Got burned with destiny, burned with NMS, and uncomfortably groped by Space Engineers; ... I remain wary of the infamous game-destroying boardroom intervention that AAA titles have been susceptible to lately.
I'm right there with you. It's not that games are losing quality. They have evolved a bit, but there have always been over hyped junk games. Just looking back at some of the trainwreck NES games will tell you that. Some were really, really bad. The truly good games were maybe 5-10% of all the releases?
I think one of the problems is the cost of development when compared to the cost consumers are willing to pay (at the risk of writing an essay about the modern issues of the video game industry, I will limit my list to one problem). Games take more to make. They take alot more to make. This becomes even more of an issue when you are innovating. Creating something that has never been done before takes time. We can see it now with SC development. They are making tools, techniques, and programming that has never been done before.
Plus, the cost of everything else has become obscene. Call of Doodie: Modern Warfare 2 had a development budget of 40-50 million but cost over 200 million after advertising and distribution. Everything and everyone stands in line to take a chunk of that budget. You have to pay for bandwidth, computers, servers, security for those servers, and everything else that comes with it. My company pays around $3,000 per year, per computer on our network. That doesn't include the cost of the actual computer itself. Security and the cost of the licenses are stupid expensive.
Then you have payroll. Hundreds of people work on a single game now. Even if it averaged out to 50k per year, per person, that will still cost around 70k each to employ them (workman's comp, insurance, taxes, etc.). A couple hundred employees would cost the company around 1.2 million dollars per month in payroll alone.
So, everything adds up. Games are much more expensive to develop than they used to be. Yet, back in the NES days, games cost $39-$59 per cartridge. They still cost that today. They are priced that way because that is all gamers will pay. Anything more and they get sticker shock. The forums light up and they get out their pitchforks and torches. So what was their solution? They decided to cheat.
Now, they sell DLC content. They push the "FTP" (:read P2W) business model. They cheat, cut corners, over-hype, and early release the trash we now know today. Sadly, it has become industry standard. I'm not talking about the percentage of crap games, but the cheap tactics the developers employ to cheat money from the customers. Point in case, No Man's Sky.
How about instead, they just own up to how much games cost and what price they need to place on it. People WILL spend money on it. Hell, they DO spend money on it without even knowing. All I want is a fair product for a fair price. If it costs more to make, just let me know. I would much have a good product at a higher price, than a crap product at a cheap price. Sadly, society on the whole either can't understand the value of that or they just don't care that they are facilitating the very junk they so adamantly disapprove of.
Walmart, I blame Walmart.