Most executives at large publishers aren’t gamers. Pretty pictures are more likely to entice them than deep mechanics. They could assign 5 people to make a game like Balatro or Stardew Valley, but they never would because they don’t work like that, they came up through the MBA route and think in terms of enterprise software development lifecycles. Also, “making money” isn’t good enough for them, they want to make so much money that they can pay themselves millions of dollars despite never actually contributing to the game.
The problem isn't detailed graphics, the problem is shit performance. The new generation of UE games look average, and require ridiculous hardware + upscaling to run smoothly
Guess I’m alone, I really do love good graphics, I love getting lost in the digital world… I’m just not going to pay $100 per game for that experience. It’s the endlessly growing list of shit they want you to buy on top of buying the game itself that’s destroying the video game market. Every new game that comes out has DLCs and expansions and season passes and skins and bullshit bullshit bullshit. Piracy is back in the rise because all the corporations forgot and got too greedy again.
Kinda seems misleading considering they said they need 7 mil copies sold to break even and 6 months after release it had sold 11 million. Blaming the layoffs on this seems like a transparent misdirection to make people think they lost money here. They want to spend less money, and I get that from a business standpoint, but it seems like they’re looking for reasons to make people accept worse looking games. I don’t really play high graphics games, but if they start decreasing the graphics budget I expect to see a decrease in cost. Don’t pay the same for less.
I agree with the other comments saying it’s about fun and not graphics, but this seems to have been published to get people to expect worse graphics regardless of fun.
They’re simply drawing all the wrong co conclusions here:
even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
The layoffs don’t mean the game or company were unsuccessful, it means they found other ways to eliminate those jobs.
Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad
That’s nothing to do with graphical fidelity, it was a shit game that followed up a shit movie.
Sony closed the studio behind Concord
Lots of potential reasons for this. If you ask me, they released a $30 game into a genre chock full of “free to play” games.
Personally I appreciate “cinematic” games but titles like Balatro and Stardew Valley (neither of which I own) are proof of the simple fact that making games that are actually fun to play is far far more important, and far more profitable.
Realistic does not equal to good looking. In example Zelda Breath of the Wild looks good, but its hardly realistic. And if all games are very realistic, then it gets a little bit boring, as all games start to look the same. The AAA gaming industry is too much focused on lip sync, realistic faces, grass and puddles. I don’t feel like getting lost in a game, but more like watching a movie. It’s so boring to me (I’m looking at you Red Dead Redemption 2).
I disagree. The art design and realism was one of the reasons why it was so good. It’s still one of the best looking games of all time. It also proves that you can make a good looking game that also is fun and fulfilling. It’s honestly a success story all around.
I’ve always disliked how washed out BotW looks. It’s like they could only process limited colours so they reduced the contrast and everything is light grey with a hint of colour.
It’s actually a deliberate stylistic choice. The colors are washed out with a post-processing filter. Textures are actually much more colorful. You can fix this in an emulator, but the problem is that it’s difficult to find a color preset that works in all lighting conditions. BotW has a consistent, almost painterly art style, even if it’s relatively muted.
Yep, did this, looked great and I loved it. Botw modded was a great experience. Just skipping all those unskippable cutscenes was worth it already. (Teleport animations, sign repair dialogue, etc etc)
I am literally playing minecraft without any of those shader texturepacks because I kind of prefer games not being ultra realistic. If being realistic was more fun than we would not need games to have fun because we have real life which is as real as you can get.
Texture packs or not, IMHO the key point is they’re optional, not a requirement for the game to be playable. Games that depend on photorealism, are bound to end up in deep trouble.
Story goes somewhere below Replay value, and controls go to number one. Gameplay and controls are pretty much interchangable unless you want a cinema simulator.
Add sound design as number two above music as number three and then the list is done.
All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope.
Sure, if your metric is hours of gameplay per dollar spent. But that’s no way to rate a video game if you ask me.
For instance I would rate The Talos Principle or Disco Elysium as much better games than, say, World of Warcraft, despite the fact that I played wow much more than the former two. But the story of those two games are just far more interesting and the games have left a much more impactful, lasting impression on me even though I don’t play them any more.
The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.
Cheap shitty headphones, when the Koss KSC75 exist for $20 and sound better than anything I had bought before. I have better headphones now, but $20 is $20, and I still like how small they are. Despite having HD600s and HE1000s, they’re still my go-to for the average use case.
