This makes no sense, what is a 'low effort environment' in your opinion? Is it letting a developer delay a game to their requirement instead of pushing it out much earlier when its nowhere near feature/content complete? Is that what you're calling a low effort environment ?
For the second line, a shadow dropped game like Hi-Fi Rush, which came out without absolutely any pre-release hype or marketing, got 2 million players in 1, 2 weeks. A good game will be a success.
Yeah. This is a game that has been in dev since 2017. Hardly low effort. MS delayed it by a year. Zenimax would’ve never done that.
I think blaming this on gamepass, series s, or the xsx specs is a bit misguided. Its probably a combination of everything plus a lack of dev resources, engine limitations, and the perils of multiplatform development for first party studios. We are expecting them to retain the polish expected from first party titles but they are literally expected to ship three versions of day one despite the game being an exclusive.
I think people see gaas games and immediately conflate them with trash like fortnite, apex legends and warzone. Not trash in terms of quality but clearly they aren’t your full $60 titles. But pve games like destiny, division, gotham knights and redfall anything but low effort. It’s just that the genre limits them to a certain budget which makes them look cheap. I’m sure there are very deep underlying systems that they spent years developing. As much as i hate watxone, getting it to run at 60 fps while rendering a massive open world is a completely different engineering challenge for a studio used to doing tiny 6v6 maps for a decade.