>Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality.

This is nonsense. Very few gamers actually care about how many polygons make up each tree and that some texture in the background is 10mb compressed. Meanwhile the actual product of video games from AAA companies has stagnated immensely. You can make your game ugly as sin, and if it's actually fun, people will love it. Every indie darling is an explicit disproving of this claim. We have Minecraft, factorio, cruelty squad which is entirely built around being horrible to look at but fun to play, an entire genre of "old" looking games that don't actually look old. There's even an entire world of games that look good with assets that you can buy on an open market for a few dollars each.

You're not wrong. But if I'm paying $70 for a game, I'm definitely going to be annoyed if the trees look like they were pulled from Ocarina of Time.

I wouldn’t mind if the game was fun. Many of my favorite games to this day have terrible graphics. A nice side effect of simple 3D forms or even 2D games is that you also don’t require a massively expensive GPU or even a dedicated GPU at all in order to play them.

>> Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality. The assets especially just take a lot more work to do.

I mean… if this is the case, how did Vampire Survivors become a huge hit and win multiple game of the year awards, and result in countless clones?

I call this "throwing cards in a hat phenomena".

Even if we have brain-interface full immersion virtual reality, you can still have fun throwing cards into a hat. In fact you will prefer it.

Games are like food rather than cars. In food, high quality food doesn't really push out low quality food. Even a billionaire will want a grilled cheese sandwich sometime. While in cars, you can say that in general people would like the more expensive cars rather than cheaper ones.

To me this puts a hard limit on upside of quality for games. It doesn't matter how many thousands of hours of dialogue you have voiced and motion captured if a vampire survivors could always eat your lunch.

Problem with something like Vampire Survivors is that the quality of game you make has very little to do with its popularity. Even poncle (the guy who made VS) admits this as there were many very similar games before VS and many after it. Some of those are objectively better video games but just never got popular. VS is basically an indie movie becoming a mainstream hit equivalent of video games.

This is very different to something like Call of Duty, Diablo, The Last of Us, etc where you put a lot more money into the game and if you actually make a good game (and fund a large marketing budget) it will most likely sell well. Same recipe works for Disney and other large movie studios.

Basically if you went to watch the next Marvel movie and you were greeted with $50 000 budged indie movie special effects and the no big name cast it gets you would you be a satisfied customer? (and you were expecting Marvel movie special effects and big star actors)

And something like Call of Duty makes more money every month then Vampire Survivors has made in the ~1 year it has existed.