I'm not convinced they'll ever realize the problem with their strategy. They'll keep half-assing it every couple of years and wondering why they don't have a larger gaming audience.
Among other things, it sounds like Cyberpunk had a lot of technical debt that they struggled to overcome, hence the move to Unreal engine going forward. With the lessons learned from the last one, they're surely on to bigger and better things with the sequel, maybe even the multiplayer they cut from 2077. I think Baldur's Gate 3 has shown how much hunger there is for a proper co-op mode in an RPG.
I played the beginning of the original release some years back and found the controls unusable, even with a mod that "fixes" them. This new game adapts the way the original basically has a console printout for everything you look at and interact with while still allowing it to control like a modern first person video game. I'm not very far in it yet. Only about an hour. But it's one of those games where you're scouring for resources and navigating a map with keycards and turning the power back on and such, and it does all that well so far.
I finally finished Baldur's Gate 3. Loved it. I immediately started again with a Ghost Recon team, where everyone is a rogue assassin/fighter battle master build so that you can get a ton of actions, create opportunities for advantage, and then get bonus sneak attack damage. It's working really well so far, and I've done more than half of the content in Act 1 with this team, though to be fair, of course the game will be easier when I know what's coming around the corner.
I also started up System Shock, a game that sorely needed that remake and shows that the difference between what made it good back in the day and what would make it good now are basically just graphics, controls, and UI.
It's not close enough if I want to run it from a PC or Steam Deck. They only allow it on mobile where they can enforce their DRM. Then those downloads are only good for a few days before they need to be renewed and they run into all sorts of technical problems trying to enforce the DRM.
Studios actually got tired of doing this, because rehiring is expensive, and ended up on a post launch DLC pipeline to get closer to keeping everyone working.
Indie game developers have it way better than indie movie makers. They have better platforms for distribution...
It kills me that there's no Steam or GOG for TV and movies. My options are either Blu Rays, when they exist, or streaming, even if I buy the movie outright.
I'm not in games, but if/when things start to turn, it's far easier for myself and the people around me to just leave for an employer that treats us right than to try to unionize and force the current one to behave. Those are the benefits of having a job that's very much in demand though, not to mention one that can be worked from home and isn't dependent on geography, so the union isn't necessary because the employees already hold enough power. If the employer has a monopoly on your jobs, being able to unionize is a powerful tool in your toolbelt.
I had no understanding of 5e, and there were a couple of things I didn't understand, but so much of that game, especially at the beginning, is choosing an option with a high chance of success and shoving or throwing things that most games wouldn't let you shove or throw. The way the game lets you verb any feasible noun, coupled with higher production value, is probably why this one hit. It's going to continue to make other RPGs with even higher budgets stand out as dinosaurs; not just Starfield but especially BioWare's next couple of efforts, given their Baldur's Gate lineage.
The criticism of Red Dead had little to do with the impressive systems that they built for the world and a whole lot to do with how they took that freedom away from you in missions. There was very much a way they could have kept the linear story that plays out the same way every time without cutting to a hard fail state for using your brain. That's the part that felt dated, especially contrasted against the actual cool, innovative stuff that exists in the same video game.
But in a world where we assume that they achieved that, ignoring the long games without microtransactions like Baldur's Gate and Zelda, there are industry-wide effects at a macro level.