It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn't escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I've seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.
Hello Games is also a significantly smaller dev team with a smaller budget so it's almost sad that a full giant AAA dev team can't make what an indie studio has been chipping away at for like 7 years to make it actually good.
Last I read Microsoft outsourced most of the development of Halo 5 to contractors who were told they’d become full employees but it never came to fruition. If this is an industry trend, then I can see how half of the budget is inefficiently spent on trying to catch people up to speed before firing them and getting a new guy.
From what I understand rotating developers seem like a standard practice at Microsoft-owned game studios. Like they only contract you for a set period and then you're out. Back when Gears 5 was still actively updated it seemed like every single community-facing developer got rotated out and all of them seemed to say something about their two years or whatever being up in their farewell messages.
They always say, art is best when there is no creative continuity.