It is very very funny to me that the AAA gaming industry has basically made their own projects completely untenable to produce because they need so many engineers and artists producing the highest fidelity content and engines possible and so now they need like at minimum 500 people over a 4-6 year period to produce a game that typically has the exact same gameplay as something produced 15 years ago. And they're like "wow we need to raise the price of games to compensate for all this added cost we added to the production of our games". And the solution is right there, quit wasting time with chasing constantly new art assets and better engines, and just reuse the shit you already have. Fromsoft and RGG (Yakuza devs) ship more games with more interesting things than all the western AAA publishers produce in ten years. And they need like 8 months of patches to make them actually run anyways.

Oh and let's not forget most consumers probably can't even tell the difference between 1080 and 420, let alone 4k versus 1080. I know all my normie family over the age of 50 can't. So they're pursuing ever higher graphical fidelity for literally no reason.

The industry is a joke. Indie games are all I need.