I was just joking about the fact techland is doing 1:1 the things CDPR has done in the last few years, in particular when it comes to marketing campaign, which has literally zero to do with the game itself.
It hasn't been just the last few years.
It's the industry. I can remember being furious with the situation back in the '90s especially. "I spend $2,000 on to-of-the-line PC hardware, build it, get everything installed and working -- and the first game I install won't even launch! I pay $60+ for a new game, then it needs to be "patched" 10 times before I can even play it without crashing constantly...or hitting game-breaking bugs...or having my graphics start flickering during a fight!? [InsertContinuingUpsetAndRanting]." I fought for literal weeks trying to get Ultima VII to run when it launched, as its Voodoo Memory manager would absolutely strangle my system at the time. I had to wait for over a year to be able to play the original Deus Ex, as it was so poorly optimized for DirectDraw that performance would become a slide-show after 5 minutes of gameplay.
And decades later, I was still encountering the same things. It's not a matter of developers doing anything wrong -- it's the nature of building something on foundations that are constantly changing under your feet.
So,
not only is it creative interpretation, which can always go sideways...e.g. think of how many performances of
Annie have been done on stages around the world. It's the same bleepin' show, using the same bleepin' script, and the same bleepin' music, played on the same bleepin' instruments, that have been used in every bleepin' theatrical production, for literal bleepin'
centuries...but some of the productions are awesome...and others will flop badly. That is the nature of creative work. Do the same thing over and over, and people will get tired of it. Do anything differently, and there's no guarantee people will like it.
Not only that -- but now try to writing your own musical from scratch while a construction crew is working on replacing the stage under your feet while you're rehearsing, and new types of musical instruments are being invented while you're actively trying to work on the score. In the end, you started creating a production that would be done on a classic proscenium stage with an orchestra of acoustic instruments in the pit...and by the end, you're dealing with a thrust stage with arena seating, changing all of the sight lines, and the orchestra is a mix of acoustic and electronic instruments, pre-recorded mix-tracks, and it needs to be amplified from off-stage via a sound system that didn't even exist when production had started. Oh, it's also being filmed now as well, so the lighting needs to work for both stage and film.
Game development is more like that, if it's going to be a big production that really tries to push the envelope and create something new. Which is also why many triple-A devs tend to simply regurgitate the same stuff over and over until people lose interest, and why many indie devs take a much more reserved approach to their designs (using minimalistic graphics, more narrow focus for game mechanics, etc.)