EDIT: Here’s a list of headphones worse than $20 funny disc with ear clip:
All Bluetooth headphones (and your $500 AirPods Max)
All gaming headsets
All in-store headphones that aren’t that one set of Audio-Technicas
In other words, 100% of what the average consumer buys. Get them in on this simple trick.
In my experience it’s both cheap shitty headset and expensive shitty headset. The arguments is always wireless + mic so people go and spend ridiculous money on something that can be done better with a cheap good headphones like the Koss + dedicated mic that may not be as convenient to use but will sound much better.
Still, good sound design may be enjoyed on a shitty headset, it’s just that good audio can add more to gameplay than just graphics. Like for example walking in the main HUB area in Starfield is like soul numbingly hilarious… it does not feel alive at all even when you see NPCs walking around all the time.
One way to understand the video game industry’s current crisis is by looking closely at Spider-Man’s spandex.
For decades, companies like Sony and Microsoft have bet that realistic graphics were the key to attracting bigger audiences. By investing in technology, they have elevated flat pixelated worlds into experiences that often feel like stepping into a movie.
Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.
That level of detail did not come cheap.
Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.
“It’s very clear that high-fidelity visuals are only moving the needle for a vocal class of gamers in their 40s and 50s,” said Jacob Navok, a former executive at Square Enix who left that studio, known for the Final Fantasy series, in 2016 to start his own media company. “But what does my 7-year-old son play? Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite.”
Joost van Dreunen, a market analyst and professor at New York University, said it was clear what younger generations value in their video games: “Playing is an excuse for hanging out with other people.”
When millions are happy to play old games with outdated graphics — including Roblox (2006), Minecraft (2009) and Fortnite (2017) — it creates challenges for studios that make blockbuster single-player titles. The industry’s audience has slightly shrunk for the first time in decades. Studios are rapidly closing and sweeping layoffs have affected more than 20,000 employees in the past two years, including more than 2,500 Microsoft workers.
Many video game developers built their careers during an era that glorified graphical fidelity. They marveled at a scene from The Last of Us: Part II in which Ellie, the protagonist, removes a shirt over her head to reveal bruises and scrapes on her back without any technical glitches.
But a few years later, costly graphical upgrades are often barely noticeable.
When the studio Naughty Dog released a remastered version of The Last of Us: Part II this year, light bounced off lakes and puddles with a more realistic shimmer. In a November ad for the PlayStation 5 Pro, an enhanced version of the Sony console that retails for almost $700, the billboards in Spider-Man 2’s Manhattan featured crisper letters.
Optimizing cinematic games for a narrow group of consumers who have spent hundreds of dollars on a console or computer may no longer make financial sense. Studios are increasingly prioritizing games with basic graphics that can be played on the smartphones already in everyone’s pocket.
“They essentially run on toasters,” said Matthew Ball, an entrepreneur and video game analyst, talking about games like Roblox and League of Legends. “The developers aren’t chasing graphics but the social connections that players have built over time.” Going Hollywood
Developers had long taught players to equate realism with excellence, but this new toaster generation of gamers is upsetting industry orthodoxies. The developer behind Animal Well, which received extensive praise this year, said the game’s file size was smaller than many of the screenshots used to promote it.
A company like Nintendo was once the exception that proved the rule, telling its audiences over the past 40 years that graphics were not a priority.
That strategy had shown weaknesses through the 1990s and 2000s, when the Nintendo 64 and GameCube had weaker visuals and sold fewer copies than Sony consoles. But now the tables have turned. Industry figures joke about how a cartoony game like Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Nintendo Switch considerably outsells gorgeous cinematic narratives on the PlayStation 5 like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases. Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.
Another theory is that major studios have spent recent years reshaping themselves in Hollywood’s image, pursuing crossover deals that have given audiences “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “The Last of Us” on HBO. Not only have companies like Ubisoft opened divisions to produce films, but their games include an astonishing amount of scenes where players watch the story unfold.
In 2007, the first Assassin’s Creed provided more than 2.5 hours of footage for a fan edit of the game’s narrative. As the series progressed, so did Ubisoft’s taste for cinema. Like many studios, it increasingly leaned on motion-capture animators who could create scenes using human actors on soundstages. A fan edit of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, which was released in 2020, lasted about 23 hours — longer than two seasons of “Game of Thrones.”
Gamers and journalists began talking about how the franchise’s entries had gotten too bloated and expensive. Ubisoft developers advertised last year’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which had about five hours of cut scenes, as “more intimate.”
