Why Games Now Take 6+ Years To Make

That's a little tangential though. When I'm saying (and Schreier is saying) people are expecting more, they're expecting Spider-Man or Assassin's Creed to last longer than 10-15 hours. Someone else already made Minecraft.

You’re right, we tend to distill value per dollar - but that’s a 2-dimensional equation: games can either be longer but more expensive - or shorter and cheaper.

As an extreme example, I have gotten so much value out of games like Minecraft and Vampire Survivors that my cost-per-hour played is in single-digit cents. Neither is pretty (graphically), and both were very cheap early-access titles when I bought them.

Comparatively, I can’t think of any recent AAA releases have had anywhere near the level of replayability of indie passion projects.

Bit of a tangent, but I personally think the gaming experience peaked in the PS3/X360 era - and the industry has been largely treading water ever since. Nothing that’s come out over the last two console generations couldn’t have been done on those earlier platforms (albeit with lower graphical fidelity).

The issue, in my opinion, is company size. Let's not just look at the gaming industry, but in every industry, when your company gets bigger, the decision-making process takes longer and the final result may often deviate from the initial idea, mostly because the decision is no longer made by the operational people. Say, HR may want to cut or remove certain things for liability concerns, PR the same for protecting company image, accounting for resources concern, etc. In an indie studio, it's the same few people who do everything and you may not know that you are supposed to do something or you have less mouths to feed, leading to bold decisions and masterpieces are made when you don't play safe.

It's weird to think this isn't the majority opinion. If I had to make a "best games of this decade" list, I think maybe Shadowbringers would be the only AAA project on that list.

Games made by small teams with small budgets, like Shovel Knight or Blasphemous or Stardew, are what'd be crowding the top.

You're missing the point. Spiderman and assassins creed have already been made too. And people are tired of buying 'that game you played last year but shinier and laggier and with 500 more meaningless fetch quests and collectibles to find'. Game companies will likely continue to refuse to realize this and actually innovate though, and will continue to throw more money and more people at their dying IPs with increasingly diminishing returns.

The fun is the important part, so it is better. Not that you should play it without having played 1 though but that's neither here nor there.

Or just put them in early access for 6+ years...

And none of that has to do with pointlessly high fidelity models that take too much time and people to produce

Both Spider-Man 2 and Assassin's Creed Shadows sold multiple millions of copies and made a substantial profit. They sell to the kind of the person who only buys 1-4 games per year, which is the largest segment of the market.

It was speaking more to point #3.

Yes, but: then you have RTX and shader mods even for that and you don't know what to think anymore😄

Vast majority of people don't use those

Is there a "definitive" version of Max Payne or are they all roughly the same?

They are just making safe games which are copy paste of previous games to ensure success. And are filled with repeatable content just to fill gametime table.

The King-fu mod is definitive.