It's not just Fallout, the industry as a whole has came up with like... one good triple A game in the last decade? And a myriad of super costly crap that takes 10 years to develop and they hype since pre-production only to come out with results made even more disappointing due to the inflated hype they generated. So yes, I guess someone really has to go back to make 1 year in development games that are simple but good. Make it as basic AF, 2d, whatver, and use creativity to get over technical and time limitations, since it looks like with evolution in technology developers only became lazy and less creative.
These days games are only either lacking in resources indie or super edge overfinanced pieces of crap. No one has figured to put down some moderate ammount of resources to generate something in between that's good.
It is basically the same in Hollywood, an industry I feel the game industry is mimicking a lot.
From constantly milking out classic and beloved franchises and often diminishing them with every new incarnation, adapting IPs from other media *, to investing so much into it that they have to appeal to as much people as possible.
* Now adapting popular IPs from another medium is not a bad thing, people who read Spider-man or Batman or watch Star Wars would love to play as those characters and into that universe. I myself love the Jedi Knight games, Yoda Stories, Kotor 1 & 2, and Indiana Jones.
And I also feel that games can help spread awareness of book or comic IPs that deserve much more attention.
And in many regards video game developers have been handling comics, book, and movie licenses much better than their Hollywood counterparts who as I describe it often seem to want to make 'their' version of a character or a book.
No you asses, we want to see adaptations of the comics or books and not your take on these stories.
Create your own characters and stories if you can't do a proper movie adaptation.
I feel that in the last ten, twenty, no perhaps thirty years now Hollywood producers, writers and company executives have been focusing more and more on the 'Hollywood Blockbuster'. The big hyped movie like you said
Gonzales that has to be a smash hit and bring in the millions to pay for itself and its marketing and make a big profit in order to be successful.
And these days it now also needs to carry a social political message and viewpoint but that is a discussion of a different topic.
The number of small movies produced by major studios that don't require big budgets, highly paid actors (for some upcoming actors this is the start of their big break) and don't require a massive audience and return has been declining. Only a few smaller or indie studios that try to fill this void.
After Disney bought Fox one of its first actions was closing one of its subsidiaries (I think it is called that) or smaller studios. This particular studio focused on producing smaller, 'medium' budget movies if you will based on original scripts or adaptations of books that were relatively well received but not mass market hits that focused on genres that you don't see often in major blockbusters.
Think drama, detective stories (think not such overdone detective stories like when Hollywood does Sherlock Holmes for example, more the slow building detective), those sort of things.
Basically the medium game projects you have been talking about.
Perhaps I did not even have to make this analog for comparison but I felt like bringing it up.
Big game studios like big Hollywood studios have become so blinded by the big major successes like Marvel movies, older successes like the Lord of the Rings movies. and everything else that brought in billions that that is all they want to focus and invest in, no longer wanting to do the medium size projects (well in game studio cases they tend to bring in smaller studios like mobile developers) which don't require big returns but do help keep the company afloat and help diversify their assortment of products, being able to focus on genres and interests that would be a lot riskier to do if one developed a triple A budgeted game for it.
Of course it creates a lot of room for indie developers to fill those niches. But those could lack the experience or the budget (I guess these studios sort of live on paycheck to paycheck) to do a lot of these 'medium' size projects.
Big studios don't want to these projects any more and small studios can find it difficult to find any investors willing to put in money in such projects.
BTW, I am talking about games on the PC (perhaps also Mac) in the late 90s and early 2000s, and not the loads of 8 bit like NES style games (why is the Master System always ignored, its games looked loads better), the 16 bit style games (Sega and Nintendo) or games that seek to emulate the styles of the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, or early PC CGA style.
Ugh everything I just wrote is not new to most of you.
It doesn't even offer any kind of solution.
If I recall correctly movie studios or at least game studios used to have one major project and several medium and smaller ones in development during any time, trying to spread their investments as much as possible in order not to be hit too severe should one of these projects fail on the market.
