I don’t think that’s entirely fair. You can begrudge the big budgets all you want, but the market had proven time and again that that’s what players want. If a studio doesn’t get the indie pass, players are all over them for being “lazy” and cutting corners. “You’re a big studio, with plenty of money. You can afford to do X, Y, and Z. Stop being so greedy.”

My point was that we’ve entered an age where player expectations are so divorced from reality that there’s just no winning anymore. Any studio that isn’t perceived as “indie” enough is expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing the new blockbuster. Even then, when such a studio releases a massive hit expectations skyrocket. Developers have ambitions, and ambitions cost money.

No one is going to argue that greed isn’t driving some parts of the industry, but it’s not that simple. If you’re a billionaire and want to patronize a development studio to make a game for the artistry of it, think about what happens. You front the hundreds of millions of dollars. Best case scenario you’re not totally regretting doing that instead of sticking your money in an index fund. You make your money back, and can re-invest it in the next project. Worst case scenario you burn through the cash and don’t even have a finished game to show for it before you have to pull the plug length hundreds of employees in the lurch (this has happened). Average case you release a mediocre game for a niche audience and lose money.

Best case scenario you get to do it again. Most likely the you can afford to fund one big artistic vision and then the money is gone. A healthy business gets to keep making games. The games people want haven’t been disappearing because of some opportunity cost gobbling up all the game development resources. They’re disappearing because the profit is so low that one wrong move and the non “greedy” investor is out of money.

The industry will start producing more niche, artistic, and interesting games when it the average case is actually profitable. Until then they’re going to have to keep chasing the cash cows just to keep the lights on. The artistry is there, people just can’t afford it.

That’s not really the problem…

The problem is that the returns aren’t good enough to support the risk. With AAA budgets, you need to hit ~top 5 of the year to make any money. That means broad appeal. Broad appeal and experimental do go well together.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a million more times. Until games can be priced such that a mediocre AAA game can see a modestly successful profit, and one flop doesn’t tank a studio, this is the gaming landscape we’re stuck with. When people get their panties in a bunch about how profitable (aka greedy) the games industry is, they completely leave it the part where the overwhelming majority of that is tied up in the things that they hate. The AAA box product model just isn’t paying the bills. GotY does under that model, but the average is not great.

Also, people like to grab numbers without actually understanding the context. I see a lot of, “game X had a $500 million budget, and sold 15 million copies. That’s a 50% ROI, which is huge!” Ok, first of all, they do not take home the full box price, so it’s actually closer to 20% ROI. Second, that cool half-bil was locked into an investment over at least 5 years, making an average yearly ROI closer to the 5-10% range, which is worse than the market average. Finally, games is very boom or bust. There was a very real risk that they only sold a couple million copies, such would have been a massive loss.

So… How risky would you want someone to be if you loaned them 50k, and in 5 years they should be able to give you 60k, but also if things don’t work out you might only get 10k back. The math just doesn’t add up for risky AAA box product games. If 1-5 million copies was the break even point, you’d see a lot more innovation.

I agree, and it’s my biggest complaint about the movies. It’s precisely what rocketed Jennifer Lawrence to fame, in that she did an incredible job of portraying the complex emotions of the character, but there’s only so much you can do with body language.

The fact is, Katniss is an incredibly stoic and guarded individual. It’s very important to the story that the reader sees both the turmoil going on inside her head and the emotionless (or acted emotional) facade she presents to the world.

Especially in her relationships with Peeta and Gale. You simply could not do it justice in third person. How do you show that turmoil of acting in love and cynically using them, but also trying to convince herself that she’s not actually in love, questioning her own motives, all while wrestling with guilt of using them for her own ends.

Katniss is a character that constantly has to convince herself that she only cares about herself and Prim (because that’s all she can afford to care about) while in reality she cares so much about everyone else and the injustices of the world. First person PoV is the way to go to sell that one.

Maybe a bit more info about what those inputs determining your behavior are would help.

Self determination theory gives three driving needs that humans share. Mastery, Autonomy, and Relatedness. I’ll focus on Autonomy as it is often misunderstood. People tend to conflate autonomy with freedom. While freedom often helps with a satisfying feeling of autonomy, they are not the same thing. Freedom is the sense of having choice. You have many options, and you have the power to choose as you see fit. Autonomy is the sense of wanting to do what you’re doing, and that the things you do matter.

As an example, you could be placed in the middle of the Sahara Desert. We’ll even give you all the basic tools to survive. Food, water, shelter. You are arguably incredibly free. You can go in any direction, or do nothing at all. The choice is yours. You would not feel autonomous. You don’t want to survive in the desert. Any direction you choose to walk seems the same as any other.

Alternatively, you could be a slave to a magical mind reading sorcerer. If you ever disobey him you will be punished severely. The sorcerer is kind though, and he uses his mind reading powers to always order you to do exactly what you want to do. This would give you a great sense of autonomy despite having no freedom at all.

Please note, I’m not trying to make any statement about “kind and benevolent” slave owners here. Just talking about psychology.

It turns out, that autonomy is way more important than freedom to us. That mind reading sorcerer is you. It knows what you want to do, and forces you to do it.

We can condition dogs to do any number of things entirely through positive re-enforcement. Sit, get treat. Lie down, get treat. Eventually the treat is no longer needed. You say sit, the dog sits. The dog has clearly lost an element of freedom due to this conditioning, and yet it is no less satisfied than before.

My advice is worry less about whether you existentially have “free will”, and more about whether you’re conditioned to be a positive or negative influence on the world and the people around you.

Obviously buying the book is supporting the author more than checking it out from a library, but of course the author benefits from you checking out their book.

1. The library bought the book. Patronizing your library demonstrates that the library provides you value, and this impacts the library’s budget and priorities. Nobody checks out books at the library, the library stops buying books.
2. You checking out the book makes a public record of someone checking out that book. This is a great KPI for the author. The only thing publishers like almost as much as money is sweet, sweet KPIs.
3. It creates demand. Books that get checked out more get purchased more. If your library only has a few copies for the entire region, rather than shipping them around everywhere, they might buy enough copies for multiple branches. If the waitlist gets too long they might buy more copies. More readers->more wear and tear->more copies.
4. Popular books get promoted more. Ever asked a librarian for a recommendation? They’re no AI recommendation algorithm, but they see the data. Librarians give out recommendations all the time, and one input to their recommendation is going to be how many other people checked it out. High movement books may find themselves in a display of “most popular books this month”.

Etc…