The immersive graphics of virtual reality can also be prohibitive for gamers; the Meta Quest Pro sells for $1,000 and the Apple Vision Pro for $3,500. This year, the chief executive of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, told the company’s investors that because the virtual reality version of Assassin’s Creed did not meet sales expectations, the company was not increasing its investment in the technology. ImageA person plays a video game on a tablet. Live service games that are playable on mobile devices, like Genshin Impact, can generate large amounts of revenue. Credit…Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Many studios have instead turned to the live service model, where graphics are less important than a regular drip of new content that keeps players engaged. Genshin Impact, by the studio Hoyoverse, makes roughly $2 billion every year on mobile platforms alone, according to the data tracker Sensor Tower. Going Broke?
It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.
“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”
Some industry professionals believe there is a path for superb-looking games to survive the cost crunch.
“I used to be a high-fidelity guy; I would log into games and if it didn’t look hyperrealistic, then it was not so interesting,” said David Reitman, a managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he leads the consulting firm’s games division. “There was a race to hyperrealism, and it’s tough to pivot away. You have set expectations.”
Reitman sees a future where most of the heavy costs associated with cutting-edge graphics are handled by artificial intelligence. He said that manufacturers were working on creating A.I. chips for consoles that would facilitate those changes, and that some game studios were already using smart algorithms to improve graphics further than anything previously seen.
He expects that sports games will be the first genre to see considerable improvements because developers have access to hundreds of hours of game footage. “They can take feeds from leagues and transpose them into graphical renderings,” Reitman said, “leveraging language models to generate the incremental movements and facial expressions of players.”
Some independent developers are less convinced. “The idea that there will be content from A.I. before we figure out how it works and where it will source data from is really hard,” said Rami Ismail, a game developer in the Netherlands.
Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.
He recalled a question that emerged early in the coronavirus pandemic and has become something of an unofficial motto in the video game industry.
In a lot of cases, I find I’ve already read the underlying content or skipped it with my reader and therefore can go right to the comments. But ymmv of course.
Maybe it’s just me, but I like the style it’s presented in, and I have major adblockers in service so I’m not sure how it’s a drug fueled hellscape. It basically becomes a normal NYT article after a half-page of scrolling. Not all their readers are familiar with these games, so the NYT is doing its diligence by trying to show what they’re talking about, so their readers have a frame of reference. (Remember the NYT is actually aimed at an investor class who owns a second house in the Hamptons and may not be gamers at all. Go look at their Lifestyle section sometime.)
I think it’s fine but I guess I’m in the minority, but also maybe it’s less worse for me because of uBlock/Pihole/Bypass Paywalls Clean.
I would argue fancy graphics help sell it. It’s the easiest way to grab attention, be it in a trailer or while watching a streamer. Depending on the game it also helps immersion, but not all games need that. All AAA games need to be sold though (at least that’s the aim of any AAA publisher). And people have bought them. And they still do. But they’re starting to learn that attention grabbing graphics doesn’t equal good game.
Just saw a video today about how on steam roughly half of the best rated games are indie titles. Needless to say that the 2D graphics are not photorealistic.
Maybe, instead throwing money on graphics alone, focus on making fun games?
I like that we can get both indie and AAA and that indie developers can successfully create a whole of the former without big business. Not many places any more where a single person can offer a quality product that sits next to a business’ with hundreds of millions of investment.
To be fair, I don’t think all of the blame can be laid on execs. Game directors and Art directors are often the source of the issue.
I’ve seen execs come to a studio and say: “Make something AAA, a single player game with unique gameplay and a great 10 hour story, and get it done in a couple of years. Don’t worry about the bottom line, we want a showcase experience.”
Then the directors come back with: “Okay, showcase you say? How about a AAAA 20v20 open world multiplayer shooter (nobody is doing that!), SaaS (to keep’em coming back), with ultra realistic graphics (it’ll be epically fun that way), a $100million budget (we’ll outsource to save money), MTX so we can make tons of money (we get profit sharing right?), and we do it in 3 years (for work-life balance)?”
Devs are just sitting there shaking their heads and thinking… “Here we go again…”
How about a AAAA 20v20 open world multiplayer shooter (nobody is doing that!), SaaS (to keep'em coming back), with ultra realistic graphics (it'll be epically fun that way), a $100million budget (we'll outsource to save money), MTX so we can make tons of money (we get profit sharing right?), and we do it in 3 years (for work-life balance)
I 100% believe most of these unrealistic expectations come from the execs. Decisions like these aren't made by art directors. They come from on high. Art directors and game directors aren't the ones making the monied decisions.
nytimes.com
Aktywne