> What does AAA-budget-quality mean?
It was a shortcut around the points you made. Minecraft _was_ made by one person, and is now a team of who knows how many people for the best part of a decade. Stardew valley I think is a great example where it's an incredibly polished experience to the point that the polish level is up there with AAA games.
> and probably several of the others you’re talking about.
And you're ignoring the game of the _decade_ - a $100m follow up to one of the most loved games of all time.
> Fallout might not be ‘focused on shooting’, but it still has the look of a typical FPS game.
You mean it has a gun in it, and it's in first person? If that's your gauge for a shooter game then I don't think you're informed enough to have a discussion on this topic. A game or movie with nudity in it isn't pornographic any more than a game with a gun in it is a shooter.
> It’s as if game developers have mostly converged on a standard game design.
You're just spouting nonsense now. Here [0] is a list of the top games of this year. Only one of the top 10 is a shooter (And it's a critically acclaimed final expansion to a 7 year old game that has shown how to do a fun shooter). If you go back to 2023, you'll see the same.
> I think it is true that most money in the games industry goes into making games that heavily feature guns
"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics". Of course mnost money goes into games that heavily feature guns; because if you look at absolute spend on development and marketing costs, pretty much everything is going to be dwarfed by Call of Duty. Meanwhile you have Baldur's Gate 3 which again, is probably the best received game of the decade, Cyberpunk (one of the most expensive games made), Star Citizen (lol), Genshin Impact - all of which are _not_ based on guns (but may contain them to some extent) with mind numbing amounts of money being spent on development.
[0] https://opencritic.com/browse/all/2024/score