@humanity: I think that it's important to differentiate between big empty words and games-as-service. There is often overlap, but games-as-service is more about getting people to stick with a game and keep pumping money into it (like with Apex Legends or NBA 2K series) than necessarily having a big open world, and a lot of the big open world games (like the Ubisoft joints) aren't games-as-a-service, especially when they're single player. They might have some games as a service elements, like some cosmetics you can buy or whatever, but they don't get support for years and they mostly make their money through purchase price and DLC (which is kind of true of Destiny too, but it releases expansions for years like an MMO rather than just a single season pass and done.)
Both models seem intended to provide perceived value over time, which seems to be something that companies think gamers value a lot these days. Maybe it's true; though there are plenty of single player linear games that still sell well. Live Services games, though, are often bets that balance the risk of failure if they don't catch on to massive profits if they do. Fortnite has made Epic billions, and GTA Online appears to be profitable enough that Rockstar barely needs to make games anymore. So something like Anthem is a big swing at huge profits, which might explain why companies are so eager to take chances on them (and EA did get a big hit with Apex Legends.)
One downside of all this is that every game takes 30+ hours to play so people buy fewer games, which makes it even harder for smaller games to compete.
My hope is that the way out of this is something like Game Pass where games don't have to sell at full price to be commercially viable, and shorter more focused games have value because people haven't invested $100 into a deluxe edition and aren't expecting 50 hours of content. We'll see how that pans out. So far it's mostly been successful for indie or other small team games but if subscriptions keep increasing we might see that get better, and not every game feeling the need to spread 15 hours of content over a 50 hour runtime.
As for Bulletstorm's use of language...it was fine. Charming even. They may not have intended it to come off so strong but the whole game was clearly tongue in cheek so I don't know why so many people seemed so put off by it. This was a game where you literally blow people's limbs off and feed them to carnivorous plants and people were really upset by the cursing. I don't get that.
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