Patch Notes #3: The game industry is becoming an innovation wasteland

I don't understand high-end console gaming. The always-online requirement to play offline content that can be revoked at any point. The mediocre graphics. The unskippable/unmoddable games that you can't even resell after you've finished them.

I get having your mates around and you all share a screen or have four split-screens to have fun on, but these games don't really exist anymore in the push to have you play your friends online instead of there in person. I get that people have busy lives and can't always be there, so for a lot of use-cases online play makes sense... but when they are there, it'd be nice to have that couch gaming option via a console.

If it's just online play, then what seems rational to me is to just have a high-end PC and come to the realisation that gaming has left the living room and is now in the private confines of the study/bedroom.

Were big-studio games ever innovative? Seems most innovative games were gambles by smaller studios that sometimes propelled those studios into acclaim. Sometimes the larger studios katamari damacy up successful features (e.g. light crafting, light soulslike combat) into their series, but that's only a decade after it's been proven successful.

Something as creatively risky as Outer Wilds, Heaven's Vault, or Paradise Killer could never come from a big studio.

I wonder what the margin on this thing is? And the original?

If the original was selling at a loss, I’d wonder if they just needed an excuse to raise the price.