Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I hope you value information over good writing, for I only have the former.
I'm quite sure that the product of Silksong was the goal, and not the money it made. A lot of old games were made by intelligent people who loved video games. Many newer games are made by soulless corporations who only want money, and I bet only the programmers that said company hire likes video games. The managers and CEOs probably don't know much about games at all. I'm also very confident that these programmers aren't given a lot of freedom over the product, nor time to make it. If the end product is chosen by somebody who doesn't know video games and who wants to make lots of money, then it will be a generic copy of something which has been proven to work. It will deliver the minimum gameplay, and be designed to use every exploit to get players hooked to it (gambling, log-in rewards, loot-boxes) and make money (always-online-model, selling user data, requiring an account, DLC), and minimizing moderation costs (bad servers, no voice chat, strict rules, no user-created content, no mods, no private servers, rootkit anticheats, poor support). Such a game will never be great, for it will would be released before it could ever be polished to that degree; past the minimum viable product, ever new update would be dedicated not to add additional value, but to milk the current value. I'm not sure how Candy Crush and Angry birds squeezed billions of dollars out of two games which are actually clones of old, free flash games (which didn't even become all that popular, look up Crush the Castle and Bejeweled), but a lot of companies seem to think that they can do it too.
Arjin is correct, too, programming is pretty hard. And programming has this interesting property where bad code makes all the future programming vastly harder.
So, why don't we have more good indie games? From what I can tell, people who make Indies aren't doing anything wrong, they just stop too early. Most games I have on steam can be completed in 10 hours or less. It feels like I'm buying demos. All the legendary games which has existed so far (TF2, Garry's mod, Warcraft 3, Terraria, Minecraft, Factorio, Diablo 2, Roblox, and The Sims come to mind) are ones you can play for 1000+ hours. Notice how all these games have communities and user-created content? They have custom servers and modpacks. They basically allow the users to create more content, and content created by users has soul. Games which are merely good or great still have 100+ hours of content or a lot of replayability (Pokemon, older GTA), and multiplayer (Monster Hunter, Fortnite, newer GTA). By the way, if your mix all the traits of a popular game but lack programming ability, you get games like 7 Days To Die :P 11 years of early access! And despite being "released", it's clearly not finished.
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