But it doesn’t have cutting edge graphics now that it’s 7 years older just because it technically runs on the newer version of the engine under the hood. It runs on phones, after all.

The flagship Unreal 5 game released on Unreal 4 in 2017 has outdated graphics, yes.

I’d make that trade, easily. More often I find games these days are too long to their own detriment than that they felt like they ought to be that long. Your mileage may vary on a game by game basis, but in general, that’s how it’s been lately.

It’s true, and I’d certainly like to see some of these studios try to target making many games at that budget than a single game at ten times that every 7 or 8 years, but even these “cheaper” games you listed still take a long time to make, and I think that’s the problem to be solved. Games came out at a really rapid clip 20-25 years ago, where you’d often get 3 games in a series 3 years in a row. We can argue about the relative quality of those games compared to what people make now and how much crunch was involved, but if the typical game is taking more than 3 years to make, that still says to me that maybe their ambitions got out of hand. The time involved in making a game is what balloons a lot of these budgets, and whereas you could sell 3 full-priced games 3 years in a row back in the day, now you’re selling 1 every 6 years, and you need to sell way, way more of them to make the math work out.

This article wasn’t about indie games.

Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we’re stretching the definition of shoestring. I’ll bet KC:D’s sequel spent far more, for one. I’m with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.

What are the good looking games with shoestring budgets?

How about Dread Delusion and The Thaumaturge? Honestly, from what I’m seeing here, you’ve got a very narrow target to hit, and those two still might hit it in the non-AAA space. And in AAA, have you checked out Indiana Jones?

Quake is open source and has about a thousand different ways to run on modern computers, but it will also still run on the computer you ran it on in the 90s. I’d assume the average person expects to put the video game in their console and be able to play the video game. The Crew doesn’t function at all when you do that right now, due to no fault of the customer to take care of the thing they bought.

Fair enough.

Because the copy of Mario they bought 40 years ago still works, as does the copy of Quake they bought 30 years ago.

I linked the gift article. This link shouldn’t be necessary, right?

Live service games are just about defined by not releasing their servers. Just because they don’t, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. With any luck, a court somewhere will decide that reasonable consumers cannot adequately tell the difference between a game with an expiration date, like the Crew, and a game that will last.

Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60

This language always misses me. Every game I buy is complete. Adding an expansion to it later doesn’t make it less complete, and it’s not like BG3 wasn’t without major bugs.

It’s hard for them to realize because good graphics used to effectively sell lots of copies of games. If they spent their graphics budget on writers, they’d have spent way too much on writing.

Quake is one of the oldest ones out there. Any game where you can host the server yourself can exist forever. It used to be very common that the server code was provided to you with your copy of the game.

No, it’s really just a luck of the draw thing on boot.

I felt far more restricted by D:OS2’s armor system. Freeform classes sound great on paper, but it also means you kind of naturally end up at a spot where you’ve got everything instead of making meaningfully difficult choices in classes or multiclassing. Learning abilities from books leads to a lot of money bottlenecks and leveling decisions that I didn’t care for. The way that the combat usually doesn’t have any chance to hit, but then does very occasionally, makes missing an attack feel like bullshit rather than a calculated risk. I’m also looking forward to whatever they do next, maybe even a sci-fi interstellar RPG, but I hope they don’t go back to the Divinity well too often for RPG mechanics.

No way. To me it felt like a solid answer to the likes of Uncharted and Tomb Raider leaning too much on combat. The light immersive sim stuff is a great answer to the linear versions of their stealth sequences, and while I’m not the biggest fan of the movies, they chose the right ways to adapt the appeal of them into game mechanics, not unlike Batman Arkham.

I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.