Yes, they had to go because six fucking years is really insane.
I'm not sure what the devil happened after 2013, but game developers have generally gotten incredibly bad. We have a lot of wank now, and it seems like a lot of the old school talent simply vanished.
We can all see and understand it. There's a serious problem with game development at the moment.
Because of this, Unreal 5's present focus on Clair Obscur conveys the notion that there is far too much unconscionable filler occurring, which begs the question, "What the hell is going on?"
Things have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
What went wrong? The expectation that every game needs to be a huge open world game with RPG mechanics, crafting, or a full featured free to play moonshot, with excellent graphics and performance, and (mostly) simultaneous multiplatform releases. To be honest, devs abusing the "hours per dollar" metric just might be the source of this.
In order to do all of this you need a senior, experienced team with a focused design. Look at how buggy and broken even the biggest, best games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were upon release. And that was with them only having a fraction of the requirements most games have today. Everything you add to a game increases its complexity exponentially, that's just how software development is.
That and the industry has scaled up immensely. We are awash in great games to play, there just isn't enough time for them anymore. Gaming has grown and the amount of people working in the industry is gigantic. We used to have discussions back in the day about if gaming would ever be as big as the movie industry, and it was an actual debate. The talent didn't disappear - it's still there. It's just these teams are releasing less frequently, and they can get lost in the deluge of shovelware and yearly CoD/sports games. There are more excellent games than ever, but there's even more mediocrity and significantly more crap.
Finally, maybe the biggest factor which has fueled all of this is cheap money. Near zero interest rates for over a decade after the Great Recession meant a flood of money into ventures that were not so profitable, because why not? It fueled a lot of waste, and the business and development dark patterns we are criticizing that are now unsustainable now that you can't just loan money to fund projects gone wrong with minimal cost. Now it's very expensive, and it gets worse the longer your game takes to ship. A 5% APY loan over 5 year development time (assuming you aren't paying it back until your game ships and makes money) costs you 27% of how much you originally borrowed, where as a 1% or 2% loan would only cost 5% or 10% more over that same timeframe. It makes an enormous difference in planning, and that is why you see companies freaking the fuck out about controlling their costs leading to layoffs and cancelled projects. They realize we aren't getting cheap money again, and the greedy bastards thought the decade of free money would last forever.
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