Astro Bot is crushing so many narratives under his little robotic boot.
You can still make 94 Metacritic games with a head count of just 60 people. You don't need 5+ years to make a AAA game. We don't need our games to be 50 hour open-world slogs to part with our $60 (no one finishes them anyway). People care as much about neat little touches, attention to detail and
S0UL as they do about multi-million dollar set pieces.
This gen has been one of the worst of all time. It has a library problem with huge gaps between releases and needs third-party
moneyhats exclusives to carry it. PlayStation Studios and Xbox Game Studios have more studios than ever under their umbrellas yet are
less productive than ever. We've learned to cope with memes like "it's a slow year now but
next year will be the best ever!" or "well that's just how game development is nowadays".
Fuck all that. I've been banging this drum for a while and Astro Bot has manifested it:
Shorter games means
shorter development times means
more frequent games AND
lower costs AND
more focused ideas.
We need this short king renaissance. Some will say "but I just can't justify spending $60 on something that won't give me X amount of dollars per hour of value!" - to that I say: you deserve the diarrhea stained future of your own making.
