Insiders, outsiders, everyone knows at this point.

You can’t make these insanely open world games with hyper realistic graphics on a reasonable budget or in a reasonable amount of time. Games take too long and cost too much to make. Too many eggs in the basket.

I remember being struck playing TLOU2 by just how damn long it is. I would’ve been happy with half the playtime and paid the same price.

Fuck cutting-edge graphics

Anno 1800 looks great, better than all the previous titles and is definitely a plus

I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…

Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don't exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.