I know I'm preaching to the choir, BlahajEnjoyer, but for anyone else reading this, this is why it's important to also not play these sorts of games in addition to not spending money on them, if stopping any of this is important to you.
The people in charge of these companies, meanwhile, get to quietly count their millions. After all, they aren’t the ones who have to go on a livestream and defend the latest patch notes.
There are, however, a lot of opportunities during development for everyone down the chain to voice concerns about making an online-only game that doesn't need to be and requires them to go on a livestream to defend their patch notes.
Enough people have left Overwatch 2 that they've resorted to putting it on Steam. Perhaps it's not happening on the timeline we would like, but people do seem to be tiring of live service nonsense.
I'm also not familiar enough with C&C to know what this game is doing different from C&C. But a lot of old designs aren't broken and could just use modernization. Look at the last few games Mimimi has made, modernizing Commandos and Desperados. At this point, I'm desperate for "boomer shooters" to catch up to the 00s in design, because no one really makes FPS games like that anymore. A friend of mine was playing some TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on Discord, and I never played those games in their heyday, but I would absolutely be into them. There just aren't games made like that anymore, and I miss them. This game could be that for RTS or C&C fans.
Side note. There are allegedly TimeSplitters and Perfect Dark games on the way. I fully expect Perfect Dark's campaign to not resemble that first game at all and for its multiplayer to be a live service extraction shooter, because that's what these big companies think people want. To be clear, this is based on nothing but feelings, conjecture, and cynicism, and I'm usually not very cynical. And if TimeSplitters ever does come back like they say it is, I expect it to be exactly what I want because they can't afford to build the thing that's going to ruin Perfect Dark.
As for BG3, the way Larian makes those games systems driven, such that you can say, "I wonder if this works" and it usually does, is doing more than just playing on nostalgia, and it is doing things that video games excel at, even if it's still doing things outlined in the tabletop game.
It's modern enough but old school. I had barely sampled C&C back in the day (this game, I'm told, is a lot like C&C3), but I played a ton of StarCraft, and the mission they gave on the show floor was definitely great for showing off the unit escalation and rock paper scissors of it all. If you're looking for another one of those, there's a good chance they nailed it. For me, however, I think I'd like to see a different take on the genre, at least for multiplayer. The fog of war would instill a sense of dread in me that no amount of scouting could ever alleviate, and while winning a game of an RTS is super empowering, losing felt so awful that I'm not sure I want to do it again. They're seemingly not changing anything drastic and just making another one of those, which is fine, because there aren't a lot of those. I'm much less interested in playing games with a mouse these days, but somehow this game has full controller support listed on the store page. I know AOE2 got updated with clever controller options, but like I said; they're not rocking the boat with this game, so it's surprising that they somehow have controller inputs working. When I played the demo, it was on a mouse and keyboard.
I played but did not get very far into Divinity: Original Sin, mostly because I tried twice to play them co-op, and coordinating adults' schedules is hard. I love how systemic those games are, but the presentation is limited to what you'd expect from an old-school CRPG. Shortly before release, I saw that this game retains all of that creativity while upping the presentation to the level of something like a Mass Effect, which makes it much more appealing. I hear that Ralph of SkillUp had exactly the same reaction to BG3. So, deep systems + finally catching up in production value and presentation.
Playing through BG2 now, the interjections are rare and don't really budge the flow of the conversation in any direction. It's a very small amount of color to inform you of their personalities.
I can't speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don't have texture bugs and T posing. I'm glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I'm also not sure how you went from, "Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying" to "Of course it will have bugs!"
I've been playing Baldur's Gate...2. I just beat Baldur's Gate 1 and moved right on to 2. Immediately there was a major noticeable change in the scenario design in a very good way when I got to BG2. Dungeons are now puzzles to be solved rather than just marching through mobs of enemies. Chapter 2 lets you go nuts and achieve an explicit objective by any means you like, and it makes at least three of those options pretty obvious. I'm now in Chapter 3 and hope to have finished the game and moved on to BG3 before the PS5 port of BG3 comes out. I'm really enjoying it overall, but sometimes, even on easy mode, it just feels like bullshit. I just took on a boss of a dungeon who was impervious to basically everything I could throw at him, and I just had to reload a previous save and try different spells until I could finally break through his defenses, which I don't think is the greatest game design in the world, given that there was no foreshadowing that I should be prepared for that. Likewise, in that same dungeon, there were vampires and wraiths that can energy drain me and de-level my characters; there's one specific way out of this situation as well, and I once again had to reload an earlier save and just have those spells ready to go to solve that problem after knowing via save scumming what's around the corner. Not only that, but a negative for this game compared to its predecessor is that it respawns enemies in dungeons. So when your only option for forward progress is to rest so that you can equip or cast absolutely critically necessary spells and then you get bombarded by another mob of enemies, it can be super tedious.
Fine. I don't play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don't expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you'd recognize no matter how into football you are.
EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.
Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make.
I don't know where you got that figure, but it sounds very outdated. I expect each iteration of Madden to cost several times that to produce. Video games are also a very scalable product to sell, so your margin comparison to a product sold on Amazon is not apt. Avengers and Forspoken had negative profit margins, for instance, because the economics of selling those things is very different than a product on Amazon.
And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts.
The business model has always affected the game design at every step in the medium's history. We used to have quarter-guzzling arcade games as the primary way games were made. Crypto and NFTs aren't taking; it was a bubble that burst just like tulip bulbs and beanie babies. Other business models have come and gone in games before, like subscription MMOs and "project $10" online passes.
Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on.
Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.
You take that power away by voting with your wallet though. EA just had its ass handed to them via BattleBit, delivering the game that fans actually wanted, not to mention Baldur's Gate 3 outdoing the last number of efforts from EA's own BioWare. Voting with your wallet isn't an overnight process, and often enough, it brings corporations down.