It’s not laziness, that’s always been a stupid oversimplification. The workers work hard on your entertainment product. It‘s a business decision.

Stardew Valley, Morrowind, Republic Commando, Anno 1404, Max Payne 2

Don‘t most addictions?

thanks

What’s there to mod in an online game? The UI?

I‘ll not take away the working person‘s well earned vacation once or twice a year, especially in a big country like the US (I generally understand that the attitude towards flying is different there).

But some dude who took a plane to yap in front of an office building? Nah.

It’s bad for the environment to take uneccessary flights and it sets a bad example.

Was it really neccessary to fly there?

20?? The devs gonna burn out just as fast.

Games generally, in every budget class, take longer to develop but they are not generally worse.

My longest playthrough this year has been The Last Of Us Pt. II I think. Didn’t really play a game with a freeform game loop.

The big money makers are Fortnite, yearly iterations of CoD and EA Sports titles, and mobile gacha crap. They overshadow „smaller“ AAA releases, which still mostly don’t have any mtx. Your examples are legendary. But do you remember any other flop on the 2600? Or games like Haze? Now forgotten like most other flops.

I think you’re high on nostalgia. Failures are not memorable, that’s why we can’t remember them. What you describe are a bunch of big money makers from the big publishers. It’s very easy to stear around them and still get more great games than there’s time to play them.

Like most major releases the past decade.

That’s disingenuous. You have terrible games now, you’ve got them 40 years ago.

There are a bunch of these in this shop. Another one that caught my eye is Godhusk.

Pretty sure China doesn’t care about Abe Lincoln. The regime cares about what the people should see and hear to maintain power, and the people are used to it.

That’s also heavily implied during the game.

Half-Life 2, Max Payne 2 and Mass Effect because I‘ve been an impressionable teenager and a nitpicking adult.

I recently played Kotor for the first time since its release and unfortunately, it really felt kinda cheesy and bland. But right before that I played Disco Elysium so that was maybe the wrong order.

Look outside AAA gaming. It‘s never been better.

It‘s naive but I‘m not really mad that some of those jobs are in Europe now.

GOG also has more classics and does some work on them (together with the communities) so they run better on modern systems.