[clarry]

> And that's why they won't make any more... you'd be mad to try and do another immersive sim.

To be clear, I don't think they even tried, as far as DX:HR is concerned. Instead, it looks like they tried hard to borrow ideas from these mainstream console games and made an anti-immersive "sim" that constantly takes you into third person, floods the screen with XP & loot popups and other UI noise, replaces melee weapons with "tap E to watch a mini-cutscene where MC beats up a guy", features busywork-filler-padding sidequests for the instant gratification RPG addicts, etcetra.

I think, if someone actually tried, this is a proven niche where one could definitely find some success.

As far as the FPS genre is concerned: boy do people nitpick them. You can point at a handful of super popular titles, and for each, there's a mountain of forgotten and thoroughly mediocre (or worse) first person shooters.

There's no single genre where success is for granted. In general, there's a long tail of games that get little attention and a small bunch of "rockstars" that everyone plays.

[dageshi]

A triple A game isn't viable on PC alone nowadays, it has to release on console and hence has to account for what modern (both PC and console) players expect. You're claiming to be a fan of this niche but haven't played any of the major releases in it from the past 10 years (Dishonored 1 & 2 + Prey), if you haven't played those games as a fan of the genre then what chance does the genre have? These were big games, marketed well by a major publisher (Bethesda).

As for genres, your point about only x number of games becoming a success is taken, but I guess my counter to that is, if you become a success in the shooter genre the upside is 10x or 100x what it would be for an immersive sim because the market for fps is much much bigger than those for immersive sims.

[clarry]

I didn't claim to be a fan. How I feel about the success potential of this niche comes merely from observing other gamers (everyone seems to know Deus Ex, Dishonored, etc. and mostly everyone praises these and would like to play more games like that; that's probably also why there's so much hype for e.g. Cyberpunk 2077, and CDPR is obviously trying to capitalize on the success of immersive 1st person cyberpunk fps-rpgs).

I might be a fan, but I rarely buy new games myself, so extrapolating anything at all from my gaming habits probably tells nothing about the market at large. I generally don't buy any new game unless it's DRM-free, has native Linux support OOTB, and doesn't come with crazy overpriced moneygrab editions or a shitload of DLC.

[Grimm1]

The Witcher 3 was one of the most successful games in a long time, I don't really get this idea that the genre is dead.