It saddens me that Sektori came out too late to be on these lists, because they are effective marketing for indies and it’s one of the finest games ever made. It works flawlessly, is Linux friendly and is polished to a shine. It’s very opinionated design, but the opinions are in my opinion all correct and the overall game is a wonderful sequel to Geometry Wars. The only thing it’s missing right now is 2-player (at least) coop.
That’s another problem, even if we disregard optimizations, AAA games from 2015. look better than modern upscaled stuff, Unreal Engine seems to be easy enough to use nowadays that big vertically-integrated slop publishers replaced seasoned developers with the cheapest of zoomers.
AC is so moldy Ubisoft could only get me excited with a nice big Grow Home / Up sequel with no microtransactions, no ingame shop and everything unlockable through playing.
It’s not Valve’s job to provide a liberal education and loving community for the young’uns, the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying. Like tiktok is doing with “Israel is controlling the U.S. through AIPAC”.
Whose employees then go and form a new company, marketing its first game as “by the makers of X” and MS is left holding IP of dubious worth and their dick in their hands.
The big problem is how to make it fun for those who are not space nerds. They are making a game for hundreds of thousands of players with a budget of a game for tens of millions. They are getting funded for a feline-shaped bag, once it’s out chances are it’ll be so aggressive, mangy and moody no one will want to play with it. Aiming at a reticle projecting where the enemy will be when the shots land for 30 hours with occassional explanations by hollywood b-listers is not everyone’s cup of space tea.