BootlegBard

“Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again.” Yes, Tim, because 2016 was one of the last great years of traditional AAA gaming. Titanfall 2, Battlefield 1, DOOM, Dark Souls 3, Dishonored 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, XCOM 2, and Uncharted 4 all came out that year Back then, games were still largely products first, services second. Publishers competed to sell you a great game, not monetize every waking hour of your life with battle passes, rotating storefronts, daily chores, and an endless treadmill of artificial engagement Games were allowed to have their own identities. Titanfall 2 didn’t need to be Fortnite. Battlefield didn’t need to be an extraction shooter. DOOM didn’t need a five-year seasonal roadmap. They were designed around distinct gameplay experiences rather than whatever monetization model executives like you are salivating over And the technology was already good enough to deliver incredible visuals without development budgets spiraling into the hundreds of millions. Games could be ambitious without needing to become permanent revenue-generating platforms to justify their existence Now we have an industry spending more money, taking longer, and producing fewer AAA games, while desperately chasing the same handful of commercially successful formulas. We’ve reached diminishing returns in graphical fidelity while sacrificing experimentation and creative diversity And here comes Tim Sweeney, the man who ruined gaming with one of the biggest live-service platforms, lecturing people about how they need to move on from 2016 People aren’t asking you to bring back 2016’s technology, Tim. They’re asking for an industry that remembers how to make art instead of endless AI generated engagement slop The fact that someone in your position apparently can’t tell the difference is a pretty good illustration of how we ended up here