The trend of deliberately looking for negativity of your favorite company

[IkePoR]

DaveyBoy88 said:

Your own quote establishes Dark Souls as the exception - it had a low budget. AND there was DLC for it, so what do you say about that? Moreover, people (at times) WANT games with bigger budgets than Dark Souls.

From Software isn't the pinnacle of modern game design, so your example falls flat.

Uncharted, Halo, Forza etc. etc. necessitate huge budgets and consequently require high sales.

Your opinion of what "modern gaming" is supposed to be is irrlevant.  The Souls series is seen as one of the best of last gen.  Just because it ddn't have the budget of those three you mentioned doesn't mean it isn't modern.  It's gorgeous, plays extremely well and is amazing fuin - all the things those games have. 

It had DLC but it is an example of what DLC is supposed to be.  Seperate advetures that give the player a new experince, something a lot of "modern" bloated budget games don't do while they sell map packs and gold guns.

To your point of "necessitate huge budgets", I'll finish with quoting myself because maybe you missed it:

IkePoR said:

True most games won't break even if they don't hit 500k.  Yet even a niche title like Dark Souls reached it easily. If you know what you're doing, take pride in making something people will love, you won't reach CoD numbers but you will gain a dedicated audience.

When greed takes over and devs/publishers want "to reach a wider audience" and make games something they aren't, and turn everything into clones of the best selling games, that's when budgets get out of control and they end up killing themselves.

Triple A titles are usually the games that need that 500k to break even; this isn't the case when you budget, something most game companies seem to have forgotten how to do.

You can push boundaries without dumping truckloads of money into games.  It's called creativity - something we're supposed to allow game makers to lack just because they want to make a game.  You can make an extremely beautiful, extremely competent and innovative game without guaranteeing being in the red.