I believe the only reason adult games aren’t as popular in Western countries as they are in Japan (and I think elsewhere in Asia?) is because there’s a stereotype that they’re low quality, which came about because of the ESRB (not sure about other countries’ rating systems) basically making it so there was no money in it in a pre-digital download world.
I like SMW better myself (actually not a single franchise entry on that list is my favorite in the series) but it doesn’t have the kind of unanimous praise SMB3 does.
I could believe that the Switch Joycons and the PS5 DualSense have a reason to cost as much as they do if it weren’t for the fact that the Xbox One/Series X controller, which is functionally identical to the 360 controller, which wasn’t that different than the Original Xbox controller, costs the same as the DualSense.
Game Pass is a profoundly stupid decision. It doesn’t make it’s money back and now Xbox users are used to not paying for games. And from a consumer perspective, enshittification always eventually happens with subscriptions.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Kirby Planet Robobot for the same reason: while not the most innovative games and not necessarily my favorites in their respective franchises, they represent nearly flawless implementations of their respective franchise’s ideas.
Sometimes I feel like Mario and a couple popular indie games are the only platformers that get taken seriously honestly.
If the game has a good enough character creator I’ll play a male. But most games and especially most Western games with character creators don’t allow me to make a male character I’d actually want to look like or at.
I could see there being fatigue with particular genres of indie games (Metroidvanias, Rougelites, First-Person Horror without combat, speedrunner-oriented 2D platformers) but not with the very concept.
Michael Eisner once called himself “the last of the creative types in Hollywood” after he left Disney, and I can’t help but see what he meant when he said that when I look at the current American film and TV landscape. It’s like today’s Hollywood bigwigs don’t even understand why people watch TV and movies.
I kinda think this happened to Western video games too (yeah Sony is a Japanese company…but PlayStation has shown a pretty square focus on the Western market in the past 10 years.) From a consumer perspective I don’t think a new CEO is the answer. It wasn’t for Disney’s fans with Bob Chapek.