The whole industry seems in need of a major reset event (aka true competition).<p>We wasted a <i>LOT</i> of innovation tokens on VR, ray tracing, battle royales, etc. The availability of OSS and COTS engines has been an uplift on paper, but brought with it an entire new universe of downsides with regard to actual player experiences.<p>For better or worse, I believe that a <i>higher</i> barrier to entry is a good thing for a major creative effort like a video game or feature length film. Both of these typically require involving more than 1 human in a deep, passionate way. You really want to make sure you have the right vision & people or it's <i>going</i> to turn out shit.<p>Would you rather have 30 kinda meh games you can play for ~20-50 hours each, or 2 super incredible games that have endless replay value? At a certain point, the value proposition goes discontinuous with this form of entertainment. In my view, you should always seek this criticality and consider how severe the economics are if you fail to reach it. You can't necessarily plan to build something that will last as long as WoW from the beginning, but you can certainly ask yourselves "is this still fun to play?" on a daily basis.<p>I'm not saying we go back to the abacus, but there is a price to be paid for the level of abstraction we are operating with today. You stop thinking about things and they leak into the player feel. When you are working on top of a physics engine that you separately tuned for 1000 hours under extreme duress, you know <i>exactly</i> when something isn't quite right <i>and can do something about it immediately</i>. Every COTS engine is a very leaky abstraction that turns into a titanic disaster the moment you desire things like bespoke multiplayer or platform functionality.<p>I also think there is a vertical ownership crisis in the industry. When you have all of your assets being produced in a separate silo, you <i>should</i> expect a very manufactured look & feel when they are combined with the rest of the product. Less content would probably feel like a lot more if we'd slow down a bit and re-integrate the artists, developers, testers, etc. under fewer hats.