[oersted]

I agree, again, there's a surprising endemic difficulty throughout the whole industry to empower decent writers and designers to make properly engaging and interesting games, and that's not really a budget issue. There's a comparison to be made with Amazon Prime's big-budget flops like Rings of Power, but others like HBO or Apple TV are still managing to reward and empower good writers.

It must be an underlying systemic issue, they are not stupid. They keep betting big on things that are obviously doomed from the outset to any average gamer, but they are blind to it. They think these bets are safe because they appeal to a wider audience, but they end up making them even riskier because they don't appeal to anyone.

On Valve, they have been doing their own thing for like 15 years. They flirted with being a normal games studio in the Half-Life and Portal era, but that didn't last long. It's not just Steam, most of their games like Dota, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress are still always at the top of the charts in active players, they require such minimal maintenance, and they are wildly profitable due to user generated content and item trading economy. Steam Deck has been surprisingly successful too, and they've taken a decent piece of the pie in VR.