I've been covering how corpos appeal more to tourists than gamers for a while now, and after seeing BattleBit Remastered dominating the Steam charts it really drives the point home. While AAA focuses on muh realism above all else, BattleBit and others like DRG are going for a simplistic yet appealing artstyle so they can focus on the GAMEPLAY. You'd think they would have learned from Minecraft over a decade ago, but I guess that's too much to ask right?

The fact is, for the most part only tourists really care about muh realism all that much. Gamers, the ones who stick with your game/IP for the long haul, would prefer decent stylized art with more of a focus on better gameplay. The reason BattleBit is able to do things AAA struggles with (such as 256 player fully destructible battlefields) is because their available resources aren't all getting eaten up by rendering hyper "realistic" graphics. And funny enough, everyone is gravitating towards it, even a lot of tourists, just cause it's a better game than the AAA competition...

As the market gets oversaturated with "realistic" lowest common denominator slop (once you make your game look "realistic", it looks just like every other realistic game lol), developers are gonna have to resort to more than just muh graphix to compete. Previously one way to differentiate yourself from the crowd was fanservice, but I guess that's not allowed in current year! Not like it would help them much anyway, since because of how they've been acting towards us this isn't something they'll be able to walk back anytime soon...

Over the past few years I've pretty much transitioned into hentai games for fanservice, so the non-fanservice games I play need to have exceptional gameplay to keep me invested. If your gameplay isn't as good as DRG or Canada Simulator I'm not going to stick around for long. If your fanservice isn't on the level of a hentai game, that's not going to be enough to maintain interest.

We're in a very interesting situation right now where the market is so saturated, and indies are making much better experiences than AAA, that there isn't any room for mediocrity in the industry anymore. AND the usual tactics corpos used to resort to when selling us on their mediocre product don't work anymore. Most of the big names are coasting along on nothing but brand recognition and nostalgia at this point, and even that's dropping with every release.

At this rate, I see the game industry struggling with about as many flops as Hollywood in the near future. Especially now that everything is also a live service, and by their very nature every live service must compete with every other live service in their attempts to monopolize your time and money.

How long until corpos throw in the towel and go back to trying to give gamers what they want again? We'll find out soon!