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This implies that the publishers themselves are trusted and that the trust people place in them is being maintained. That is not the market I observe from the inside. AAA gaming seems like a dumpster fire at the moment, having arrived at a place similar to the film industry where they're actively generating anti-fandoms collectively rooting for their failure, but without the film industry's institutional moat and diversification to protect them from the consequences. There have been a lot of bombs lately, and studios, even major studios, often don't survive them. Major publishers are frequently loathed by the player-base. The studios and publishers with considerable good will are generally in the indie space or increasingly lonely titans like Rockstar, which is so lonely because those titans can and do die: Blizzard and Bungie, two of the most successful companies the space has ever seen, are arguably toast at this point. Most AAA studios appear incapable of controlling costs to anything resembling a reasonable level, so one bomb kills most of them and a second bomb kills most of the rest. Further, both workers and leadership are, from my perspective, pathologically averse to solutions to any of these problems. They'd rather unionize, blame the audience, virtue signal ideology, retreat into a bubble of toxic positivity, anything other than engage with the fact that their whole segment of the industry is a horror show at the moment.
It seems to me that the success stories follow a pattern: keeping costs low, teams small, find an audience and engage with them heavily, make the game they want as simply and quickly and responsively as possible. Alternatively, make something simple and coherent with a very small team and hope to get lucky, offsetting the risk of the gamble with pure passion. I think this latter class is already pretty large and is just going to keep growing as barriers to entry vanish. I think they're going to saturate the market, and that's going to have cascading effects on the far more leveraged-up end of the industry. Quality will rise to the top, and at some point there's so much of it that the audience dilutes and fragments, and the old business patterns become unsustainable.
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