i think the problem with graphics is that AAA games are too focused on high fidelity, which is why games take so long to make right now (and when they come out, they're riddled with glitches.) it sucks when you have to buy a new console to experience new "state of the art" graphics that look almost
exactly the same as the graphics from the previous generation. good graphics stopped being a selling point for games by this point, but the industry still acts like the are... all at the cost of making artists burn out like hell to get the game to come out on time
The worst part is that Activision is disrespecting the reason WHY they were founded. The CEO of Atari at the time, Ray Kassar, was too overpaid, leading four devs leaving to form THAT company.
Okay, so do some journalism. What's the internal budget/finances like for a place like Insomniac? Posting bumper sticker opinions on Social Media does not equate to journalism.
Those are very confidential docs for senior leadership that the vast majority of employees won't have access to, even if they were willing to break NDA to share. Would be nice to see a project's financial breakdown but takes more than just "some journalism" to get your hands on that type of data
The intent of my message was to say: I think they should do some journalism before claiming to be out of retirement. A few sentences on bluesky don't mean anything.
Cultural requirements fits in as well. Video games used to be pure escapism, but now you have to make everything look fair and balanced. The reason for that, I suspect, is that culturally in the USA there is no true balance - one group controls everything.
IIRC there was this one article about Bobby Kotick formerly Activision CEO. who's salary was like $100K this particular year and made an additional $200 million in bonuses. Sounds like embezzlement to me.
It's obviously the employees who are at fault, if the company just employed less of them Bobby Kotick would have made 300 million in bonuses and his children wouldn't have gone hungry
American CEO's: “How can I make myself the most money possible? Just take it from everybody else and blame it on player expectations and shareholder needs while exhausting devs and fire them without cause to take their bonuses for myself? Hell yeah!”
I’m also okay with a reduced focus on graphics and return to stylized games. I’ve been playing Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina’a Wonderlands and the stylized look is so pleasing. It doesn’t have to be perfect
The success of retro-looking games like shovel knight should be proof enough that we don't need more graphics, dont need next gen gaming pcs and consoles to enjoy games.
Also lack of creative talent coming from people who didn’t exclusively grow up in the video game world bubble and therefore only know how to make derivative games based on other games.
It is, but employing derivation in a way that mixes unique elements with inspiration from other, less explored sources is what creates worthwhile, quality art.
Everything builds on what came before it, but is the next iterative product always worth money & attention?
If this is about the insanely high resolutions on modern games there's room to talk about that too, not in cost to make but in the whole 100gb video game epidemic.
Speaking as someone who spent 17 years in the C-suite of games companies, I would say you’re both very close to correct. The issue is that c-suite salaries are usually a tax, but also that the graphics require hundreds of humans to use properly. 1/
And once those humans finish their current project the way studios are designed and run, there’s little for them to do until the next one, which is also a failure of studio leadership and (especially) HR departments. /fin
If less people can run your game because of poorly optimized rtx fueled garbage you're gonna turn off so many potential customers no matter how award winning your game is
thats a problem with lazy devs and lack of time to finish their project more than anything. we've had games with great graphics that are very performant on most decent hardware.
At this point, pretty much every single game on the PS5 has a Performance and a Quality mode, and Quality invariably runs at 30 FPS while Performance runs at 60 FPS and looks all but identical. There's something hilarious about this.
Like, this framing is incredibly irresponsible. Doesn't actually say Spider-Man 2 lost money (highly unlikely it did) just happy by implication to suggest these layoffs were the result of an over budget game that bombed, ignoring the huge number of layoffs at small and medium sized studios
Wait has anyone said Spider-Man 2 bombed? Like I know it didn't reach the amount of sales it wanted in it's first week or whatever but I remeber it being incredibly popular, am I missing something?
i do think aaa games multiplying “state of the art graphics” by “minimum 100 hours gameplay” to create a hole that can only be filled with $100m-$300m worth of labor over 3-10 years is unsustainable as a business strategy, regardless of management or their salaries…
…but the fact that companies keep doing pursuing this strategy despite its observably low odds of success proves they’re either galactically bad at their jobs or making out like bandits anyway
11 million copies at $70 each is $770M gross, so they'd still make money even if they lost 60% to storefronts and such (standard is 30% afaik?). If someone as uninformed and as bad at math as me can notice that, it's absurd they don't try to back this up at all in the article.
The issue is the “industry” may have immense profits but it’s extremely concentrated.
Spidey 2 barely made enough money to fund the next game. Thats really really bad! Not a “failure” but also not sustainable. One miss = death is a bad place to be.
