Games@lemmy.worldbyampersandrew@lemmy.world
7 hours

Why Games Now Take 6+ Years To Make

www.youtube.com English

In short:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Covid happened in the not-too-distant past, and everyone had to change how they work on a dime.
  6. 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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    Big video games are now taking more than 6 years to make. What are the reasons? Let's break them down.READ:Why So Many Video Games Cost So Much to Make https...
    • Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 hours

      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.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        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.

        • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3 hours

          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.

          • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            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.

            • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              2 hours

              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.

              • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1 hour

                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.

        • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3 hours

          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).

        • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2 hours

          And none of that has to do with pointlessly high fidelity models that take too much time and people to produce

    • missingno@fedia.io
      4 hours

      I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.

      • grinning_serpent@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        It’s weird to think this isn’t the majority opinion. If I had to make a “best games of this decade” list, I think maybe Shadowbringers would be the only AAA project on that list.

        Games made by small teams with small budgets, like Shovel Knight or Blasphemous or Stardew, are what’d be crowding the top.

      • thesohoriots@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        If it’s longer, prettier, and less fun than the original Max Payne I’m not interested.

        • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3 hours

          How would you rank Max Payne 2 in that comparison? It was more fun (subjective), prettier (objective), but shorter (from memory).

          • BladeFederation@piefed.socialEnglish
            2 hours

            The fun is the important part, so it is better. Not that you should play it without having played 1 though but that’s neither here nor there.

    • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
      6 hours

      As for 1, maybe they also gotta to understand that not every game need to have “you can count the wrinkles on every fly on the butt of your super realistic horse” level of detail.

      • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5 hours

        Popularity of games like Minecraft would suggest players don’t really care about ultra graphics that much if you just make a fun game. The art style should be good, but it doesn’t have to be graphically demanding.

        • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
          58 minutes

          Yes, but: then you have RTX and shader mods even for that and you don’t know what to think anymore😄

        • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
          5 hours

          Valheim is another example where less is more. The textures are pixalated but the lighting, colors, basic designs are all evocative and convey enough to recognize everything in the game. I find it more immersion than a highly detailed design where the imperfections catch my eye.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6 hours

        You won’t hear arguments from me on that, but it’s still a problem that happens along a spectrum as you scale graphics up, too.

    • Konraddo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 hours

      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.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.worldEnglish
      5 hours

      Yeah this seems a fair summary, although I think the question more accurately should be “Why do AAA games now take 6+ years to make?”

      There are plenty of smaller and indie games that don’t take 6 years. There are also plenty of smaller and indie games that do take 6+ years but for somewhat different reasons.

      • ZephyrXero@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5 hours

        Coordinating large groups of people is hard to do. As teams get larger they can do more work technically, but this also requires endless meetings and requirements discussions to keep everyone on the same page

    • Stupendous@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6 hours

      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

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6 hours

      So far, Jason is batting 1000 with his YouTube channel.