All the layoffs were inevitable with the extremely obvious bubble in any computer related jobs. Same as dotcom bubble with a bunch of superfluous hires for superfluous tasks and ridiculous budgets that were not going to pan out. So yes now we’ll have tons of unemployed programmers and art departments from companies overhiring for at least a decade.

They already have once though. Many of Morrowind’s dungeons were procedurally generated in development then edited a bit after, that was the same engine. Same with Daggerfall altho that was a diff engine.

Very different game but Amnesia: the Bunker has plenty of procedural generation as well.

It’s not at all impossible for one of the largest game development studios to have some procedurally generated, essentially dungeon content. Doing a bit more than the exact same place copied and pasted would be a huge undertaking yes, but if they wanted to they could have. There are plenty of 3D rogue-likes out now as well. Returnal is AAA and haa procedurally generated levels, far more complicated than neccesary for Bethesda to do in order to populate planets in their game about planet exploration.

Making it seem like Steam’s problems for the first ten years were some software bugs inherent to all software.

It required you login every 48 hrs to two weeks to play most games for DRM purposes, they had no return policy, app’s buttons barely worked, overlay made games run considerably worse, it frequently took up a shitton of resources. The 48 hr thing meant that if you were offline for a bit and Steam was down or slowed (any time a bit sale happened or a big game was launched) most games were unplayable.

Steam came out in 2003 and tons of people complained about Steam DRM hearkening the end of actually owning videogames until at least 2012. GoG came out in 2008, didn’t require a launcher at all, sidestepped everything wrong with Steam.

There’s been non-buggy, not anti-consumer software as long as there’s been computers, Steam prior to like 2016 was not that. There’s been an alternative, buying physical games (until they all started using Steam DRM or worse) and GoG.

Yeah Epic Launcher is barebones. Both Steam and Epic are anti-consumer because of DRM, and making users beholden to any buggy software update to play software they purchase. At least Epic pays devs.