Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:
Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.
Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.
Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.
In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.
Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.
I think the issue is a bit more nuanced. Graphics have gotten so good that it is relatively easy to get character animations which sit in the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is bad. You can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics everywhere, but if your characters are in the uncanny valley, the overall aesthetic is more similar to a game which didn’t have the photorealism at all.
In the past, the goalpost was at a different spot, so putting all the resources towards realism still wouldn’t get you into the valley, and everyone just thought it looked great.
What they don’t do is make money hand over fist without the need to design more product, as happens with subscription-based, game-as-a-service multiplayer titles. Some companies don’t want to make good games. They just want to make good money.
Musk should buy Bethesda. Gut it like he gutted Twitter. Start development on something random – the Elder Scrolls VI: Kingdom of Doge.
When it comes out, it will be a horrible, poorly made mess. Just like a regular Bethesda game but extra enshittified. He can charge extra for it to make it seem super premium.
I actually felt it was one of the best games I’ve played in the last 10 years. I really enjoyed the story. The game is beautiful. I love the amount of immersion that is possible, especially with mods. I’ve played through it twice.
I really, really wish we could inspect weapons. One mod gets close, but it isn’t the same as a Rockstar-style weapons inspection. We don’t even get to zoom in on the models in inventory. A damned travesty because the weapons are gorgeous.
But overall, I find it hard to fault, especially given its state at launch.
The corporate world absolutely idolizes the grift. Being able to “produce value” (=make more money while actually not producing anything more) is the only game left. Shareholders look at something like EA that releases the same old Madden year after year while making money hand over fist, and they fucking salivate.
Edit: and BTW, you know one giant group that grifts profit while producing nothing for the economy? Landlords.