They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch.

In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management, economy or politics is a joke)

This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.

None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from the game directors and business people.

And for very good reasons. A huge fraction of players buy the game based on how it looks.

Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features.

Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have.

Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected.

It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know.

But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see.

If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the facts.

I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to manage it.

It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in making an actually playable game, which indicates that the problem is not something inherent but a simple product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see Creative Assembly's meltdown)

As scope increases all the organizational challenges balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous project and ready for the next phase of this new project to get to where you need them to start design levels and assets? It's much easier to fix if the additional 3 month of development is just 3 months cost of living for John Romero and John Carmack.

it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat. look at old games' credits, you'll find maybe even bigger studios (making art and programming with limited hardware was much more time-consuming....) but they had good gameplay on a much smaller budget. Today, studios waste money on analytics, governance things and other fluff...

Best case study is Mojang, the company has over 800 employees but it is literally outperformed in game design and update quality/quantity by ten people at Re-Logic. (which includes managers and legal as well!)

> it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat

Are you serious? Teams have increased massively. Super Mario Kart for example had less than 20 people working on it. That's not even the size of the audio department for many modern AAA games

Terraria started off as a 2D homage to Minecraft...The very first release basically was just a 2D version of Minecraft. It took a few updates for Terraria to become its own thing.

I enjoy both games, especially Terraria, which I have played since its original release. But let's not lie to ourselves that the volume of content updates for Terraria is anywhere close to the updates that Minecraft has received. Adding content for a 2D game is a lot easier than adding content for a 3D game, even if you're using voxels.

IMO, the parent picked a terrible example. Comparing any game to "Minecraft" doesn't make much sense to me. What even is Minecraft at this point? There seem to be a multiple versions on a multitude of platforms, some on the same platform targeting different demographics. Different changes are need to keep the different demographics hooked. Of course the original was built by a single guy which avoided all the organizational complexities.

The indies that don't make a viable product, you don't see.

That's just bias on your part.

You don't see the thousands of indie games that were never released because the creators screwed it up, or they ran out of money.

Or the indie studios who never made a second game because they didn't recoup their costs.

Indies that fail just fold and you never hear about them. AAA that fail release their games.

Sure, but this is Paradox, a company that constantly makes buckets of money on DLC for Stellaris, Europa universalis, crusader kings, etc. I doubt they were about to run out of money. They just had to release a new race of scantily dressed aliens for stellaris and they’d be good for another half a year.

Paradox is just the publisher, it's developed by Colossal Order.