I didn't say that there were no worthwhile creative works being made today. There certainly are, but they are few and far removed and there are more and more bricks being put in your way when you want to get to them. Algorithms make actual discoveries impossible. There are fantastic movies on Netflix from all around the world that the service will never ever recommend you, no matter how long you scroll through their site. Global distribution through the internet is a scam, if everything is just a click away you are only in competition with every other artist on the world, all the while peoples attention spans are being sold to the lowest bidder. Back when you had videostores or recordstores you had actual human beings who you could ask for recommendations, you could walk through the aisles and just pick out whatever looked interesting.

And even besides that, the economic realities of being an artist today are just going to make it more difficult to make good art. Why were there so many great artists in new york in the 70s and 80s? Because the rent was low. You won't make great art if you have to work 60 hours a week just to pay your rent. Gentrification kills the scene.

Considering basically everything in the world has been going downhill over the last decades as late stage capitalism takes over every part of our western societies, it is a complete fallacy to think that art could somehow be immune from that.

At least according to themselves, Sony is making more money with Playstation right now than they ever have. They sold 60 million of these things. People just want a console to play Call of Duty and FIFA on, that the thing doesn't have exclusives is completely irrelevant to those people.

Someone or something took all of my dopamine and ran away with it. Please come back I need this stuff

I genuinely doubt there are more than a handful of creatives in the industry who even know anything other than the trends. It's not like the vast majority of indie devs produce anything other than cheap uncreative attempts at copying some other big indie hit. The gaming industry is simply creatively bankrupt to the core, gamers are too stupid to make art.

I mean the question really is just whether capitalism is pulling the rug too early or if mass media and surveillance has already established sufficient control over people's minds to fully indoctrinate enough people. And it's really impossible to underestimate how much more directly controlling mass media has become over the last half century.

I'll believe it when I see it, I don't know if they can really make a game about finding your dad/some mcguffin in a whacky but often hostile world work

im sure the people who work at the studio mean well and it obviously sucks that people got laid off, but there's few other things less appealing than when someone describes the thing they are working on as "intellectual property". like the quote about "proving themselves to the fans of the IP" just completely robs me the wrong way.

I really wish the team that made Disco Elysium had gotten the chance to make another "whatever-the-hell-they-wanted-to-make" but that sure seemed like wishful thinking.

edit: also describing your own thing as "110% authentic" to some older thing you made before is just cringe, the hell do i give a shit if its authentic to some other thing i liked, the thing should stand on its own

If you look at the show on its own it's totally fine entertainment (way better than anything westworld certainly), but as an adaptation of a videogame series called Fallout it takes out everything that might make an adaptation of that series interesting while also making the source material much less interesting and resonant in the process. I might do a longer write-down at some point if I feel like it, but it's 100 percent "Bethesda™s Fallout: Skyrim with Guns Edition" taking over the series and its lore. There is some stuff that is good and works (the brotherhood guy is exactly the type of facist dudebro the brotherhood would create) but also so much of it just feels like corporate-brained nonsense.

sometimes I feel like the us is entirely made up

It's pretty enjoyable for what it is, which is a Bethesda™ Fallout story, just with characters you might actually care about and a story that basically works. There's also a surprising amount of stuff that is set pre-war and they really go for it with "filling out" the backstory of Fallout and changing the status quo of its world, it's just a shame that everything they do lore-wise makes the world less interesting and less resonant. It is fully Bethesda™ Fallout.

when you're talking about triple-A games

biggest fucking asterisk in the world

That and that there were historically low interest rates and the fact that gaming and tech in general saw a huge boost during COVID that has started to subside last year added to the obvious bubblr