Far Cry 5 is, inadvertently, where the entirety of the Media Façade completely crumble. While GG was the watershed moment, it was the period after announcement that the Gaming Journalists went full "we get to kill Whitey!" for a couple of weeks where the mask completely dropped. This, of course, completely horrified Ubisoft because the game was more about the Cultish following their previous Far Cry games had caused with the villains. Ubisoft also, unironically, vindicated David Kersch's appeal and the Branch Davidians. It has led a lot more to understand the mass murder by the ATF at Waco, as a result. (As a note, Montana was a brilliant place to put a Far Cry game, haha.)
The problem Remedy has had is they don't really have a core audience big enough to justify the costs of production after the Max Payne era. To pull that off, you need integrated marketing that's really clever to build hype. It's the same issues Arkane always runs into. How good or bad the game is only matters so much, but what you have to do is figure out a way to build hype. Cyberpunk 2077 built massive hype from a single slowmo video of one character, it can be done but it needs talent that knows how to sell that game. Which is likely the biggest issue. They have to hire outside marketing firms and I'm guessing they've just been bad at that.
Remedy's bigger fumble is Control. Great foundation with some really well done performances, but marketing was weak and a primary character that's main interaction with themselves always has issues for any larger budget game. (This is, unironically, why they keep giving sassy worn sidekicks to characters, but they keep fumbling the writing with that.)
Arkane's Prey probably had the Best Game with the Worst Marketing award for the 2010s, just to throw that out there, since I've ragged on Arkane a lot, haha.
