The last exciting western video game was cyberpunk 2077 and technically it's Polish not American. Even that was a shitshow.
Elden Ring meanwhile is game of the year. The year before that Death stranding was the big game everyone talked about.
The Last of US 2 went down the shitter too. Horizon zero dawn was crap too.
Last time a western game didn't disappoint and was really good was either God Of War or Spiderman 2018.
Since then there has been no worthwhile game that I can think of that's coming out of the western world except for GoW2.
Why have western games become so shit?
Are Americans not worries that they have lost the culture war? That all of video game culture that is successful seems to be coming from Japan and South Korea? Or does the current day US consider them equivalent to Italy and Spain?? That is the only way this state of affairs makes sense to me.
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capitalism - general safety and focus on numbers. Means taking fewer risks, trying to sell more guns/bigger map/etc. as innovation, aggressive monetization, dumbing down to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, rushing releases, jumping on trends, big focus on personalization and individual identity with heroes, cosmetics, loadouts etc. instead of fixed identity characters that can be more fleshed out.
balooning costs (kinda ties in with the first one)
market saturation of sorts, the market hasn't really expanded as much as many have perhaps hoped over the last 15 years or so, except mobile. You either shit out something that attracts wide audience which usually means certain compromises, or try to carve out a niche and target mostly autists and tryhards if it's a MP game
general decline in ingenuity of developers - it's mostly soys, wannabe artstrags, people who can't find jobs in better paying industries
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