I’ll explain this as quick as I can. Basically the bourgeoisie that own the major studios are so obsessed with profit that they make blatantly unsustainable decisions like overmonetization and shipping unfinished games every few years. Now look what’s happening, the studios have no choice but to lay off employees to recoup the costs they inflicted upon themselves and the worst affected are the fired employees naturally.
This is honestly infuriating and insulting as someone who’s been a massive video game fan since 2019 because the franchises I took a liking to (especially Halo) had countless labor and talent (stretching decades in some cases) have been completely gone to waste publishing cookie cutter generic dogshit games for the c suite’s next payday.
Indies are no better. They also suffer from the problem of shipping unfinished games but unlike their AAA counterparts, they suffer from genuine lack of time and resources to deliver games in a timely manner. So the whole “go indie” is basically lesser evil.
Come to think of it Capitalism actually enables and rewards such incompetence as long as profits are high.
I’ve been playing counter strike since 1999. I played Counter Strike 2 once, deleted it immediately afterwards and never played counter strike again.
I’ve been an Age of Empires fan since the first one. I played AoE4 quite a bit also, but then the “meta” became the end all and be all and I found myself watching youtube videos to learn how to play, when before I’d just experiment myself. Stopped playing that too when I realised how silly it is to be actively learning something that should be fun.
I played Diablo and Diablo 2/LoD a lot. One of my favourite games. Then Diablo 3 came out, I tried the demo and never installed the main game. Diablo 4 I won’t touch with a laser.
I haven’t played video games in over two years. The last game to catch and hold my interest (couple of years ago) was Stellaris, cause I liked the atmosphere: looking at planets, space ships, nice soundtrack playing in the background. The other game was Hell Let Loose (and to lesser extent Post Scriptum) cause I like WWII. But I quickly got bored because nobody actually wanted to play the game, but just run around and shoot like a headless chicken.
After years of not playing anything, I recently installed Mini Metro, and it’s just about all I can take. I also enjoy FTL, although that can get pretty stressful.
There’s not really a point to my post except to say that if people stop playing video games, I understand why.