Glide
There are a lot of reasons to not bother going to Tim Horton's, and the lids on their cups is not one of them.
It's weird because you're both right and wrong.
It's not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it's advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, "you can play it forever", etc. are are not present.
But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn't suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I'd perhaps agree with your statement that it's closer to AAA than to a "small dev" game, but it is true that it's a "smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards".
This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft's gaming divisions. On the one hand, they're cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can't help but suspect that they're going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: "this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have" while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.
"Fuck them, I've got mine" pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.
It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.
It's literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can't for the life of me understand how you can think it's "easier" to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they're already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.
Cassette Beasts kicks the ever loving shit out of Pokemon across the board, modern or retro.
Retro games weren't better than modern games as a "full-stop" statement. They tended to be bug-ridden messes, but there was still a heart and soul behind them that tends to be missing in the AAA industry. Continuing on the Pokemon example Red/Blue were an absolute mess. I mean, moves and items that were supposed to massively increase critical hit rate massively decreased them instead. Stat calculations were all over the place. Hell, the ghost-psychic interaction just straight didn't function as intended. It was a mess, and yet for some reason, it's touted as "better" than the modern Pokemon games.
Plus, not all big studio games are soulless cash grabs of releases, either. Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite game of 2023 by a huge margin, and was a Bethesda published game. Sure, the dev studio was "smaller" compared to Ubisoft or Activison, but I wouldn't call the game indie - it was AAA in polish and scale. I'm currently really enjoying Unicorn Overlord, getting major Ogre Battle 64 vibes from it, and playing a lot of Monster Hunter Rise thanks to a Steam sale. These games slap, and have all the depth and passion of games of old without alI of the horrible jank we dealt with in the pre-internet "no such thing as a post-release patch" world.
It's easy to see the yearly Call of Duty, Pokemon, generic EA sports, and obligatory Ubisoft open world games release and think "man, AAA gaming sucks", but they're honestly a very tiny portion of the conversation.
EDIT: I take everything back, Bethesda just closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush. AAA gaming is a cancer that needs to be surgically extracted.
Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become "easier" with this change? Either it works or it doesn't; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn't alleviate server load.
Sure, and I'm not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they'd gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony "listening" to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.
I feel like listening is a strong word.
I suspect someone ran the numbers and realized they're likely to lose more money on reduced future sales and microtransactions than they would have gained through data scraping.
A win is a win, but don't fool yourself into believing Stony listens to anyone but the almighty dollar.
How much less bullshit PC players are willing to put up with compared to their console counterparts, apparently.
I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.
Though I agreed with you. It's still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony "caring".