Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have.
I’ll extend this by saying that the Wiimote is actually pretty damn good for shooters, and particularly good for accessibility. Not having to cramp up my hands to press buttons is awesome for having arthritis. Aiming with the Wiimote and moving with the nunchuck just feel really natural, you barely have to move your fingers for anything.
If the formulas were so successful, everyone would be doing the same thing. I’d argue that Golden Age of Video Games is more so now than the far past. It’s an Age where anyone can make a video game and be recognized as being among the greatest games of all times.
Also, companies definitely take risks. They take a lot of risks, it’s just that a lot of those risks don’t necessarily play out and we never really hear about it. If you only focus on the largest companies putting their entire company on the line, then that company wouldn’t have been so successful in the past anyways. Risk doesn’t make a game good and honestly, with stuff like Game Pass these days, developers are way more likely to make riskier games when they don’t need to make a return on that game to actually keep going. For instance, Pentiment by Obsidian, in their own words, would have never been a thing if things were as they were in the early 2010s.