Chebucto Regional Softball Club

This isn't even something you should be doing for your devs just because being nice to them is nice. So many indies on their second and third games are showing that once you get the ball rolling on institutional knowledge (skills and tools developed during the making of a game, contributing to the next) you can SERIOUSLY up your game. And for a lot less cost than it would have been to go that big from the start. Meanwhile big studios are dumping staff and therefore expertise like it's no big deal. Switching to a revolving door of subcontractors who can't possibly get to intimately know the games they work on.

Accurate. Also who did this? Did someone take Razira from her?

SHE'S BACK INJECT THE CUTENESS INTO MY VEINS

I assume you're referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen? These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be "in development". But I'd hardly call it a boom. There's only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don't really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases. Then there are games that really do use the "Early Access" model to fund getting the game made. It's not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get to something in exchange for your money, immediately. And it hss brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace... Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before "1.0" dropped and became the explosive success it is today. Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please _the players_. I don't really see why you'd be salty about this psrt of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that's true whether a game is finished or not.

It wont. ET only had the impact it had because the industry was small. Relatively speaking. Today, production (both indie and AAA tbh) is diverse enough, that no one game could ever taint the whole industry to that extent again.

_the kawaii goblin withdrawal is getting bad_