Seems this conversation went a couple oddball directions. Let me start with the topic at hand first.
No exclusives mean there's little reason to buy the console. It's one of the many reasons Xbox has been floundering the last couple generations. Since last gen, Xbox has been porting its games to PC and giving us the proof that ports equate less console sales. On the flip side of that coin, as bikingjahuty stated, the developement costs for AAA games have ballooned to the point that most aren't financially viable to remain in one ecosystem. Playstation and Nintendo remain viable due to their larger userbase but for Xbox, that ship sailed a long time ago. It really all depends on how popular the game is and the sales on said platform.
I've been saying since the start of Microsoft's PC porting that they're on a slippery slope and soon enough, Xbox will become irrelevent. We're now at that time, especially with Microsoft now porting their "exclusvies" to Playstation and even Switch 2. There is no reason to buy Xbox hardware.
Now... onto the other topics.
Not all game characters are required to be "attractive". That's the thought when the PS4 gen really began switching from mostly attractive to mostly "realistic". There's two versions of realistic in this sense. There's the Lara Croft realistic where they turned her from sexy bombshell into a more down to earth, girl nextdoor, with regular sized breasts... not the oversized balloons from the PS1 days guaranteed to give any woman back problems by her 40's. Then there's the realistic in that the faces of said characters are just... well... unappealing. I personally rate attractiveness based on the face first. Then I move down to the body type and decide if she looks healthy. Not body positivity healthy... but the healthy any Millennial and older would recall from their childhood and early adulthood.
The male gaze as in, sex sells (yes, that's what I'm going with), meaning main female characters are required to be scantily clad like in Stellar Blade, MGS 5, Dead or Alive, etc. etc.... Those games aren't going for realistic. Going back to Tomb Raider, even when I was playing the first couple games on PS1 as a teenager, I thought to myself that wearing shorts while running around in the snow was dumb for anyone to do. Then I quickly remembered it's a videogame and ignored the reality of it.
Now let's pivot into the other topic, the modern industry, as the above ties into it quite nicely. One of the reasons so many female characters are unattractive, or part of the LGBTQ community, or take the fun of war (in various forms), giving it an Animal Crossing skin (looking at Warcraft), is because Feminism took over this and most other western entertainment industries. Within the big western developers, are mostly female devs (look at recent developer team photographs) with a very specific lens they view the world through and they can't capture what made games great for men. Modern devs don't understand men because they employ so few and probably don't have any willing to stand for any masculine principals for fear of being shunned and/or fired like those that came before. And yeah, I'm being nice in this paragraph.
We don't see many strong male leads or attractive women in western games anymore because of that worldview. It's how we get abomiations like Horizon: Hunters Gathering. Honestly, when they revealed the upcoming Tomb Raider games, I was pleasently surprised they made young Lara attractive. Even her older self in the upcoming Catalyst is attractive given that she's in her 40's at that point.
Here's the thing. It's not that these "realistic" characters don't belong in gaming. It's that they don't belong in EVERY western game as has been the push for more than a decade. You can take this next line and apply it to any part of the modern era. People are sick of being beat over the head by the leftist agenda. And yes, feminism is leftist. Everything ties together and people have had enough. It's why AAA gaming isn't nearly as strong as it once was. It's why Hollywood is failing. It's why modern television is failing. It's even why mainstream book publishing is failing. Thank God for the independent developers and creatores because they are saving the entertainment industry.
As much as I would love to see Uncharted continue, there's no way in hell I would want modern Naughty Dog, or any mainstream developer touching the series. Modern corporate creators DO NOT care about the fans. They DO NOT care about the stories. They ONLY care about pushing an agenda over EVERYTHING else.
The modern games industry is Pet Sematary for video games. Yeah, you can bring them back, but they'll be different, they'll be changed. It won't be them anymore, just something dark wearing their skins. Sometimes, dead is better.
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