In short:
- Increased graphical fidelity means that you need more people to create the same scene. By way of a source of his, he gives the example of a scene from Final Fantasy IV and how many people with specialized roles it would take to create the same scene in modern graphics compared to back in the 90s.
- Larger team sizes means communication takes longer. For everything. No longer just one studio but multiple studios in multiple locations and time zones working on the same game.
- Scopes are bigger. Players are expecting more, whether that’s more hours of content for your dollar or more reflective puddles. May become a vicious cycle as this means you now need to make your game appeal to more groups of people in order to justify your larger costs from this and other areas.
- Technical challenges; changing game engines or platforms over time. If you need to upgrade your engine so that it supports outputting to a console that came out while you were developing the current game, it affects more than just the version that ships on that new platform. Or any other way a game might need to upgrade to support some ambitious new thing the game is trying to do.
- Covid happened in the not-too-distant past, and everyone had to change how they work on a dime.
- Mismanagement, though a bit too umbrella of a term. He feels the number 1 reason is managers deciding every game needs to be a live service, not playing to the developers’ strengths. He also cites shifting timelines by 6 months at a time instead of actually evaluating how much time the game really needs; upper execs not being decisive about a direction for a studio while the studio is strung along for months before minds are changed; short-sighted layoffs between projects breaking up team chemistry; etc.
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I don’t think graphics are the issue on their own. The problem starts when better graphics become the priority instead of making a better game. Some of the games I remember most weren’t technically impressive, but they had great gameplay, a unique style, and felt like they were made with a clear purpose.
A lot of AAA games seem to keep getting bigger, yet not necessarily more enjoyable. Huge maps, endless side activities, and dozens of hours of content don’t add much if the core experience feels repetitive. I’d happily take a well-crafted 20-hour game over a bloated 100-hour one any day.
Ill take less graphics and better gameplay please
They are just making safe games which are copy paste of previous games to ensure success. And are filled with repeatable content just to fill gametime table.
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.
I do not. This rethoric makes it sound like gamers share the fault for the industry being shit, when the fault lies solely with the publishers and sometimes devs. I do agree with “no crunch and decent wages” bit - if it takes a decade to make it and costs a lot fine, so be it, take your time, but I want and I like options: shorter games, longer games, pretty ones, 8-bit one, realistic graphics, story or not is of no concern, I want them all. What I don’t want is this late stage capitalism infinite growth bullshit which stifles studios from innovating, keeps franchises going forever on mediocre entries and closes studios for short term gains.
I want games with 6th and 7th gen graphics. That was the last time most games were creative and not corporate slop.
What does 6th and 7th gen mean?
I want games with 90s to mid 2000s graphics. FMV was the height of graphics hahaha
6th gen = Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox
7th gen = Xbox 360, PS3; optionally Wii, but this is the spot where Nintendo systems sort of stop aligning with other console generations
Thank you! Xbox and PS3 games hold up, sometimes… sometimes not, for me. Most GC/DC/PS2 games hold up great for me. Most stuff before that looks excellent still (sometimes requiring a CRT.)
Yeah, any earlier than that and I’m hunting down scanline filters for RetroArch to dial in the look. Having a proper CRT and old consoles is too much for me, but CRT scanlines very much affect the look of those old games.
Xbox 360/PS3 had enough graphical power. We never needed more.
Obviously better is better and more is more, but I dont want that increase at the expense of anything. If the tech happens to be good enough that we can just magically have better graphics and its all fine then great, but i dont want to wait many years, or have massive teams of miserable code-monkeys chained to a production line, or have less overall games desperate to make a safe return so they dont dare try anything new or original.
We never needed more.
I might be wrong, but I think that’s too early for me - I’d like 120fps at 1440p in a game like Portal 2 as a regular mid-to-high end experience, and I’d like to have room for funky stuff (portals will already have some funky cost).
The issue to me is that it’s a nonsensical competition for better graphics, without considering the actual experience, and instead of solving the root causes people are treating performance as the issue to attack by reducing fidelity, framerate and resolution, and filling in the gaps.
It’s funny, thinking about it. Back when hardware was weak game developers figured out they can keep textures at low resolution and layer them with differently scaled textures, or straight up noise, to make them look more detailed up close. Now we’re basically doing the equivalent of that on the whole screen, cutting down on the image and filling in the gaps, and it’s become a competition of who can do it better.
A game like Halo 3 still looks great today besides some of the human faces. Most games from the mid 00s to the early 2010s hold up graphically for the most part, but actually have interesting and fun gameplay on top of it.
It’s weird to think this isn’t the majority opinion. If I had to make a “best games of this decade” list, I think maybe Shadowbringers would be the only AAA project on that list.
Games made by small teams with small budgets, like Shovel Knight or Blasphemous or Stardew, are what’d be crowding the top.
If it’s longer, prettier, and less fun than the original Max Payne I’m not interested.
How would you rank Max Payne 2 in that comparison? It was more fun (subjective), prettier (objective), but shorter (from memory).
The fun is the important part, so it is better. Not that you should play it without having played 1 though but that’s neither here nor there.
Is there a “definitive” version of Max Payne or are they all roughly the same?
The King-fu mod is definitive.
People arent expecting more. We are expecting passion projects from fellow gamers.
Companies are leeching the soul out of gaming in the name of profits.
You can go on any gaming forum, including this one, and see people distill a game’s value down to how many hours they get for their dollar, so there’s definitely some amount of truth to it.
