trynn

The answer is simple. Games are categorized as AAA when they’re built by large teams with large budgets at large companies. Puzzle games usually don’t require a team of hundreds of people and tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars to produce. The gameplay and asset scope is tiny in comparison to a typical AAA game. Most games with puzzle elements that do end up getting made by AA and AAA studios (like Portal) have the puzzle aspect merged with some other genre (like FPS, in Portal’s case), and those other genres do require more resources to produce.

Star Control has a complicated IP situation and was never owned by Activision, anyway. You need to look to Stardock for future Star Control games. Do you mean StarCraft instead?

Define “finished”. A lot of the games I enjoy are ones that don’t have an “ending”, like Crusader Kings or Civ.

In general though, I try to finish games I’m enjoying and quickly stop playing games I’m not enjoying so that I can move onto something else.