That’s because privatized companies spend money to promote their products while open source largely grows through word of mouth. The average person doesn’t know about the issues of proprietary software nor the existence of an open source alternative, they just use whatever everyone else uses and everyone else ends up using whatever gets successfully marketed.
Hell, the 360/PS3 era games are still peak, IMO.
I recommend you look at GTA5 comparison videos between PS3, PS4 and PS5. There’s a massive jump in overall graphical quality coming from PS3 to PS4, less so from PS4 to PS5 unless you look at specific things like shadows and reflections. The reason the jump is smaller from PS4 to PS5 except in those two areas is because we’ve essentially hit a dead end with rasterization. You can pump up the fidelity but the improvements are so marginal that unless you a direct side-by-side comparison you probably can’t tell the difference. So what makes those two exceptions so special? That’s raytracing. The reason PS4 shadows and reflections look like ass compared to PS5 is because PS5 can do raytracing. But it kinda sucks at raytracing because raytracing was still in its infancy when Xbox and PS were putting together their hardware for this gen. They pretty much had to do a last-minute pivot into raytracing because Nvidia came out with the 30 series and showed raytracing is actually commercially viable. The current gen is still largely stuck behind rasterization with some raytracing sprinkled in for nicer shadows and reflections.
And that’s why I’m excited for the next gen even though I’m not going to buy any of the consoles. I’m excited because the next gen will be designed with raytracing in mind and I think proper dynamic lighting is going to the huge generational graphical leap that we didn’t get with the current gen. There’s no reason to be excited for the next gen consoles themselves, but there’s a reason to be excited about the hardware update.
This isn’t even a question of hard or easy challenge. There’s is no challenge. You can literally put the controller down and the game completes that section all on its own.
Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven’t been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You’re used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
Because indie doesn’t mean independent. It means small studios with low budgets, kinda, sometimes it doesn’t even mean that (See Clair Obscur winning Best debut indie game despite not being self-published nor being low budget).
The issue with equating indie to independent of publisher means that Cyberpunk 2077 is indie, Destiny 2 was indie for a while. The entire Monster Hunter franchise is indie. And technically Stardew Valley wasn’t indie at release. Neither is Terraria. So the technical definition of indie doesn’t fit the expected definition of indie.