"When asked how he feels about there being less prolific “auetur” developers in the scene, like Hideo Kojima, Suda51, SWERY, and Kenji Eno, Niikawa suggests that this might be due to the “corporate” nature of the video game industry. “That’s a bit unfortunate, to be honest. To put it in my own words, I feel like the salaryman-ification of creators keeps progressing,” he says. For context, a “salaryman” in Japan refers to white-collar workers, employed at large corporations, who stereotypically prioritize work over anything else and are subservient to their organization."

"On the other hand, when you’re a developer who works for a company, various other factors, like company policies and decision-making, as well as profitability, come into play, making it more difficult for “individuality” to come through..."

Isn't this also happening in the West? In any case, AAA rarely appeals to me; almost underground-like indies/mods/Foss games are the places to find the really experimental works.

I am having a little fever with Ultima Underworld/King's Field dungeon crawling, so I guess I am pulling the trigger on Monomyth and Lunacid xD

"To say that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are into live-service games is only half the story. These games offer a social space for players to hang out and be creative. For them, it's not about winning in a competitive online shooting match but about expressing themselves and exploring in a virtual sandbox."

"Plus, just because Gen Z and Gen Alpha not playing those $70 titles now doesn't mean they won't in the future. Yguado believes that those players will "graduate" from Roblox and other sandbox titles, although they probably won't be leaving Roblox forever. Games won't be going away just because Roblox is around. You just have to meet new players where they are and on their own terms."

"Use of generative AI among game developers has declined after rising sharply in 2025, according to new data from the Game Developer Collective and Omdia. The survey shows 29% of developers reported using generative AI tools in early 2026, compared with 36% during the same period in 2025."

I find my brain extremely happy when a game provides ample opportunity to make connections, like in Dwarf Fortress, where I watch an event unfold, which can stir my creativity and imagination like nothing else. Writing a story out of it is extremely smooth and easy compared to other sandbox games.

I also find myself in love with immersive sims like Desu Ex and Thief, where level design and exploration take a front seat, every map is like a big playground with verticality and branching paths, where you find secrets and lore hidden around every corner in an atmospheric world.

What is immersion to you?

This might be unpopular, but it feels like the “redemption” story around No Man’s Sky has become more of a cultural comfort narrative than an honest look at what happened.

Let’s be real — most of those updates were just delivering delayed promises, not generosity. The game we were originally sold was missing a lot of advertised features, and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying. On top of that, every update brings more bugs and half-fixed systems, and the community acts like free beta testers for Light No Fire, while still framing it all as “passion” and “commitment.”

It’s like Hello Games built a shoddy, unfinished building, declared it open anyway, and then decided to use it as a testing ground for their next building — and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.

So why do people keep buying into this narrative? Because it’s a comfortable story? Or is it somekind of parasocial relationship going on there?

NMS made 78 million in 2016, this can't be compared to a failed AAA game or indies where devs walk away from financial failure, another emotional argument?

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2016/09/30/august-2016-digital-sales-report-no-mans-sky-generated-78-million/)

According to the number of upvotes, it seems that their angst is a reflection of the game industry in general. Hello Games had indeed performed to expectations by not walking away, but does that warrant mythologising the redemption arc? Even when the state of the game is buggy?

When someone repeats an argument that has been proven false /badly argued many times before, but keeps repeating it in hopes of drowning out opposition or derailing a thread. Yet not disruptive enough to get banned on forums, as it wraps itself in non-hostile, nicely written sentences.

How exactly do moderators deal with this kind of behaviour?