Well, it's also not all "visuals"

commercial is ALL about visuals

A lot of animation is intimately tied to gameplay

you wouldn't need to sell a game on the trailer if you brought back demos

Though in practice cinematics are still disproportionately expensive

but demos don't net you pre-orders

yeah but if you did that, you'd have to actually make fun games 😉

and can only hurt your sales

I think people don't know how to react to demos anymore

That's been replaced by early access, TBH

betas are treated like demos

Thats why modern games are all just lacking

theres no drive to make a good game, theres a drive to sell games

I don't disagree, but it is a rock and a hard place

If they don't sell they can't be made

I can pull rank on this 😛 i graduated my college on IT specialised in game development

heres what generally happens

"Gameplay" is developed in Game Jams

if theres some good niche for gameplay

some bigger studio picks it up and makes a game around it, and gets funding etc

or indies do it themselves

Some studios do that

ive always worked with "proof of concept" but im not sure we talking about the same thing here

Sunset Overdrive came about that way, but Spider-Man did not

but Game Jams aren't designed around games that take 7-8 or more hours to play

So although you can have a fun game for a while, most don't work in long playing

Game jams are centered around creating 5 minute funzies games

Typically, yes

then ofc theres the big cheese studios like EA who just buy up prominent small studios, and milk their cool new hip franchise

It's the "30 seconds of fun"

yes

but 30 seconds of fun doesn't translate well in full games, hence theres not many "development" for fun gameplay

People sometimes forget the part where you have to duplicate that for 20 hours

halo 2's design was "take the 30 seconds of fun from halo 1, and copy paste it"

for a whole level

yes

TBH, I'd say part of the problem is that studios _don't_ really do that anymore

but thats most of those franchise milking products

Not the AAA guys, anyway

The talk there is usually about "set pieces"

thats not "safe"

that

AAA games go for safe, which creates boring duplicates