Not trying to sound like I have rose tinted glasses or whatever but lots of my favorite AA+ games, including AAA, are so low effort now. My favorite game ever is World of Warcraft, and it’s just shocking seeing how little content you get for your $15 a month. They have been drip feeding it for years, now they are going so far as to sell early access to the next expansion for even more money. It’s insane to me. People will pay $30 extra just to access the exact same amount of content, for just a few days earlier. That’s crazy.
Another game that I have really come to enjoy lately is Genshin impact from Hoyo. This is a gacha game, But it’s still relatively fun to play with no monetary investment at all because of how generous they are with being able to obtain the in-game currency, the entire storyline basically is available without any paywall. Cannot say this for a lot of games. You want to play the new Call of Duty or something, $70 minimum. You want to play Starfield, $70. That game was not even half finished upon release and they are still working on it! So gacha games aren’t exactly a bad deal if you take that into account. $0 investment some people spend hundreds on it of course. But still, they are for the most part extremely high quality…
Zenless Zone Zero though is so low effort it’s crazy. It’s just a half-hearted eroge/erotica game. It launched with tons of questionable imagery of imaginary women who are very young, they look like they are 15 years old or younger and half dressed. No healer like other games, so content is extremely challenging. They ignored most feedback from the beta about game features that people didn’t enjoy like the TV system which is globally hated by everyone, and there were tons of comments on their official forums back in December of people saying they didn’t like the system and that it was a really bad system, they launched it in this terrible state anyway even knowing people didn’t like it. Now, after release, still no healer like other games, there’s no support system like star rail and Genshin have so you can’t have a friend to come help you, you can’t borrow a character from someone else. The game is literally half finished garbage and people are just raving over it because of skimpy characters who look like they are 12 years old. Like wow…
I could give you a dozen more examples but these are the ones that are most obvious to me.
Having played most of these indie games already, I agree with you completely. Indie gaming is awesome, and I can’t wait to see what new games are developed. I’m also hoping to develop my own title, but I have first hand experience with development, and it’s a crazy amount of work. It’s going to take me at least 12 months Just to even get the first town or area in my game done because of how much learning I have to do, how much design and development, then coding. Truly astounding how much work goes into creating something incredibly small scale. These big massive companies with billion-dollar equity behind them, They have all these crazy resources to Create these games absurdly fast. They can just plop down a resource generated set of walls and textures, and in days, You have an entire town created. I’ve seen it done, makes me kind of jealous and hope that indie developers can get this kind of stuff later on