The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.

I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I'd say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I've watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it's not a fantastic game and I don't plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the "Ubisoft = shit" bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.

Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade's Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were "Ubisoft Southern Northland" and "ubisoft = shit".

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.

Its easy to forget that a lot of these overarching publishing houses have a bunch of smaller shops underneath. Larian could just as easily have been a small house operating under the Ubisoft or Activision or Sony mega-publishing brand. The problem with these small studios is how the parent company routinely shoves them into crunch mode and guts their staff between launches. Ubisoft Zurich, for instance, was spun up to develop MMOs for the German/Swiss market, but shuttered two years later when the parent company decided it wasn't worth the effort. Wolfpack Studios, started in 1999, was bought up by Ubisoft in 2004 and shut down two years later, with the founders having abandoned the project to start a new studio.

Mario + Rabbids looked fun, without a doubt. But who knows what's going to happen to Ubisoft Milan and Paris in another five years, if the gaming market continues its downturn? When all the talented developers are laid off and the remains of the studio become a bunch of poorly paid prompt engineers, what is a sequel going to look like?