You’re not wrong but as a long time fan of the original Ghost Recon I must admit it burns me pretty bad to see the franchise treated like that.
I’d rather watch it die a honored death rather than… that.
That said, it’s probably some fun games.
You make some excellent and indisputable points, Jedi, and most eloquently.
I was a studio executive involved in the development and production of movies in the ‘90s. From that perch, I watched as corporatisation, greed and the ability of sophisticated marketing to lower audience expectations in ways convenient to the content-makers brought about a huge and probably irreversible decline. We will still have good movies just as we will have good games but this one is the gaming equivalent of the worst of corporate Hollywood; vacuous, lazy and formulaic. Your argument makes good economic sense but I feel we need to hold these corporations to higher standards by not buying trash when they take their audience for granted, or trash is all they will make and ultimately it will be all we can expect.
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I honestly do not see a way out of it. In exactly the same way that you probably felt like you were talking to a wall in trying to change the course of what you experienced.
I don’t know if you saw this or not, but it seems for video games there is a binary decision tree.
If game (or film?) makes more money/profit than predecessor = all the changes we made from previous title are justified, if we keep changing we can increase it more!
If game makes less money/profit than predecessor = all the changes we made weren’t enough to save it, the audience is moving away from these types of games and we should focus our investments elsewhere.
The fact that they are either unwilling or unable to see that the changes they made might have caused the decline in sales always means the next one in the series will deviate from what came before, good or bad. From the outside, it seems that the studio industry has the same ideas internalized. While a director or writer or producer here or there might offer a mea culpa and admit they got it wrong, it seems the studios writ large blame the consumers for changes in their taste. It worked, we know what they want! It failed, they don’t know what they want!
I can’t argue that they shouldn’t go where the ROI will be best as, like the big studios, they are publicly traded companies and need to show profit/growth/etc. It just seems like the mid-budget (by today’s standards) titles have been abandoned in favor of either low-budget indie jobs or tentpole splashes trying to spend a ton to make a ton squared.
I also don’t believe that they’re all stupid and make bad choices all the time as a result. I think some are smarter than we think and it’s a cynical ploy to get the most money for their effort and the actual quality is not important. They might be poisoning the well for future entries, but as long as they can pin their hat on the success of THIS one, their bonuses and reputation will take it.
I’m always reminded of the scene in Big where Tom Hanks is sitting in on the new toy development meeting and he’s looking at a Transformers derivative that is a robot that becomes a building because their research says toys that change are the next wave and blah blah and he just asks “What’s fun about a building?” They all give him blank stares as they are unable to understand what he means. It ticks the boxes their research pointed out, how can it fail?