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this is purely my own gut feeling and i’d love actual devs input, but i get the sense that on top of everything else collapsing, one of the big struggles in games is that the Normal Iterative Sequel, reasonably scoped and made on a quick schedule, seems to sell like six copies now

this type of game has traditionally been the bread and butter. this is what keeps lights on. but i saw that boltgun 2, by all accounts a fine sequel to a popular game from a massive brand sold like a fifth of the original numbers and was like. well what the fuck are you meant to do if not that

similarly i saw deadzone rogue get reviewbombed because they decided to make an iterative sequel a year after leaving early access rather than continuing to patch the original forever and i understand all the steps to why this happened but you have to see that infinite updates is not sustainable

I also wanna offer a generational perspective if youre a young adult who started gaming in the 2010s, whose first halo game was halo 3, your second halo game was most likely 4. Fallout new Vegas? Here's fallout 4. Dead Rising 2 or 3? Oops 4 killed the franchise.

Game sequels being iteratively better stopped being the norm back in the 7th gen. And at best the exceptional polished 2nd entry would be followed by a third that puts the series in gaming jail for a while