>>14780590
>why do they think they're all entitled to Rockstar-like profits?
The developer usually just wants to make games it's more "the publisher is threatening to liquidate the studio if we don't sell X amount of copies, we have to let go of X amount of employees if we don't sell enough" etc.
>how often does a beloved series die just because the developer think it's not profitable to continue making them for the new generation?
It's more because game dev is extremely risky and you have to convince someone. A lot of the time games will get pitched to publishers as new installments of older franchises but then get cancelled or turned into a new IP instead. Arx Fatalis was pitched as Ultima Underworld 3 but then became its own thing when EA didn't wanna do it.
There's also another issue which is a lot of the time developers don't want to make sequels because they've run out of ideas. A good example is Miyazaki doesn't want to make another 'Souls game because he's made basically the same game for 10 years and feels burnt out. You can also see it with how across all the games there's a lot of repetition of ideas from characters to bosses and environments. Sometimes a game dev only has one good idea and doesn't want to just stretch it out across 10 games.
>why do indies think that their only choice is pixelshit
Because 2D games are significantly easier to develop than 3D ones. Less time consuming to create assets and far less hardware intensive. It's a lot easier and faster to make 10 weapon sprites in an hour compared to making 10 weapon models.
>do people seriously get so put off by old graphics that they wouldn't consider to look at them?
Yes
If you look at reviews of a lot of older games you'll often see negative ones where people say the game looks like garbage. A ton of people, especially younger people, are put off by older graphics.
>wouldn't be more sensible in some cases to not aim as high in regards to profit and release an "antiquated" game that brings some reachable target profit-wise instead of going broke?
This happens a lot but we don't even really notice it because they get buried by other releases. Like War for the Overworld, a modern attempt at making a new Dungeon Keeper game extremely rarely gets brought up after it released. The issue is you need a really big marketing budget to get people to want to play your game and if you don't have it unless you're really lucky and strike gold with something like Minecraft it gets buried.
It's also that the publishers that fund these games have also done a cost/benefit analysis and determined it's far less risky and less expensive to just put all of the money into making a new sequel to an already existing franchise like Call of Duty than to make 100 games for the same money and have half of them fail.
>why don't companies bring abandoned franchises back to life with the same graphics as they made them?
Mostly because they want to get new players to join the franchise and not put them off by older graphics.