Sorry you've completely lost me. What does a mocking avatar of Todd Howard or FO76 have to do with anything????

Are you perhaps implying that I’m a Todd Howard fanboy perhaps? If it helps assuage you, I think the boy Todd is a more duplicitous scumbag than CDPR’s finest.

Now, you clearly possess a God-tier intellect and understanding of all things second only to Einstein, but I’m a mere simple soul so please just speak plainly.

Nope I just hate Todd's face.

I would have thought that creative business is inherently different - like theatres or motion picture industry. After all this is just another form of entertainment (if you exclude the competitive multiplayer side). Without fresh screenplay, IP, ideas, concepts you become stale and then average or dead. I think the problem really stems from consolidation and inability of the purchasing giant to keep creativity and fresh trail of thinking in the studio. It almost always ends in tears - the founders leave shortly after acquisition, key writers / developers leave as well and what's left behind is some outdated IP. I've seen the same in the company I worked for - we tried to consolidate and enforce our culture onto all acquisitions - guess how those ended.

Yep, most of the Witcher devs left the company and new people were hired, the same for Bethesda, most of the core of the Elder Scrolls is long gone, including plenty of people in the mod community. We saw this with Activision, Blizzard, Naught Dog, plenty, a mixe of owners hunger for cash and a new element, the damn vermins of cancel culture and political correctnes.

But they don't mind destroying their products core mechanics and feel of the product for fans of a series only people who've never invested in their products matter.

I don't get it this whole phase shift it's not limited to games there's like some moron analyst that all corporations have hired "Now don't focus on keeping people loyal, you want new blood, you need it from everywhere and make it for everyone, nobody buy's unique anymore make it poorly and make it the same as everyone else."

This push to make a product a whorehouse is common practice, there is a video where a superb developer explained about the company´s mentality, the magic of do KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). No matter if you ended up screwing a lot of the original foundations in terms of Lore, just bring a modern element that people enjoy, like a construction set, plenty of survival games are doing this, plus, the facction that provides more explosions.

Launch no matter how things are, even with all the bugs and bad quests, you hit 12 millions copies ($750 millions), fuck, you don´t even need waste time with free DLCs, put a price on everything.

The rest is all about selling Mods, or if you need another killer tip, the incredible PR of that company recomends do not call this feature as Mods, instead, they are small DLCs, genius!