gamers are weird like that. I think you can still be successul without crazy graphics, but the PR you will get around the net will be dreadful because people want to justify their high end rigs or their next gen consoles. And those people are disproportionately more likely to comment.

But you also can't listen too much to the core gaming audience because they also don't think more subtly about what makes a game fun. And despite that PR good looking games can still sell. No wonder the market is so unstable, it's audience is fickle.

Never every game needs to have insane graphics. For a lot of games, “good enough” graphics is fine.

It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested.

We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!

Frostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real input from the developers in question.

I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent game engine on their own if extreme performance is not needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.

Honestly I prefer games with a strong sense of style over those with high quality graphics but a bland/generic look.

you're asking for consumers to temper their expectations. Just look at how much crap they threw at Redfall, and that was likely a game many people played on Gamepass for "free".

It sucks but part of that "need" for insane graphics is consumer driven. Even though Nintendo games get a lot of flack for how "weak" the Switch is, but their big IPs do cirlcles around the industry, all on one platform without even relying on MTX. But I guess Nintendo appealing to more than just the core gamers helps a lot. Come to think of it, it's surprising how few "family" AAA games there are these days.

Redfall was an incomplete game. Graphics was the least of its problems.

Gamers are calling a lot of games lately incomplete. It doesn't stop sales if it looks good enough.

Redfall sold disastrously. The days of releasing an incomplete game are apparently over.

okay, and I can point to a dozen games called unfinished that sold fine. We are far from over those days.

We're nitpicking at this point. Can we at least go back to the core topic and agree that critics and consumers are generally more sympathetic to games with good graphics?

We are moving past that phase. All of the broken games got terrible reviews and many were immediately abandoned after launch.