It will be named the BlyatStation

That’s why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It’s insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.

If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.

Wait, didn’t EA had their in-house engine Frostbite? They botched Mass Effect Andromeda because they moved from UE to frostbite (not the only reason) .

CS 1 hasn’t disappeared yet, you can still play it.

The problem wasn’t the lack of creativity, but the fact that it was rushed.

Not yet, but I played the first one. It was pretty good. I also enjoyed Quantum Break.

Bioshock (series) for the incredible story, world building, how they explored philosophical concepts in a video game.

Mass Effect (trilogy) also had a really great story, I really enjoyed how it went from some small events that didn’t seem imporant to such a grand scale where you have to save the freaking universe.

Control which had a really interesting story, incredibly good looking and creative graphics, and some truly epic moments.

And I have to add a honorable mention for Factorio and Kerbal Space Program… Factorio really tickles my engineering mind, and KSP does an incredibly good job at teaching how rockets work.

DDG is just a front-end for Bing. There are very few search engines that actually do their own indexing.

It’s not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don’t make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.

Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won’t find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.

Pixels aren’t that expensive. And there are very good reasons why GrapheneOS only supports Pixel devices. Pixels are the only devices that have the proper hardware security features.

If you care about your privacy, and you should, get a pixel and install GrapheneOS.

Game is free but now you pay real money instead of sims money for building the house. No more motherlode and rosebud for you.

Sad samsung noises…

As a developer, it’s easy to get lost implementing things that “you might need”, and waste time on countless refactorings. This is why project management is very important, and to have capable people in the leadership that can give a direction.

I’ve seen some interviews with developers, and they definitely are building cool tech, for example procedural generators that can do very detailed models of buildings and interiors, but it takes time away from actually making the game.

Check my other comment, I found a quote saying they have about 1000 employees. At $100k/yr average salary, that’s about $100M/yr just to pay the salaries. Even if they underpay at $50k/yr, thats $50M/yr. That money is simply being burned. This whole project is a classic example of feature creep and sunk cost fallacy.

I can’t answer the first question, but developers and artists are expensive. Here is a quote I found online

As of 2020-12, CIG has a total of 695 staff. 512 of whom are developers. As of July 2023, 1100 CIG staff are working on Star Citizen, not counting third party …

At an $100000/yr salary, a team of 1100 people will cost $110mil/year. That excludes other business costs or any third party company they may contract for various assets, for example music.