>>716228470
>Still no explanation for this phenomenon

There is though. Its just a boring non political one: The late 90s and early 2000s were just a brief period where games were made by people who were massively overqualified. Valve made Half Life because after DOOM, making a 3D shooter was just the cool thing you did if you wanted to be at the forefront of tech. Most of the Looking Glass team were genius level MIT graduates. Games like Theme Park and Evil Genius had a guy called Demis Hassabis working on them as a designer. He went on to found a company called DeepMind which was sold to Google for £400 million.
This whole period was basically a flash in the pan. In 2025 there is basically zero reason for anyone of this calibre to be working in the games industry. The salary is dogshit. You could go do any other tech related thing and make 10 times more and also actually see your friends and family as well. The only people who will put up with the pay and conditions are midwits with 'game design' degrees. In this current year, the young person out there who is basically the next John Carmack would never be working in games. They would be working at Google on some cursed AI chatbot instead, or some nebulous Silicone Valley start up