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.
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.
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.