It’s certainly true that the indie market is better about that stuff, but the indie market also generally isn’t considered the driver or trend-setter of the overall games market the way AAA studios are. It would be amazing if that trend shifts, don’t get me wrong, but until or unless it does, I don’t see this going well overall. It does, though, mean that people who care will still have options, and that’s good, so solid point.
I figure the digital-only consoles are a stepping stone toward this. I’d never consider one myself because if I don’t own a copy of the game that I can sell, I’m not paying for it just in principle. But a ton of people wanted the convenience over the practicality of resale. Digital-only consoles have basically killed the physical game market going forward, since it’s been basically dead on PC for ages. I see the same thing happening with the consoles themselves. I mean ps+ already has a streaming option and a substantial portion of their catalogue is only available to play that way. I’m sure Xbox has the same thing, probably with a similar portion of content locked behind streaming from their servers. I don’t even really understand why they would do this since the bandwidth to stream is far higher than to download and play offline, so I have to assume there’s something behind it like a push toward that model. Get people used to it as an option, then make it the only option.
And there’s nothing indie studios can really do about those big trends led by big studios/companies, except to quietly keep doing what they were already doing, and make a huge fuss about it when they get their 15 minutes like larian has done. Wake up as many people as you can sort of thing.
I suspect the population needs to see nothing happen if they vote in a blue wave, and I suspect it’s going to need to get worse… not that I don’t support voting, but right now there’s still too much faith that the system will correct itself. If you aren’t constantly consuming political news, you might think the lip service is actually doing something, and with the constant barrage of shit, people can honestly be forgiven too since extent for not knowing exactly how things are playing out with challenges and stuff.
It would be nice if it did correct course with voting, but I don’t think it will. At least not without a bigger shakeup (like actually progressives in place of dinos, flipping gerrymandered red districts, etc.) than 2026 midterms are likely to deliver…