I finally got around to 100% completing the Lego expansion last night, and man, it really shows how badly Horizon needs to have proper progression in its campaign, like in the first game. A bunch of races with no structure to them and countless random tasks to do isn’t fun. It’s just tedious and repetitive. This expansion is basically just the main game on steroids.
This is not the biggest problem. The game grew in popularity during FH3 era, which was yet another step towards horizontal progression. The people who want a campaign are in the minority and not just in our genre. Single player games are not selling well enough to cover their costs (which is sad since I like them best). I even think EA should forego the story completely for their next NFS since the story has been bringing their games down for a while.
Biggest thing IMO is that the game is being marketed towards children and preteens. Yes, it's true. That's why there's such a push to create exclusive content out of cars that really aren't all that, or to add things to the game that feel completely out of place in it (the VW I.D R for example). That's also why it was strange to see the ESRB "suddenly" caring about the game's songs when it shipped with them in the first place; censorship happened ahead of Lego's release. That's also why most of the arguments in support of the current exclusive system are like, "you're complaining about 15 minutes?!?", when surely enough, some people have trouble even making room for that!
Young people are easier customers. They play more and push numbers more. These young people then become able to pay for cosmetics once they turn eighteen, or once they pester their parents enough to buy stuff for them. Easier to manipulate into the industry model Fortnite has paved the path to.
My theory is that Microsoft is obsessed with popularity, which is why they opened their exclusives to Windows PCs and decided to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We get worse games as a result but, since most people don't really give a damn about bugs/glitches/general complaints, the numbers increase anyway.
Still, there could be a bit of a resurgence in fully-fledged campaigns since the newest COD added it back after it got removed in BO4, and, coming from a majorly online game, it's
very significant.