Game Studios are Destroying themselves

[D. Flame]

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/gaming-industry-insiders-say-cutting-edge-graphics-cost-too-much-to-make-for-aaa-games

Speaking to The New York Times, several game developers and some industry figures spoke out about how the gaming industry's AAA studios couldn't reasonably handle the stress of creating cutting-edge graphics— particularly in light of major waves of layoffs throughout the past two years, and several high-fidelity AAA games underperforming in the market.

https://www.techspot.com/news/106125-aaa-games-struggle-keep-up-skyrocketing-graphics-costs.html

Gaming studios face increasingly difficult decisions as they grapple with the escalating costs of creating cutting-edge visuals and the diminishing returns these visuals often provide. The challenge lies in striking a balance between visual spectacle, engaging gameplay, and sustainable development practices.

...and the absolutely hilarious thing, is gamers don't even want it. The price of consoles have gone up. The price of graphics cards have gone up, all in an economic downturn. The PS5 is selling below the PS4 in the same time period globally. The 3060 is still the most used GPU on Steam.

And yet, this Studio execs have:

-convinced themselves that they need to pay a ton for Hollywood actors to be in their games. Which gamers found novel at first, but could not care less about now that it is old news.

-Convinced themselves that every game needs to be motion captured, even to the point where so motion capture actors are starting to act more ‘animated’ to make the motion capture look less motion captured.

-Convinced themselves that people want to lose 90% of their FPS for poorly implemented path tracing,.

-Convinced themselves that gamers should just buy more powerful hardware that doesn't even exist yet, rather than having the game be optimized.

They are wasting more and more money on poor choices that gamers do not even care about, other than the 1% who buy things like 4090s, then spend more time bragging about it online rather than actually playing games. Then these studios try to pass that cost on to the gamers, despite the end result being barely any better looking than a game from last gen while having less than half the performance (See: Monster Hunter World vs Monster Hunter Wilds), ONLY TO BE SURPRISED when gamers snub the game, and the game flops

Then? The studios close, and cry out, "Who could have seen this coming?" The answer is everyone. Everyone could have seen this coming. Everyone did see this coming. Well, other than the execs sitting in their ivory towers detached from reality, while demanding more and more gimmicks and such be shoehorned into the games, rather than just making decent-looking, well-performing games that people want to play.

The days where we get legendary graphical jumps, like from the PS1 to the PS2, are gone. We are deep into diminishing returns territory. It’s time to refocus on gameplay and performance. Instead of trying to make a game look 0.1% better graphically, try to get it running at a solid 60 or 120 FPS at 1080p or 4K first, and do it without relying on crutches like DLSS and Framegen. And don’t make it so demanding that it cuts out your biggest markets (PS4 and RTX 3060).

[xBCxRangers]

This was the worst generation of games ever. And i'm not going back to the 80's, being there was no comparison to that of today.

There just seems to be a brain drain of gaming development teams, creating games that folks don't want to play, or placing the wrong people in those positions depending on the game, or the gaming developers becoming too greedy looking for the smallest investment for the highest dollar.

If you're gonna come out with a military shooter, you may want to do what they did back in the day, and have military advisors help you in that development.

If you have sports game, it may be worth it to change the engine and model every few years.

It may also help to know the demographics you're reaching. I saw a survey that the average gamer, is 35. And so they may want to mature the games up a bit.

I think the next generation has to focus more on content and scripts, and the matters i mentioned, rather than having the best looking, highest performing trash ever created.

[T9]

endlessly repeating the same formula, disgusting squeeze practices, lazy-butt development
why support it?

well ok RDR 2 for some reason is at least a bit fun

[Red-4-Golf]

Because in today's age you don't even need talent to create a game. I.E. just buy a unity license , clip and paste whatever and call yourself a Dev. Market as the greatest ever and laugh yourself to the bank when you realease it and it runs like crap.

[Diogenes49]

wait until they start using AI to develop games

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by Diogenes49:

wait until they start using AI to develop games

They already do.

[Tito Shivan]

The game graphics is a tech aspect that is on the part of the curve that offers diminshing returns by themselves.

AAA studios are usually the slowest path to innovation, as they're per design risk-averse companies. AAA games jumped on the Battle Royale bandwagon when there was excess of offer in the genre.

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

The game graphics is a tech aspect that is on the part of the curve that offers diminshing returns by themselves.

AAA studios are usually the slowest path to innovation, as they're per design risk-averse companies. AAA games jumped on the Battle Royale bandwagon when there was excess of offer in the genre.

The reason that they have become so risk adverse, as opposed to the golden age of innovation on the PS2, is because these games now cost them so much to make. The thing is, it is a self created problem. They are making choices that have little effect on the final product, but major impacts on the budget.

[Yzal]

I know right, it feels great!

[Mad Scientist]

Loads of Devs are doing fine, like the Factorio & Palworld Devs. Companies tend to do fine when they focus on making a good product, keeping the players happy, and not getting involved in culture wars. Some exceptions like culture-war mocking games tend to do decently.

Remaking the same thing every year with some slightly updated graphics, maybe a new piece of gear or map to play on can generally go poorly as well.