Everything going on in videogames is part of a well observed trend across the ENTIRE economy, as companies try to battle a downturn's effect on a graph sheet by sacrificing millions of peoples lives on the altar of shareholder profits
It's really telling when a lot of these companies are posting record profits nearly yearly and still laying off the actual developers while increasing CEO pay. Capitalist greed is ruining everything fun and beautiful
I feel the industry low key must hate Baldur's Gate 3 because it shows just how a big budget can be used if the company actually has a clear idea of the game they are making from the start and treats its workers well. It really makes everyone else look bad
This is exactly how it went down, as a matter of fact!
There were all sorts of posts and tweets from industry leads when BG3 dropped being like, “Well, it’s an anomaly for x, y, and z reasons, so nobody better expect other games to be this awesome! 😡” lol
Very fascinating that they refuse to acknowledge that CEOs saw COVID assistance as free money, and now that the assistance is gone and the market is contracting CEOs are mass-firing regular people in order to maintain their otherwise-unsustainable salaries they've had over the past few years.
There's merit in spending less on games and having more focus in game scope, but the real problem comes from the C-suite and shareholders sucking up the money that would otherwise go to developing smaller games that fill the gaps between tentpole releases and float the company during those times.
I just read the thing and it's like, they are *so close* to figuring out the problem but they just focus on this made up notion of graphics and keep babbling about it...
Got my kids a ps5 and lots of games with great graphics. They don’t care about graphical quality and RTX. They still default to their steam libraries full of indie games, Roblox and Minecraft.
CEOs/the entire executive class/shareholders are what's ruining every industry, and the world as a whole. Put them all in a rocket and fire them into the sun and grind the concept of the stock market into dust and watch how fast things improve for literally everyone.
they want to outsource all that to somewhere cheaper so they can get a bonus- CEO salaries aren't even as much as how much they make off bonus and equity
And that means outsized budgets on projects that ask for things that don't pay back in at sufficient rates past a certain point (fidelity is a necessity up to a point but there's also a point where spending more budget on more time and staff to push the fidelity harder doesn't draw people in)
Especially when they can shorten dev times and reduce staff size on a given project by REIGNING IN SCOPE, then be able to put that extra staff and time towards more projects that will have better initial return ratios.
This is all aside from the fact that like... Morally, the workers deserve better pay and less crunch; but like even from the 'all the monee' capitalist perspective, the way they're managing stuff is on its face inefficient for returns because people wanna see BEEG NUMBER
Yes, people DO think that all the different parts of a video game are somehow constructed out of dollar units, given the way they suggest that we reallocate resources;
"It's so buggy! They should have spent less on the graphics and more on QA! Just move some of the story map dollars to PvP maps!"
Well shit, tell the artists and level designers working on DLC assets to move to bugfixes, pronto! because that's what they were hired for! this studio with 500+ employees can only possibly do one single thing at once!
The graphics also didn’t change much between the first game, miles, and 2. The game was considerably bigger than the first two, with 2 totally new maps, and in development longer.
At 11 million copies, the game made back ±$800 million. No store fees, because Sony owns the distribution. That $300 mil includes the marketing, with it likely taking the lion's share (CP2077's marketing budget was double the development budget).
i haven't even heard of the article yet I feel like I can see the entire thing in my mind's eye because the nyt only writes one kind of article and just changes the nouns
It's like the only people who don't know this are the CEOs themselves, IGN and the legions of twitter/armchair critics who blame it on 'lazy' game devs who are forcing 'the woke agenda' into games.
I am so sick and tire of that same pathetic f**king excuse being used over and over and over to explain why some rotted brained, brick hearted, self sentered chud doesn't like something
That on top of all these huge AAA games having such unreasonably high budgets that it’s almost impossible to actually get a profit unless everyone buys the game. Like $300 million spent on Spider-Man 2?
Sadly this article seems to just be repeating what half of social media seems to think about graphics and game budgets. The people who either post that “I want worse looking graphics…” meme or think they’re making a red hot take when they say “I think art direction is more important than fidelity.”
Games need to cut it out with the graphics. Current games have hardly improved over games from 2010 in terms of fidelity (with just tons of extras layered on top) and it’s ballooned production times and costs to absurd, industry breaking, levels.
Graphics serve aesthetics. If you have a good, unified look, it'll do more for your game than illions of polygons and double reacharound ray tracing. You need artists more than feats of computing.
I would argue a game like Half Life 2 has “better” graphics than most AAA games today as they were clean and functional, ran smoothly on tons of systems and never got in the way of the game that they supported. It’s also why a game like World of Warcraft was so vastly superior than it’s competitors.
Value extraction at the top of companies is a problem across sectors. We've seen huge wage inflation for the CEOs of academy trusts in the UK. With Schools having to shrink their student facing labour force in order to sustain huge pay at the top of the pyramid.
