how do we make RPGs fun again?
For the story you need educated people, who are not insane. This is very rare, because gamedev was invaded by mentally ill people, with very low standards
My pet theory is that Gamedev is, as a rule, horrible to work in, compared to other sectors in IT, like normal corporate work.
The industry had a 30 year talent boom, with Boomers, Gen X, Xennials and Millenials who had contact with both the digital and pre-digital world, working on it.
Those weren't just some dudes, they actually read and played the source material. Like, the Doom Team was playing Tabletop games and shit - and we already commentary here on how RPG-esque Doom's level making was and how it's not insane to say that every OG Doom level is a
dungeon.
The OG Game maker dudes from the Golden Age of Games were insanely well-read, played tabletop RPGs, watched a LOT of good movies and series, read cool comic books, etc.
But going back to the beginning: Doesn't pay compared to the effort.
I'm surprised people don't compare the Gaming Industry to the Comic Book Industry. Both produce great-quality entertainment, and both have an issue of the industry companies mistreating creators. There was a big "Creator Rights" bruahuahua going on in the 80s/90s, and AFAIK Creators did get a bigger slice of the pie, but even today there's a lot of issues going on - like, there are guys being paid a lot of royalties for rando-ass characters, while people who created big famous characters aren't getting virtually shit (like, Thanos was THE villain of the MCU and from what I heard, Starlin got almost fuck-all for his appearances in billion-dollar movies).
There's also the way things are managed, like, there's a lot of hiring and laying off. Its not the most stable industry. I'm a dev, and I know that for every project, for every codebase, there is a learning curve, as you familiarize yourself with the code and how it works. And once you are familiar with a codebase, you can do things faster and better, what are your dependencies and libraries, you know how everything works, you know what you need to change, how to change, what are parts of the code that are good and which ones are a giant pile of radioactive old bad code which require a Hazmat suit before messing with it, etc. So when you fire a guy with that kind of knowledge and hire a noob, you are essentially resetting your institutional knowledge until the noob can catch up.
So the Industry, with all its crunch, overtime, not paying enough, constant layoffs, is a big talent sieve. Big shot vet dev gets laid off or leaves, then decides to make his own studio with his buddies from the old studio. Devs exit the industry and go back to corporate IT work. Devs go full indie. People get retired, washed out, die, etc.
And that's where the mentally-ill people stepped in, because "Can I make money?" is not their main drive, not even "Can I make super-cool games?", but "Can I spread my ideology with this?"
