This cope no longer works Highguard was made up of a ton of ex-titanfall devs, a massive cash injection from from Tencent, who are notoriously hands off, and gave them 100 chinese employees and given one objective: make money And they couldn't do that We see this pattern constantly, double fine, ninja theory, undead labs, list goes on, given unlimited money, time and freedom and they had nothing to show for it for years Bethesda had 1600 people working on starfield and where does it show? The new halo doesnt even have multiplayer yet it has an esports team of like 10 people Bungie had like 3000 employees when they got bought by sony, yet all they were working on was destiny 2 content, and had no other projects at the time it begs the question, what the fuck do these people do all day? Weve seen what they do, and its fuck all Weve seen what they produce, and games made today take longer to make, run worse, look worse, cost more, are less fun, are made by more people, and they just fucking suck Because the people making them fucking suck, its that simple There is no conspiracy that le evil heckin corporations are conspiring to dump billions into making games shitty on purpose, and every failure is their fault, and every success is in spite of them While it is true that higher ups will often push for financial incentives that may harm the final product, they are not the ones responsible for the writing being bad, running poorly, or looking ugly as fuck, or being boring or lecturous The fact is, the AAA industry has been infested by an elitist club of theater kids who are there solely to check boxes for investors and government grants, and have treated this art form that you and I care so much about as a charity designed to provide endless welfare to a club of weird communist freaks who hate you, hate games, and hate themselves They think they should be allowed to break your toys as much as they want, be shielded from any and all criticism, and given constant second chances when they repeatedly fail to deliver, and you are required to keep funding this unsustainable system No other industry in the world functions like this, none of them have produced anything of value in the better part of 15 years, yet we're all expected to be super sad that the free ride is over and these people will have to actually do their fucking job for once, or find a new one Everyone with a soul either left or was laid off over a decade ago The layoffs don't go far enough, fire them all, shut their studios down, go back to teams of a few dozen actually talented people with smaller budgets and shorter time frames