In the case of Avowed, a lot of the blame can be placed on Microsoft leadership. Statistically, out of two dozen studios they've bought up, at least a few of them should be capable of making a game that audiences like, yet it's been 5 years or thereabout since they've gone on their purchasing spree and the results are abysmal. Even studios that used to be able to make something tolerable have gone to ****, and it's clearly not only because the old talent left. There's something ****** up in the way Microsoft runs their studios that didn't use to be the case 20 years ago.
This, conveniently, brings me to another issue - *****, and specifically ***** in positions of leadership. The Indian elite human capital brings to ruin every company they infest, and it's no clearer to see their ruinous influence than with Microsoft and their subsidiaries.
Naturally, it's not just ***** in the companies, and ***** in the sweatshops that get work outsourced to them, but also the other employees. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it never hurts to reiterate, back in the "good old days", game development was a volatile industry, and the only reason anyone decided to make a game was because they truly wanted to make one, or had a vision for the medium they wanted to share with the public.
And yes, many of those pioneers became obscenely rich, but so many more were worn down by insane crunch and crushed under the weight of their ambition.
Nowadays, game development is a 9-to-5 job. You come to work, clock in, sit at your workstation and then robotically do your tasks. Barring some positions, no real talent or spark is necessary - large parts of making a game are either outsourced, automated or streamlined to the point a well-trained monkey could do them. I've read a few reports of how Ubisoft makes their games, which largely involves placing brightly colored blocks next to each other and connecting them like it's some kind of Incredible Machine parody of a game.
I'm not saying that making games should be deliberately hard or obtuse - in fact, a good tech base and well-made development tools can help to tremendously decrease the time and energy being wasted on wrangling the programs and code to do what you want, which can then be invested into making a better product.
But what we see instead is companies getting rid of the actual talent and replacing them with NPCs(oftentimes in the shape of a ****), that attempt to follow instructions.
There's also the fact that so many modern developers are hyperspecialized, compartmentalized cattle that can only do one thing, and even that inadequately. Meanwhile, old (White) game developers nearly always pulled double, triple and quadruple duty - coding, writing, voice acting, making art.
Old devs came from all kinds of walks of life, and brought with them an eclectic collection of skills, knowledge and life experiences, which ended up shining through the product. The modern gamedev is an urbanite bugman that has spent all his life in and out of leftist "educational" institutions, living in urban bughives, and knows nothing else, turning the gaming industry into an inbred, incestuous den of mediocrity and blandness, or offensively ugly leftist agitprop.
I remember someone looking up the names of the people credited as working Empire: Total War, and it turned out that most of them hadn't worked on a game before, but were largely sourced from the business end of the IT industry. CA pretty much hired a bunch of accountants to make the game.
You can track the degradation of Bethesda as a developer by looking up the number of people that worked on each of their RPGs, and the amount of main and side quests in the games. It used to be that devs could do astronomically more with less. Skyrim was made by 70 people and boasts around 270 quests. Starfield was made by more than 1000 people (counting the outsourcing *****), and has 200 quests, or less, and that's if you're being generous and stretch the definition of what a quest is.
Also, the elephant in the room for everyone here is the woke clowns. It's a truism that the more ******** are involved in a modding project, the less actual work gets done. One could probably crunch out a formula to determine what percentage of the team would need to ***** out for the pace of development to reach 0%. Now apply that to teams numbering in the hundreds, where managers and creative directors spend less time delegating duties and ensuring the whole team is on board with the vision, and more time playing therapist and mediator for the zoo of mental illnesses, sociopathy and narcissism running rampant in the company, and trying to keep the ****** contingent away from the women's bathroom and whatever child is unfortunate enough to have wandered onto the premises.
Is it any wonder that such a toxic human cocktail now requires ten times the budget, ten times the workforce, ten times the time to make a product that is ten times worse than what we had 10 years ago?
