Things do get better and then...they get worse. My point is that no matter how great you think a developer/publisher (insert something else here) might be, they will eventually fuck up enough (due to whatever reason whether it be interference from higher up, change in leadership, greed, etc.) to where they are perceived as the bad guys. Bethesda was once heralded as a pretty solid dungeon crawler/RPG developer due to Morrowind and a much lesser extent Daggerfall. We all know how things went from there. No one ever thought they were on the scale of Fallout 1, Planescape, or Baldur's Gate but they were good for what they were, until people suddenly started thinking the top quality cRPG's weren't as good as the now more appropriately titled hiking simulator/RPG hybrids.
The game industry is doing fairly well mostly due to the indie resurgence. As an aside, how do you think gaming would be doing WITHOUT Kickstarter and indies right now? Ponder that for a bit. There would be little to no mid-tier games. That niche is being almost toally filled by these indie studios. Shit has come full circle folks. We are (kinda) back to nerds creating games in basements with teams of 5 people.
Yet the AAA developers/publishers (think EA, Activision, Square Enix, Sega, Capcom, Konami, Ubisoft, Zenimax, etc) that are part of the problem are the ones fucking up. They strictly think of profit and easy money. They don't want to take risks on new games and out-of-the-box thinking. They have all screwed up in numerous ways, some trying to redeem themselves due to past faults.
After all any company that has been around for 20 years will have some dark points in it's history. Some of them are more careless than others. "Fuck Konami" is so prevalent that it almost goes without mentioning.
The corporate types running these companies want the game boiled down to a formula, like the generic jRPG's that are flooding out of Japan in mass. Design by committee. Problem is you can't have a businessman or woman create a work of art. They aren't looking at triggering a long lasting emotional response, they are looking for a way to trick you to give them money, consume, and move on to the next one. Open world games are quickly becoming the same thing over and over. Most open world games share a lot of things in common now which does appear on the surface to be lazy, but more likely is due to consumers still eating the shit up. Mark my words that the Bethesda "formula" will be replicated, done better, and Bethesda will have some serous competition. It has already happened to a lesser extent. Next go around will be a bloodbath.
AlphaOmegaSin raises some pretty good points about all of this. When is a gaming company beyond redemption?
This all has to do with developers using fanboy praise to get away with deceitful business practices. Why did Bethesda leave Survival mode (you know the real survival mode that New Vegas did right) out of the base game while also delaying the Creation Kit? Because they want the fans money and they knew they would thank them for allowing them to pay for content that could have been free with a little modder help. Bethesda has in a sense created their own worst enemy.
I have grown up watching once great companies like Konami and Capcom turn into evil versions of themselves. Capcom has managed to improve their failings recently but you have to admit that Street Fighter V is a loaded topic. More and more DLC dripping out a bit at a time, and then the inevitable Collector/Director/GOTY/Complete edition with a smidgen of new content to make the fans buy it again.
Season Passes have become so anti-consumer I am genuinely surprised some fans are happy about saving a few bucks (not really) when they are getting robbed at the same time. It seems like they are unaware that assholes like this are LYING TO GET YOU TO PRE-ORDER AND BUY THEIR SEASON PASS! BETTER ORDER NOW BEFORE YOU LOSE OUT ON THE SAVINGS! The oldest trick in the book.
The fact that only one of the DLC's Bethesda has coming out is actually a new landmass like 99% of the other DLC is pathetic. My feelings on this is they are attempting to expand, possibly stretched a bit thin, and they know they can get by with low tier content since people bought Fallout 4 and loved it.
DLC was pioneered by Bethesda according to most console users. Somehow they were given a free pass for horse armor, and the attempted paid mods fiasco, which is just a pre-cursor to the real fuck over that is looming over us. Is this the end of the world? Nope. It doesn't end it just rolls back around and goes on and on and on and on and on and...the cycle continues.
