Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.

There are even great AAA studios out there that aren't pushing mtx. I just played uncharted 4 and I can't believe that is almost a decade old. It still holds up. Far better than Rockstar's red dead redemption 2. That said there is room in the industry for everyone. The indie team that takes 6 years to make high quality games to the AAA studio pushing games out every 2 years. Including small indie studios of 5 people making huge hit survival games and indie games that were made in 9 months but have a lot of heart.

Quality is subjective and I think we'll start to see our genres break down as people go towards more and more specific definitions. We've already seen this a bit with the fps reverting back to doomlike with games like prodeus.

Absolutely what I noticed too. The tweets didn't seem like they were even "panicking" but just saying to players "Don't expect this because most studios aren't going to devote the same resources and ability to the party-based classic isometric-inspired RPG genre because the genre is fairly niche."

The individuals working on the game might care.

The managers who make the decisions don't. Doesn't matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It's a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.

Wonder what a divine crit roll would cost, $5 in combat $3 outside? Heck that's too complicated $10 for all, $7 for season pass holders.

For those wondering there is no season pass.

You know what creates engagement and retains players?

Making a good game that's actually fun to play instead of focusing on how you're gonna sell me hats and paint jobs and weaponizing FOMO.

Sir, allow me to introduce you to capitalism

My counter to that is the last 2.5 BioWare games - I say 2.5 because Dreadwolf has been in development for ten years total now and still isn’t out. Andromeda was in development for 5 years. Anthem had money galore thrown at it until it came out. Too many devs, not just BioWare, are wasting years of development time because they haven’t got a clue what they can feasibly make then rush to get things out the door.

Instead of making excuses for why gave dev is the way it is now - a way that isn’t working - maybe look at what Larian did right and ask why more studios aren’t doing that. Early Access is normal used by indies with overinflated budgets? Well, why aren’t larger studios taking advantage of it or using systems like it?

The new normal for a have to be developed is turning into 5+ years, and there’s no excuse for the hot messes that have been coming out lately.

As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).

Nowadays it's mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice... Publishers and players expect "Early Access" games to be feature complete and polished before the "Early Access" launch...

He's not wrong, though. Game development is a business, like any other, and larger-scale games require exponentially more resources to produce than smaller indie titles.

Obviously one could make the argument "Well they shouldn't be making every single game into a huge, multi-billion dollar blockbuster title that costs the player an arm and a leg to gain access to, then they wouldn't need that amount of resources to begin with", and that would be a fair argument. But ultimately, people keep buying those games, anyway. And not by force, they buy them of their own volition. So those games continue to be profitable. There's no incentive for big studios to change their ways when consumers keep giving them money, so they're going to keep making huge games that require huge resources and huge payments from the players.