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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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.
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.
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.
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.
But none of those models are even ‘made’…
They’re just 3D scanned real objects/people.
Games are harder to make now due to committees and consultants, that’s it. That’s the whole reason.
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.
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
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.
Thats right, but games like Baldurs Gate or KCD2 still take a lot of time. Its not like shifting the priority to making a better game makes it take much less time to develop. If you abandon graphics altogether maybe, thats where indie comes into play. But AAA need to appeal to much bigger groups of people.
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.
Or just put them in early access for 6+ years…
It feels like expectations keep stacking up. Every new release is expected to be bigger, longer, and packed with more features than the last, which probably makes it harder for teams to stay focused on what made the original idea interesting in the first place.