I'd be able to point out few other reasons like keeping servers for always-online single player games that nobody asked for or overspending on advertising and nonsense bureaucracy and "consulting"...
I mean, ceo salaries don't impact nearly as much as the profit demands of investors in a publicly traded company. I was once laid off because my game sold 3.5 mm copies instead of the 4 the CEO had promised. (It was profitable. Just not enough to keep the team employed.)
As a game designer, I think it's fine to let players do what they want. If they want to skip, fine. I don't think it's cool to use dark patterns to keep people paying you tho.
That's fair. The phenomenon I'm referring to is a trend of some AAA live service games, especially Ubisoft & Activision titles, that are microtransaction storefronts, with a game on the side.
Cheat codes in 90's did the same thing. I couldn't care less for career mode in Need for Speed, I just typed codes to unlock all cars and all maps and raced how I wanted. The only difference is that cheats are monetized now.
They're directly related. In order to get the high salary, ceos must appease the stockholders at all other costs. I agree that the infinite growth mindset from investors is the core of the problem though
It sounds to me that it's still the CEOs fault: he over promised and then instead of reducing his bonus to compensate, he went to you guys and said "hey kids the evil investors want you fired" deflecting any blame to himself.
It was a publicly traded company. If we didn't make more profits than we had the year before we were always going to be laid off no matter who was at the helm. He was an evil asshole though. Later convicted of insider trading. -g
CEO salaries, and appeasing shareholders: The 1-2 punch that's ruining literally every industry on the planet because capitalism is a shit system that doesn't work, as evidenced by (gestures broadly at everything).
Read the article and it’s like they were just avoiding the real subject.
I do think the continued pursuit of high end graphics is just chasing diminishing returns, but it’s not the oldest gamers, or the goals of studios that are at issue here.
Wanna know the dumbest part about this? A lot of that crowd is like "these writers shouldn't be paid." What they fail to realize is a lot of them weren't. So many interns go to these aaa companies with a spark in their eyes and a dream of making something amazing. Only to leave hated
For a single line of dialogue that they wrote that they didn't get paid for. And some shit they said about some politician because they are real people with real fears in their real lives. What I really hate about this grift? They're not just harassing people. They're bullying slaves.
Meanwhile the rich sex pests who own these companies spend it all on ai research and kids to molest. Some programming and a bunch of marketing. Sometimes they get hated too. But its very rare that the evil people responsible ever get one drop of the hate the unpaid intern gets.
Comments
I was suggesting some games to a colleague who replied with "I didn't spend xxxx€ on a new gaming PC to play old games"
Break it down for us, do the work.
Japanese CEO's: “I legally can't exploit that.”
If the CEO is rich by profiting off of others expense, then what is the behavioral modification executable really doing?
What can video games become? What have they become?
Also lack of creative talent coming from people who didn’t exclusively grow up in the video game world bubble and therefore only know how to make derivative games based on other games.
Everything builds on what came before it, but is the next iterative product always worth money & attention?
Definitely not always.
It was worth paying for because it wasn’t just a derivative iteration, but a unique addition to the artistry and scifi storytelling of the time.
It was new.
Games cost more, revenue shrinks -> studios take less risk -> sequels -> gets gradually less appealing to players.
They are made by people! And employing lots of people, is not the bad part of big budget video games.
The bad part is chronic mismanagement, toxic culture, funneling their immense profits to a handful of people etc
The issue is the “industry” may have immense profits but it’s extremely concentrated.
Spidey 2 barely made enough money to fund the next game. Thats really really bad! Not a “failure” but also not sustainable. One miss = death is a bad place to be.
I think that's called "late-stage capitalism." Or just "western economies after the pandemic"
The infinite growth machine must be fed with the bones of the people who achieved success.
1. They took their time making it
2. They drew on past learnings from making video games before
3. They managed their resources to staff the project accordingly rather than just letting the ceo have a Scrooge mcduck swimming pool of money 🤷♂️
There were all sorts of posts and tweets from industry leads when BG3 dropped being like, “Well, it’s an anomaly for x, y, and z reasons, so nobody better expect other games to be this awesome! 😡” lol
The mindset ABSOLUTELY is of "how much costs for time spent doing with quality as a secondary thing to consider", with 0/0 = infinite.
Like CEO benefits are an issue, but there's a bigger problem where investors think that this is a simple 'more money in, more money out' sitch
"It's so buggy! They should have spent less on the graphics and more on QA! Just move some of the story map dollars to PvP maps!"
"I can't believe [studio] is already working on DLC when the main game still has [issue]!"
Like. God. They didn’t do even basic research
I do think the continued pursuit of high end graphics is just chasing diminishing returns, but it’s not the oldest gamers, or the goals of studios that are at issue here.
The problem is CEOs, shareholders and investors.