No Man's Sky

I really hate that this has become a trend now… I really don’t know why and how, but at least in my opinion, this changed drastically over the last view years.

Agree 100%. To borrow a phrase that's popular atm, I think it's the 'enshittification' trend at work in games just like social media. Games used to be made by comparatively-smaller teams, devs often had a very deep passion for what they were creating. I'm sure that's still the case for many devs now but with so many big developers now being owned and controlled by publishers... it's becoming less and less a passion project, and more a "how much juice can we squeeze out of this lemon" scenario. Then you've got stuff being outsourced massively to lots of little providers in order to deal with the scale of modern games, which causes fractures and lack of cohesion in the overall vision (imo).

TBH, NMS taught me a valuable lesson, not to overhype anything. And that's not to say I'm now a pessimist, more I'd say I'm a realist... prepare for the worst, hope for the best kinda thing. Then CP77 reinforced that, the one studio I still had faith in did exactly what all the others did by releasing a half-baked game that didn't live up to their claims (though I'm definitely looking forward to the new update, tempering expectations as always now).