I love seeing those videos about game making up until 5th and 6th gen, how creative developers were, managing console hardware capabilities to bypass limitations and find other ways to render faster, wider, more colors, or fit more stuff in less space, pushing the system to its limits… am I wrong, or is the modern game industry just about using an unoptimized engine to make games, not optimizing shit, releasing games that don’t get close to reaching the full hardware potential, and then releasing a next gen of hardware even though the next gen games would probably run even better 2 gens ago if devs had half of the talent and problem-solving skills of past devs?
It’s a bias you have, because there are no nostalgia driven docs about current work. If you watch Game Developer conference videos you see lots of "we had to be creative to…"moments.
I don’t discard it, but how much they have to be creative on technical aspects today unless it’s to port a new game to older gens (do they even do that?), it just seems the hardware has so much power and potential they barely tap on it before the industry release new hardware, so they don’t even have to care about optimization.
Games, like movies and TV, have become so expensive to make because studios and publishers have consolidated so much that they can’t keep the machine running with modest budgets to make modest profits. They have to slop together content with the lowest effort to extract the highest revenue from microtransactions and season passes because every game has to be a Call of Duty/Fortnite/Pokemon level hit or the studio is shuttered by the publisher.
Great games are still being made, just like great movies that aren’t remake or superhero slop are being made. Just not from big money but independent studios instead.
I think it’s more about tsunamis of content now. Graphics have been on a track of diminishing returns for ages now. Today it’s all about generating hundreds of skins, weapons, badges, hats, drops, whatever. It would explain why everybody’s salivating over generative AI.
I love seeing those videos about game making up until 5th and 6th gen, how creative developers were, managing console hardware capabilities to bypass limitations and find other ways to render faster, wider, more colors, or fit more stuff in less space, pushing the system to its limits… am I wrong, or is the modern game industry just about using an unoptimized engine to make games, not optimizing shit, releasing games that don’t get close to reaching the full hardware potential, and then releasing a next gen of hardware even though the next gen games would probably run even better 2 gens ago if devs had half of the talent and problem-solving skills of past devs?
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
It’s a bias you have, because there are no nostalgia driven docs about current work. If you watch Game Developer conference videos you see lots of "we had to be creative to…"moments.
I don’t discard it, but how much they have to be creative on technical aspects today unless it’s to port a new game to older gens (do they even do that?), it just seems the hardware has so much power and potential they barely tap on it before the industry release new hardware, so they don’t even have to care about optimization.
Games, like movies and TV, have become so expensive to make because studios and publishers have consolidated so much that they can’t keep the machine running with modest budgets to make modest profits. They have to slop together content with the lowest effort to extract the highest revenue from microtransactions and season passes because every game has to be a Call of Duty/Fortnite/Pokemon level hit or the studio is shuttered by the publisher.
Great games are still being made, just like great movies that aren’t remake or superhero slop are being made. Just not from big money but independent studios instead.
I think it’s more about tsunamis of content now. Graphics have been on a track of diminishing returns for ages now. Today it’s all about generating hundreds of skins, weapons, badges, hats, drops, whatever. It would explain why everybody’s salivating over generative AI.
its all MTX. the only game to go reverse on graphics is pokemon.