Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn’t even launch Hyenas because they realized they’d only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it’s not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn’t need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.
To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it’s a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they’re not the first one of these to market.
They’re all the same format, but The Dark Pictures is an anthology of games that are about half the size of Until Dawn. There are 5 or 6 of them at this point.
Supermassive games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the Dark Pictures are great for this, especially since later iterations have built-in “pass the controller” modes that are great for sharing a game with your spouse.
Maybe not. If that’s the case, I’ll live. They’ve brought their past PC releases to GOG until very recently, so if they see sales drop off, they might continue to do that or relax the PSN requirement. We’ll see.
It definitely does not matter. You build a game that you’re capable of making. If it felt like they were making a game that needed a bigger budget to realize the design they were shooting for, that will affect my opinion of it. Games like Halo Infinite spent so much money on the game making it “big” that it actually made the game worse than if they’d spent less on it and kept it smaller. I don’t give a damn how much they spent making it. We had a whole era of RPGs in the 2010s that were made for a tiny fraction of the development cost of what was coming out of BioWare, but they were better RPGs without having to give them any sort of pity scale to arrive at that conclusion.
I brought up Superman 64 because it’s known to be one of the worst games ever made. When you know how bad a game can actually be, Starfield has no business being a 1 out of 10.
Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.
Your opinion is your opinion, but I don’t think the scale of the company or its resources matter one iota. Games made by a single person have been better than those made by thousands of people, and that’s without putting my thumb on the scale in either direction. I don’t even agree that Starfield is linear, but even if it was, that doesn’t make a game bad. If you’re calling Starfield a 1 out of 10, there’s no room to go down from there on that scale, which is absurd to me, because that means you’d have to cram Superman 64 and Bubsy 3D on the same part of that scale.