>>55019883the game industry - emphasis on "industry" - had some big shifts during the ps4/xbone era. lootboxes and the mobile game were perfected into their current shitty exploitative forms. remember in 2013 when xbox owners yelled at microsoft until they backpedaled on their always online bullshit? or how playstation owners were anywhere from disappointed to pissed that sony would be charging money to play games online? and now with all the subscriptions available and games as a service being the norm it all feels quaint.
back in the '90s a successful game could be made with as few as one developer (shoutout to chris sawyer), but anymore a modern AAA game has dozens at a minimum, so any individual's contribution is diluted. as budgets expand, monetization (especially of things that used to be cheat codes) has to become more intrusive and obvious to make it back, and nobody wants to risk hundreds of millions of dollars on a game that might flop. games were always products to be sold, but it used to be less obvious and less homogeneous.
consider that everybody made fun of horse armor in 2006 for being a paid skin, and twelve years later fortnite made $5 billion by selling horse armor to children.
you're right that an official game will never make you feel the feelings that pmd made you feel when you were a kid, and i don't think it's just because you're older and more jaded. the only thing that has a chance is a fan project with love and care put into it. i'm honestly kinda concerned about how an explorers remake might go: bdsp didn't include any of the changes made in platinum, so it's plausible that an explorers remake wouldn't include new stuff like spinda's cafe, the sky peak subplot, or any of the special episodes.
