this is a genuinely really interesting post in that it's a rare acknowledgement that modern AAA live-game dev is totally unsustainable if you ever want to make anything else, ever again
to expand on this slightly; I think it's become pretty clear that the Fortnites and Genshin Impacts of the world have reached a pace of gigantic updates and self-remakes that is unsustainable without a dev team literally thousands strong, and that has now Set the Standard for pretty much everyone else who's competing in that space. AAA genres have always been dangerous to try and compete in, but the live service shooter/rpg is now basically a flaming money hole for anyone who isn't the sole winner. I feel like this is going to manifest as an acceleration on the crash-n-burn speed of new live games until people figure out a way to pull back on player demands, assuming that can even happen anymore.
The worst part of the "Everything needs to be a live service multiplayer forever treadmill" is that there's a massive amount of players that are... not even fucking asking for that? That don't want this bullshit? That you're showing you don't care about, so they'll just go... somewhere else?
It's a perfect storm of capitalist greed from management types ("we can lock people into our game? and then sell them stuff? forever?!") and A Vocal Part Of The Playerbase That Was Already Being Catered To Anyway By Not Your Fucking Game.
So you end up with people being overworked to generate new shiny baubles to dangle in front of players to try and capture and then keep their attention... until the inevitable implosion of the project.
Amazing.