Yeah and Minecraft is one of the games people have put the most hours into. People want a game that is fun and continues to be fun. That doesn’t require 600 people to do. It requires caring, intention, and understanding of what games actually provide for people. Not just a desire to sell more loot boxes or whatever.
That’s a little tangential though. When I’m saying (and Schreier is saying) people are expecting more, they’re expecting Spider-Man or Assassin’s Creed to last longer than 10-15 hours. Someone else already made Minecraft.
You’re missing the point. Spiderman and assassins creed have already been made too. And people are tired of buying ‘that game you played last year but shinier and laggier and with 500 more meaningless fetch quests and collectibles to find’. Game companies will likely continue to refuse to realize this and actually innovate though, and will continue to throw more money and more people at their dying IPs with increasingly diminishing returns.
Im tired of playing the same game over and over again for sure. Since getting gamepass I basically only play the little indie games on it.
I’ll download every big AAA day one release to see the hype, but after 5 minutes of “wow its very pretty isnt it?” I realise that ive already basically played it before and dont need to do the rest.
There’s an MS-free version of it called “Indie Pass”. It’s not remarkable right now, but I’ll admit I’d like to see it built up into something worthy of more attention.
Both Spider-Man 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows sold multiple millions of copies and made a substantial profit. They sell to the kind of the person who only buys 1-4 games per year, which is the largest segment of the market.
You’re right, we tend to distill value per dollar - but that’s a 2-dimensional equation: games can either be longer but more expensive - or shorter and cheaper.
As an extreme example, I have gotten so much value out of games like Minecraft and Vampire Survivors that my cost-per-hour played is in single-digit cents. Neither is pretty (graphically), and both were very cheap early-access titles when I bought them.
Comparatively, I can’t think of any recent AAA releases have had anywhere near the level of replayability of indie passion projects.
Bit of a tangent, but I personally think the gaming experience peaked in the PS3/X360 era - and the industry has been largely treading water ever since. Nothing that’s come out over the last two console generations couldn’t have been done on those earlier platforms (albeit with lower graphical fidelity).
And none of that has to do with pointlessly high fidelity models that take too much time and people to produce
It was speaking more to point #3.
As for 1, maybe they also gotta to understand that not every game need to have “you can count the wrinkles on every fly on the butt of your super realistic horse” level of detail.
If we assume the faith of most games gets decided by a board of directors based on a short 10-slides pitch, it’s easy to see that videos and screenshots, made up numbers and popular hashtags (openworld, moba, ai) are what lets them be greenlit. Pertnering up with AMD/NVIDIA so they patch drivers for your project alone, so your game at least launches, is pro and not a con.
EA doesn’t have fly wrinkles and we do, with the help of AI, in Betamax 9k MetaHD.
The only way to get under surface for a tripple A game publishers is test groups, but I don’t think this can touch the question of gfx/performance/effort because everything is presented on capable hardware, scenes handcrafted to impress, and it’s hard to point out anything about visuals unless they are hella ugly.
Popularity of games like Minecraft would suggest players don’t really care about ultra graphics that much if you just make a fun game. The art style should be good, but it doesn’t have to be graphically demanding.
the first*, eight and tenth most purchased games of all time are 2d games with pixel art graphics
Valheim is another example where less is more. The textures are pixalated but the lighting, colors, basic designs are all evocative and convey enough to recognize everything in the game. I find it more immersion than a highly detailed design where the imperfections catch my eye.
Yes, but: then you have RTX and shader mods even for that and you don’t know what to think anymore😄
Vast majority of people don’t use those
If it was a button you pushed once instead of something you need to download and set up do you think they still wouldn’t use it?
It would probably increase the number using it, but it would still be a minority.
You won’t hear arguments from me on that, but it’s still a problem that happens along a spectrum as you scale graphics up, too.
Or just put them in early access for 6+ years…
Yeah this seems a fair summary, although I think the question more accurately should be “Why do AAA games now take 6+ years to make?”
There are plenty of smaller and indie games that don’t take 6 years. There are also plenty of smaller and indie games that do take 6+ years but for somewhat different reasons.
Coordinating large groups of people is hard to do. As teams get larger they can do more work technically, but this also requires endless meetings and requirements discussions to keep everyone on the same page
They’re just like Hollywood blockbuster execs. They’d rather one game that copies what they’ve identified as popular from other games and media to formulate a game that can make hundreds of millions in profit if not into the billions rather making a bunch of smaller games that can make smaller profits. Single to double digit million dollar profits. It’d take a large amount of smaller hits that they can’t imagine managing to accomplish to equal the profit of one mega hit so go big or go home. Unless you’re Nintendo, they churn out smaller games and they have a brand/game identity that people generally don’t seem to be let down from. They’re consistent
Go from the summer blockbuster equivalent holiday AAA graphics bonanza game where the rest of the year was filled out with cheaper bets to any month is a month for a blockbuster/AAA game. Well, graphics don’t sell games like they used to so you get these multi hundred million dollar budget games struggling to sell any better than AAA games made in 2007 that were made with a fraction of the modern AAA team size and made in like a third of the time to development
The issue, in my opinion, is company size. Let’s not just look at the gaming industry, but in every industry, when your company gets bigger, the decision-making process takes longer and the final result may often deviate from the initial idea, mostly because the decision is no longer made by the operational people. Say, HR may want to cut or remove certain things for liability concerns, PR the same for protecting company image, accounting for resources concern, etc. In an indie studio, it’s the same few people who do everything and you may not know that you are supposed to do something or you have less mouths to feed, leading to bold decisions and masterpieces are made when you don’t play safe.
So far, Jason is batting 1000 with his YouTube channel.
