• It’s pretty sad that I can’t tell if this list was made yesterday or four years ago. If people are able to have fun despite a stagnant industry, all power to them, but I haven’t seen a good game out of AAA in a long while.

    I really hope one day business schools will start teaching people that trying to blindly follow trends in art has literally never worked. Hasn’t worked for all the film studios trying to make their own cinematic universes, hasn’t worked for game studios trying to chase the new live service dragon, but still we get braindead suits getting senior level positions approving derivative drivel.

    • Alright, new theory:

      You guys don’t play too many games, right?

      For the record, the best selling games of this year had fewer live service games than last year and the year before. The top of the charts was consistently single player games without microtransactions and this is one of the main GOTY candidates of 2023 following trends from “business schools” straight into… eh… a climactic absurdist musical number.

      I’d tag that as spoilers if I could because, as I said, it’s increasingly clear you guys haven’t been playing this stuff.

      • You’re right, the best selling games have been single-player focused. So why has Ubisoft, EA, Square Enix, ActivisionBlizzard, Warner Bros, and Sony Interactive been pushing to jump on the recent extraction shooter trend? Hell, find me a triple A publisher that does not have a live-service game being maintained, I’ll wait.

        If you’re argument is that AAA is not wasting millions of dollars on chasing trends, you’ll have to find more evidence than all their projects being failures.

        • Because they’re not all failures, they’re also making single player games and you’re assuming that the one example of publishers wanting to tick a box in their lineup is somehow all they (let alone the entire industry) are producing.

          The fact that people are making extraction shooters doesn’t mean they’re not making anything else. Warner’s biggest game this year is a narrative RPG. EA’s biggest game is (as always) a sports game, and their highest reviewed games are a Star Wars single player action game and a single player horror game. Sony’s biggest game is an open world superhero action game. I don’t know about Ubi’s sales off the top of my head, but what they’ve shipped recently is a 2D metroidvania and a throwback to classic Assassin’s Creed.

          I don’t understand why you want publishers to be judged by what they don’t make, as opposed to what they make. Major publishers are billion dollar companies that put out many games. I have zero problems with EA running Apex Legends if I get to play Dead Space. I have zero problems with Sony trying to get a live service game going if they keep making insanely refined narrative action games. I don’t enjoy every game people make, but I don’t hate that people make games that are not for me if there are also games for me happening at the same time.

    • I just had someone telling me if I can’t tell the new street fighter installment from the old one then i must not have eyes. It looks practically identical to the previous three installments. I think I’m done trying to interact with gamers for literally anything.

      • You have to take a very cursory glance to not find differences between Street Fighter 5 and 6. The gameplay systems are very different, 6 has an actually good single player mode, the net code is vastly improved. If you’re just looking at the graphics, you’re doing the same thing this post is criticizing but for the opposite goal. Street Fighter 6 is one of the AAA home runs, especially when you consider the disasterous launch of SF5.