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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9597779" data-attributes="member: 18">Nah.R* abandoned their reputation with GTA Online turning into a money-printing factory and a fairly manipulative rip-off it kid-targeting one at that. Them dumping all GTA V story expansions in order to print more money via GTA Online really was them leaving that rep behind.Further, RDR2's online mode attempted to be even exploitative that GTA Online, but because it was so gross and awful, it was actually too gross for most gamers to engage with (which is a very low bar) and so flopped.Add in that their remasters of GTA3/VC/AD were insultingly bad and featured very lazy and incompetent use of AI upscaling (famously destroying a joke by turning what was intentionally a nut - as in nut and bolt - into a perfect toroid) and that they've been too cheap to pay for even the most important songs to get renewed with them, and instead just dumped most of them, and we can't say they're a company with a reputation of quality anymore. (They've sorta-fixed the remasters, but like, it's real minimum possible effort stuff, not "company of quality who cares" stuff)Everyone expects GTA 6 to be pretty great but also people live in fear of just how exploitative the online will be, and fully expect R* to have made the main game kind of shorter and to try and funnel you into playing online (something GTA V didn't actually do), and people are skeptical that GTA 6, no matter how good, will get any non-online expansions or the like.Now, R* could claw some of their reputation back if they don't do those things. If GTA 6 has a truly epic single-player story like RDR2 did, and if GTA 6 doesn't funnel you into online, and if GTA 6 has at least one single-player expansion, suddenly I think that would make a lot of people re-assess R*. If R* then came out with, say Bully 2 or a similarly actually daring game, then we might see their reputation climb a lot.I don't think there are any big Western studios who really have any rep left. Bungie, Bethesda, BioWare, Blizzard, all the Bs have dented or worse their reps in various ways.There are Japanese AAA studios who have never meaningfully screwed up - FromSoft comes to mind. Capcom weirdly are one of the few companies whose reputations is improving rather than getting worse, too.There are still a lot of indie or AA or very small AAA studios who have at least solid reps. Like, SuperGiant have never made a bad game (Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, Hades, Hades 2). Obsidian have never made a bad game. They've made a lot of kind of 8/10 ones, but that's kind of their brand.</blockquote>

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