While you personally might not be, the market as a whole is. Big games with an open world to explore are very popular and sell very well indeed. Gamers want these types of games. The issue is that they've become astronomically expensive to make, and they aren't selling enough to make the effort worthwhile. So publishers are now between a rock and a hard place where consumers are expecting massive open worlds with amazing graphics, but providing consumers with these games costs so much it may no longer be worth it.
This feels like the natural end point of 20 years of chasing high end gaming, and maybe it would be best if everyone (including gamers) took a deep breath and held back a bit for the tech and effort needed to produce these games to become more affordable, if we want to preserve jobs and the industry in its current form. Or we see the big publishers diversifying their lineup ala Nintendo so they are producing smaller games more frequently while having 2-3 big games in the pipeline at any given time.
As usual, the problem is never aspiring to growth per se, but having unrealistic, unreasonable and unsustainable expectations of it. Development costs have exploded because this technical race is not rational anymore. A home console doesn't have to be a top-of-the-range gamer's PC, and it doesn't cost the same anyway. Games take an inordinate amount of time to develop, not because we ask more of them - that's normal, ongoing technological progress - but because we ask
too much of them at this point of what affordable tech is. For me, the best illustration of this race into the void is the emergence of mid-gen consoles, which make no sense other than to fuel this ridiculous headlong rush.
You make a console. You make games for that console. They're fluid, they're functional, they're ambitious and a progress from the last gen, but there's no development hell, no huge sales targets that set the house on fire at the slightest commercial hiccup. There's no obsession with terraflops to the detriment of the rate at which games are released. That's a healthy model. You have available technology, you make the best use of it. Instead, we constantly have a race to the next technology and sales projections that think people are going to buy the next technology forever without worrying about having games to play. It's absurd. Of course this bubble that speculates on the next big thing has to burst.
Not everyone is a happy few with high purchasing power. In fact, what's very ironic and representative of the excesses of neoliberalism is that tech as an industry contributes to making people poorer, by making people redundant and abusing short, insecure contracts. So this industry is actually helping to reduce purchasing power. And this same industry is basing its growth forecasts on an increase in purchasing power, which it is itself helping to reduce. Of course this bubble will burst. Of course they'll end up going to hell. So much the better.
The sad thing is that nothing Sony's boss says is really a wake-up call. He's not saying that Playstation needs to get back into the real world. He's saying that Sony needs to diversify its revenue streams to continue to fuel its growth. He's not saying that we need to review the scale of projects and projections, he's saying that it's the teams who 'don't understand' = let's make redundancies to increase our margins.
And Nintendo isn't immune to this idiotic ideology, as we've already seen when the company was in trouble. The power of nuisance of the famous 'analysts' that Sony's new boss has just quoted religiously is a permanent threat. They're going to have unrealistic and irrational expectations about Switch 2 sales. The slightest misstep and there'll be panic, with shareholders asking Mario to go mobile and Luigi to pole dance.