EDIT: I really F'd up the formatting, the following is in response to Curl:

I get your point on disliking certain character art styles, and I do find certain styles off-putting. But, personally, I wouldn't want to play either of those characters :)

But, it looks like, at least on the bottom game, there are lots of better options.

I dunno about that, the rest of the cast are mostly pretty awful looking too:

But not so terrible as the first one.

I never want to see Concord characters again.

I have liked this year a lot for new releases. Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. Cosmic Fantasy Collection. FF7 Rebirth. Granblue Relink. Stellar Blade. Persona 3 Reload. Robocop. Macross Shooting Insight. Radirgy 2. Eiryuden Chronicles. Warhammer 40K Boltgun. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2. Slave Zero X. Paper Mario TTYD remake. SMTV-Vengence. Gundam Breaker 4. Later this year DQIII Remake. Physical of Capcom Fighting Arcade collection. Ys X. Metaphor looks amazing and unique.

Sure none of these are 10 million sellers.  Maybe SM2 will be? But they are mostly small to mid-budget games (I said most as SM2/FF7R are obviously not small-budget) and have sold well. Relink sold over a million launch month. Stellar Blade as well. There are a lot of good smaller to mid-budget games that did well. I can't speak on Helldivers 2 and Wokong and such. Did not play them. I think a lot of success in 2024 and my fave year of games since 2022. 2023 was mostly a slog for me. I think where the saturation is are mostly gaas titles. Also, games that are the same AAA dredge we see year after year. Some of those maybe people are sick of. Concord has been discussed to death. I think Ubisoft fatigue is setting in for many. Did for me many years ago. Who would have thought in terms of sales that Grandblue Fantasy Relink would be a big success and a AAA online shooter would be the biggest disaster in years? Sony's best new IP this year was a Korean single-player action game. I think mid-budget tastes are catching a wider net and more of the same AAA shit for some fatigue has set in. So an Xdefiant or Outlaws or COncord is just a big meh. Even among gaas games people say HD2 is different. I have to take their word for it. People seem to want something different in general. I know I do.

Hellblade 2 was on gamepass, and was an average game at best. Star wars got a lot of average reviews aswel.

No.

Holy... Did they employ people on fiver? I've seen better Deviant art amateur mock ups of Original characters. The one in the suit is what every fashion artist starts with before they start adding their creative process. I've never seen such soullessness and now I realise how much character design actually means to these games even though you only get to see them in the menu. 

I'd say we're currently in white noise period of gaming.

I have to say there is something to be said about it though for GaaS games but I think only one type of consumer is effected here and even then it's a stretch cause live service gamers play single player too. They industry is competing for a finite amount of time, the more of these games they put out the more chance of failure, the more it takes away from another title. Even FF14 and WoW have the problem that they're competing with GaaS games now, ones you wouldn't expect would overlap but do like Honkai star rail and other gatcha games and silly little streamer games cause WOW and FF14 content creators diversified there content recently. Diablo and POE are competing with more than ever and now streamers are pulling up old games like Grim Dawn and causing more of a split. Hero shooters are out of style but the player base is right there playing The Last Decendant and the like. It's odd, they can't rely on the costumers in this space for anything yet they keep trying to grab lightning in a bottle, qll they are really doing is shaking around the lightening as they shift the consumers from one game to another. The one constant that remains is single player games, make them good enough and you have profit, it's just that, that profit isn't high enough apparently. Keep chasing these trends and that'll be the least of the worries. They'll tank everything and leave only indie developers until players regain faith in games when everything is a flop cause right now Fair Game$ could be an amazing game but people are going to automatically treat it with hesitation and apprehension and when that starts happening for every GaaS game that whole sub division of the industry collapses if it isn't already in the process of happening.

The game industry is in terrible shape! The game industry is in great shape!

Both sentences are true at the same time. If you look at the classic big publishers, they struggle. The project get too expensive and take too long and then are greeted with lukewarm response. If you look outside these classic publishers you see big successes, as mentioned before Palworld, Wukong and so on do pretty well. I think the big publishers are caught in a trap of their own design. As gaming revenues increased, especially during the pandemic, they invested big too grow, but also wanted to streamline the process and create more benefits. So they chased the already successful dragons: Fortnite, Overwatch and so on. But in the process they alienated the creatives. They moved away and left the industry or opened their own studios. Now the big publishers meet the after-pandemic lull with very big and very expensive games that are streamlined in many board meetings and thus devoid of any creativity or uniqueness. And now the publishers look in horror as the public response is lukewarm at best and don't understand what is going wrong. While the creatives outside of the big publishers show them off with creative games. So, the industry is in terrible shape for big publishers. The industry is full of promise and has a bright future for creatives that stand outside the big companies. And yes, overtime the now creative indies will grow into the slow and uncreative corporate mess the big publishers are today. They once were creative indies themself.

BTW, I think GTA VI will be a defining moment. A lot rides on it's promise and I don't think it will become a financial failure, simply because so many are hyped for it. But that especially can lead to big problems if all the overhyped gamers find that the game itself might be big but not special. Because nothing indicates to me, that they evolve much from the formula they created with Vice City and San Andreas. Many will enjoy the game for what it is, but compared to the hype they will feel unfulfilled, because the game in the end can only be more of the same not something revelatory. At least I doubt it. So reception of GTA VI could be very mixed, which would be a problem for the big publishers going forward. Or they really pull it off and people are excited and the industry will chug along a few more years.