I’ll explain this as quick as I can. Basically the bourgeoisie that own the major studios are so obsessed with profit that they make blatantly unsustainable decisions like overmonetization and shipping unfinished games every few years. Now look what’s happening, the studios have no choice but to lay off employees to recoup the costs they inflicted upon themselves and the worst affected are the fired employees naturally.
This is honestly infuriating and insulting as someone who’s been a massive video game fan since 2019 because the franchises I took a liking to (especially Halo) had countless labor and talent (stretching decades in some cases) have been completely gone to waste publishing cookie cutter generic dogshit games for the c suite’s next payday.
Indies are no better. They also suffer from the problem of shipping unfinished games but unlike their AAA counterparts, they suffer from genuine lack of time and resources to deliver games in a timely manner. So the whole “go indie” is basically lesser evil.
Come to think of it Capitalism actually enables and rewards such incompetence as long as profits are high.
I don’t think I would have played some games I liked as much if they were shipped finished, as waiting for a new version which improved and expanded the game was always a part I liked about some indie games I played.
I wouldn’t have played Rimworld nearly as much, for exaple, if it had just come out fully formed. But the way it was released I could enjoy it thoroughly, stop for a while untile the next update and then come back to something that I liked and that was now much better than before.
If the world became fully communist now I would still like if such things still happened. Although for AAA games they should definitely be properly released, while also taking the views and ideas of those working on it into account to some extent as well. Even if usually only meant that they chose the person that would direct it and such.
Hopefully under communism video games that shaped millions of childhoods and years of video game history get preserved for future generations.
Not only preserved but made open source so the communities around them can thrive and even push those games to the limits of what people want.
Thinking about it there is not only the possibility of open source minecraft, with groups getting toghether to improve its code, but also people designing computers whose only job is to play minecraft, and the games built on that code, as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
Have you heard of minetest?
I think I agree with this, most of my favourite games right now (Dyson Sphere Program, Hades) are indie early-access games that would not have been possible in the “old style”. Those both come from studios that aren’t under real time-crunch and actually have relatively good working environment by all accounts. DSP is a small passion project from a Chinese studio that only works on that for example.
Your example, Rimworld, is probably my favourite game of all time. Part of that is the development process, but also the tremendous support from the community. Rimworld without mods would not be the same game.
Big studio AAA games could do those things too, but it is a relative rarity due to how much more profitable making a big GaS and/or DLC platform can be.