox One, can be abbreviated as the XBOX, which again, is not the original Xbox.
Vampire Survivors. Don’t be fooled by videos, it looks intense but it arguably has more in common with incremental clicker games like cookie clicker than you might imagine.
If I remember correctly, it was originally intended to be an episodic game, but plans changed late in development. As a result, the first half of the game is a really good bit of moody character-driven slow burn storytelling, and then suddenly it’s like the entire corkboard full of plot ideas gets vomited out at once.
Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.
It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.
In previous Bethesda games I eventually just started doing calculations in my head constantly about whether the stuff I was grabbing was worth the weight involved. I’m still not quite at that point for Starfield, but I’ll get there.
Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there’s a $60 game already on there (which also isn’t normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.
A shame, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Volition was never quite the same after the THQ bankruptcy, and that was still several years before Embracer took over.
Honestly I’m not sure you can make a AAA game in a brand new franchise and have it succeed in the current market. Nobody wants to pay the big bucks for something completely unproven, especially not when there are so many huge but familiar games around.