The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook

Here's the thing though, these games are highly reviewed and played but it may still in fact be more profitable to keep pumping out mid tier trash. For companies that have long forgotten the time when they had a soul and were a group of passionate gamers, that's all that matters.

Principal Skinner = no. The children yearn for the microtransactions

Crazy, if you make good games, people will buy them and pay for them.

Naw, the companies will miss the point and demand studios go as cheap and dirty as they want for Helldivers 3 and Baldur's Gate 4

Eh, there's a lot that could be said about Helldivers, at least as a PC port.

Great game, nice content delivery, very cool. No DLSS, no modern FSR (it straight up uses an horrendous implementation of FSR 1.0), very bad usage of multiple threads, quite a few bugs - the armour ratings literally did not work, as in, a crucial feature of the game that changes the entire balancing of gear and enemies did not apply, meaning you could have a party of a heavy gear tank and light gear medic and both would take the same damage from the same enemies.

Again, the game itself is very fun. But I'm absolutely not going to praise this port and claim it's a shining example of developer quality.

also no rebalancing the games progression so you can shoehorn mtx into it helps a lot too

I expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not "unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end servers and leaves players in a weeks-long login purgatory" good

It continues to boggle my mind that people will take this objectively bad thing built in to the game's design and turn it into good press. Being unable to play the game you paid for is a bad thing. They could have let you host the game yourself. Yes, even the dungeon master part that Joel does. That they don't let you not only leads to login problems with unexpectedly populous launches but also an expiration date that Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't even have when it comes to online multiplayer.

There's a much better game in that regard:

Factorio

Okay yes, but helldivers is still filled to the brim with bugs. Not quite an equal comparison

Edit: wild that fanboys will down vote you for simply stating a fact

Liberty will see you through