No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me

It just... can't appeal to a lot of people without being perfectly catered to them?

Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway),

Dude... Dark Souls is a frigging Metroidvania. And every youtube essayist looking for some clicks will point out how incredibly tutorialized Dark Souls 1 is up to the Lordvessel. People whinge that Spirit Ashes made Elden Ring too easy all while not realizing that basically every hard boss in Dark 1 and 3 has an NPC summon... and the Dark 2 SOTS update added the ones that were missing.

I love the Souls games. It is fun to pretend they are super hardcore affairs for those of us who want to drive nails into our proverbial winkies (and some. mostly non-From, ones are) but they are ridiculously mainstream games with off the chart vibes.

Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing?

I forget what the budget of Titanfall 1 and 2 were but both are very clearly A/AA games in terms of scope and what the budget "should" be. If they were actually somehow the kind of industry goliath that a GTA is then... EA done fucked up.

To put it in movie terms: You are complaining that a Michael Bay transformers is not as tight and well done as Before Midnight. They are completely different scopes.

Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.

Then don't pay for it? Again, you (and I) don't fucking matter when a significant chunk of the planet are perfectly eager to play those giant tentpole games.

You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways

Oh, well. If you are a master of the economy maybe you can fix the games industry so that there aren't massive layoffs every week?

Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price.

Again. If you actually CAN make the "jack of all trades master of none" (which is actually a complete mischaracterization of the GTAs but...) game... you make it. Because 11.21 million people who are "mostly happy" and buy it on launch (in 2013 numbers) is a hell of a lot more money than 2 million people who are "ridiculously happy" (in 2025 numbers) in the first few weeks. And, for funsies, RDR2's week two sales were 17 million in 2018

They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks.

Let's actually break that down.

Clair Obscur is a game that came out of the ubisoft content mines. We all love the idea that Guilaume Broche made it in his shed with scraps but he applied most of the game design lessons and industry connections from his time at Ubisoft (and 12 coworkers from Ubisoft) to found his studio and secure funding.

Ubisoft... is not in good shape. But, 5-10 years ago, they were very reliably in that AA/AAA space and the AssCreed games were used specifically to point out that platform exclusive games weren't the be all end all anymore and that most people were playing the same games regardless of what console they bought.

CO also is a game that came out of the "infinite money" of COVID in 2020-2022-ish. Contrast that with the modern gaming landscape where money for devs is increasingly tight and studios are getting shuttered left and right. Xalavier Nelson Jr has talked about this at length in the context of Strange Scaffold which... is kind of what everyone says they want in a studio. They make great games with a ridiculous amount of heart on time and on budget with little to no DLC. But that still costs money.

Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?

You wouldn't because you seem to think everything needs to be perfectly catered to you.

The general public does because they like 80-95% of a game and value having a great 20-30 hours with it.

AGAIN. This is not a model that most studios should follow. It was basically the killing fields back in the early-mid 2010s when studios and publishers were dropping like flies because they tried to make AA/AAA games that sold B/A numbers. Arguably, this is what has been leading to Sony and Microsoft killing SOME of their studios (less so one like Tango who get praised as what studios SHOULD be by the prick that fired them all a week or two before that interview).

Rockstar and especially GTA is not that. They are peak Transformers/MCU where they can, through one means or another, employ a significant percentage of the overall industry and still turn a ridiculous profit. And, as a result, keep those support studios open for other studios/films to use them (less so the MCU these days...).

Which gets back to: I 100% think there is an argument that AA games are a mistake. That puts studios in a very dangerous spot where they need to get amazing sales just to break even. Whereas a B/A game can be something like Clair Obscur or Armored Core 6 which is a very limited scope with the potential to branch out. But for the studios who can do AAA? They have every reason to because it makes ridiculous bank AND buoys the industry as a whole.