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That explanation doesn't work because in many cases "this game / book / movie / comic wasn't made for you, chud" comes way before it's anywhere close to finished.
It also makes no sense to blame it on unwillingness to spend money - never played Payday, but cheaper indie games do better numbers than this for a much lower budget, and if they wanted easy money for little investment, they'd resell the previous one with updated assets, and call it a sequel. The success of these artistic and semi-artistic projects generally isn't about the money in itself, it's about catching lighting in a bottle. You need a good team, that wants to put something out, and works well together. This is hard in the best of times, as several well-funded corporations found out upon being beaten up and having their lunch money stolen from them by a well functioning startup. But wokeness adds another layer of issues, it's hostility to meritocracy will result in losing key talent via "who needs this asshole, we'll just hire someone more agreeable", people being terrified of providing necessary negative feedback, and will attract the worst kind of social climber.
This is why JTarrou's example is so good. The wokeness that one needs to look out for isn't necessarily the wokeness in the game, I'm pretty sure a good woke game could be made, it's wokeness on the team that's the issue. The two will obviously be correlated, but conflating them let's people dismiss the issue via 2rafaesque arguments.
The fuck of it is, they kinda were doing this before Payday 3 to begin with. I might have to dig up this one video talking about the history of Payday 2, but in short, from my memory: Overkill/Starbreeze put out the game, made a shitload of DLC for it, tried to put it behind them as they focused on a new Walking Dead licensed game and their own snazzy VR headset project, those two things failed hard, so they went back to Payday 2 and cranking out DLC for it just to raise money to keep the lights on (complete with new "complete editions" to save you the hassle of purchasing the million DLC packs separately). I don't know why they even bothered with Payday 3 if they were going to go back to supporting 2, which did kind of make them a lot of money anyways.
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