I have a feeling that not many around here will be willing to listen or agree, but let's give it a shot anyway
I think the main problem is that for some reason people have started to see $50 as a huge investment for a new game. This is of course the result of the endless sales on Steam and similar platforms. But consider this; A new game in 1990 also cost around $50. Inflation dictates that the cost should be considerably higher now. Salaries for game devs have followed the inflation, and so has marketing. Personally I think $50 for 25 hours of good entertainment is very reasonable, and $10 is ridiculously cheap.
Yeah, sometimes games are released in a buggy state. That was also the case in 1990… but possibly, because patching is so much easier now, it happens more often these days. I don't know, perhaps we have our rose tinted glasses on when thinking back. Or we were more willing to work around the bugs (let's call it quirks) back then?
Take PoE as an example, which was mentioned earlier. Yes, they keep patching it - because they can. But holding out on playing it is, in my opinion, ridiculous. I played it more than a year back and didn't have any problems. It was AT LEAST as stable and bug free as any 1990 CRPG I remember playing.
I'm also hard pressed to remember any game from back then with as much and as detailed (and expensive to develop) content that we see in some of the big AAA games these days. But people always expect that these days.
So combined:
- People have become extremely cheap, and will wait until a game is $20 before buying
- They expect tons of polished and complicated content
- They complain more about bugs. And with the Internet it's easy to be extremely vocal..
Not hard to understand why AAA is having a hard time.
In my opinion we're busy killing off our own hobby with our unrealistic expectations…
The math is simple; it cost X amount of $$$ to develop a big AAA game, meaning that we have to sell Y amounts of full-priced copies to break even. Y is a very high number…
If we don't break even, then eventually the business model doesn't make any sense, and AAA will be a thing of the past. Some might be OK with that, but I'll be sad the day I cannot play games like Witcher 3 anymore.