I think Microsoft themselves have less incentive to make great games due to GP since subscribers are getting the game for “free” regardless, which in turn means it’s more cost effective for them to make a lot of cheaper games instead if going all out with bigger budgets.

For other studios, not really. Especially the smaller ones as they would generally try to use GP as a marketing tool to build their brand. They would be likely to try to make the best product possible so future projects can sell better and not need GP.

This is a shitty idea but I think it’s funny that people have a problem with this but don’t care at all about Kojima jamming blatant product placement in all of his games.

Is your argument that lower budget automatically equals worse game? If Obsidian was better than Bethesda they’d make better games. Not like it would’ve been difficult to outdo Fallout 4 or Starfield even on a smaller budget. Obsidian outdoes themselves when they work with smaller budgets. Their smaller projects are far better than their big ones like Outer Worlds or Alpha Protocol. Obsidian just sucks when they actually have to put resources into gameplay mechanics and open world exploration rather than just writing. Games like Outer Worlds are going directly against their strengths.

The only critically acclaimed ones are the ones that are reusing half the assets from the previous game in the series, like KOTOR or FNV. Outer Worlds was not “critically acclaimed”, it’s reception was generally worse than Starfields, and it didn’t have the excuse of high expectations like Starfield had. Outer Worlds failed to meet modest expectations.

Obsidian is fine if you give them small projects but the second you give them something big the whole thing turns out worse than the average Bethesda release.

It’s just worse than Fallout tho is the issue. The issue isn’t that it isn’t enough like Fallout, it’s that it’s lower quality than even Bethesda’s middling Fallout 4. Obsidian can’t create a big budget project from scratch to save their life. They should stick to CRPGs, they’re far better at those.

All it needed was better side content and better open world design and it would’ve arguably been the best game in the series. But the repetitive side missions and world not worth exploring outside of seeing historical landmarks just made it a decent game instead of a great one.

John fighting his way up a mountain to get revenge in RDR2 was cool as shit especially with the music. Huge improvement over RDR1s ending.