"Overhaul" please stop.

[Dzian]

I absolutely agree with OP on every point he has made. Trust me, I know all companies want is money/numbers. That’s all that matters to them. However, maximizing those numbers should also be a priority. You cannot maximize numbers if you’re only catering to one audience. (Casual oriented stuff) Because if you cater to both types of audiences (casual players and serious players) you get the most out of those numbers.

The issue here is that it that attempt to maxi.ise numbers that totally destroys games a d the primary reason so many AAA franchises have been killed off is because they dumb things down so much that everything that made the game great and popular is lost.

And when you look at some of the most successful games of the last couple of years you'll find that many of them are actually more of the nicher titles than not. Things like God of war a game that was made purely for its fan base. And every decision was quality of product before quantity of sales. And in delivering that amazing product sales came naturally.

In MMOs this also brings true. It's why developers like CCP still make a killing on EVE despite being a fairly niche MMO. And yet games like XIV are constantly trying to real in new players to stay afloat because the players it does pull in generally dont stick around very long because the quality of the game is pretty mediocre really and thus people get bored fast.

Capcom did an interview with kotaku I think it was some time ago now. Where they said the focus on simplifying games for wider audiences is having a hugely negative impact on major franchises. It's one of the big reasons they been doing the resident evil reboots to push the franchise back towards a more in depth survival horror instead of the run and gun shooter it turned into with later games.

And it's something yoshi even brought up at an interview about a year ago. That of the final fantasy franchise is to survive long term. It needs to move away from the mainstream audiences and go back to its fan base.

It's also why free to play is in the state it's in. Once dubbed as the future of all gaming more and more gamers completely avoid it. Because free to play is generally perceived as low quality games that try to milk your money off you fast because you'll be bored of it in a few days. And knowing this essentially means it's not even worth the effort to download.

The industry as a whole is bigger than ever and spends more on games than ever before. And that looks good from a business perspective. But on a consumer level consumers are spending less because the quality of products has dropped significantly. People are maybe only buying 2 or 3 games a year where they used to buy 1 a month or something because so much of what gets released these days is mediocre junk. Even AAA titles which is why so many end up flopping and underperforming.