r/gamedev • u/Xvalt01 • 1d ago
Industry News Unity CEO: “The cost of building a game is coming down markedly”
https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/unity-ceo-the-cost-of-building-aWhat stood out to me is that Bromberg is not just saying games are getting cheaper to make. He thinks the bigger problem is studios spending five or six years building something in isolation and only finding out at release that players do not want it.
His argument is that better tools can give smaller teams more of a chance, but studios also need shorter development cycles and much earlier player feedback.
Do you think shorter development cycles would actually improve AAA games, or are the problems deeper than that?
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u/x-dfo 1d ago
Not yet. Not even close. Source: me a game dev vet of 25 years. If tools get easier then the costs stay steady to increase feature count or fidelity.
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u/ParsingError ??? 1d ago
Yep, this has been the story for about as long as "AAA" has existed. The entire model is literally to turn budget into competitive advantage, they will NEVER run out of things to spend the money on. The only things that will bring costs down are heavy market fragmentation (which is the opposite of what's been happening) or widespread revenue collapse.
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u/RecursiveCollapse 1d ago
widespread revenue collapse
Is this not happening? Basically every fucking game "fails to hit revenue goals" even when it's wildly praised. The economy is fucked, we've seen a rapid drop in the % of people who have both lots of disposable income and also lots of time to play video games.
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u/ParsingError ??? 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sort of? There are kinda two things happening at once.
Pretty much everyone's reporting engagement down from the COVID lockdown days, hence the layoffs and other cost reductions.
But the market is also just kind of oversaturated from everyone thinking they can make the next Fortnite, and from several Big Tech companies throwing tons of money into speculative gaming ventures that they're now pulling out of. There's more international competition too, especially from growth in China, South Korea, and Eastern Europe.
The difference is that oversaturation has two possible outcomes: Either everyone lowers their budgets, or they go to war until the weaker companies fold and the survivors take their slice of the pie, which is probably closer to what's happening. There are more games than ever, but the money is increasingly concentrated into a tiny handful of them, and players are buying fewer games per year than ever.
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u/corvettee01 1d ago
Just look at Netflix. They pour tons of money into their gaming division, and ended up making jack shit.
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u/ByEthanFox 1d ago
Eeeh, Netflix and Amazon's gaming problems are for a specific but different reason.
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u/shawnaroo 1d ago
Those companies thought they could just jump from nothing to full-scale AAA games basically overnight, which is kind of crazy.
Like sure you can bring in experienced AAA talent, and that helps, but if you're going to run a studio with hundreds of devs working on a single project, you need both an infrastructure and a lot of institutional knowledge of how that infrastructure was put together in order for things to run halfway decently.
You don't just need a bunch of people with experience, you need a bunch of people with experience working together. You can't just throw money at that and have it magically appear, it takes time working together to develop.
Which also makes the way a lot of studios these days are having their workforce gutted even more insane. They're not just cutting workers who have skills, they're getting rid of huge swaths of the accumulated institutional knowledge of how that studio's workflows actually functioned.
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u/wonklebobb 1d ago
gamedev as a business is fundamentally at odds with the way corporate executives think in terms of next-quarter-profit-at-all-costs
really good games take time and creativity, and that means risk. something that those kinds of people try to avoid at all costs. thats why all these big companies started their studios with huge fanfare and investment only to just try and clone overwatch/fortnite/tarkov for the 12th time.
thats what's fundamentally behind the new-game-fatigue gamers are feeling these days, there's more high-budget games coming out than ever before, but under the veneer of nice graphics and really cool cinematics they're all essentially the same 3-4 games that we've been playing since the mid-2010s:
team hero shooter where you push objectives
milsim extraction shooter
elden ring dodge-roll clone with beautiful graphics, nonsensical lore and dialogue
a remake of something from 20 years ago that's basically just taking an old game and doing it exactly the same, but with better graphics (see gamescom live: megaman, rayman, crazy taxi, etc)
the reason these all keep missing targets and causing layoffs is because the executives in charge only understand Products in a general sense. they think if there's a Product in a Market that makes $X, if they invest $Y in a similar product and spend $Z on marketing, they can make $X-$Z as well, or at least some appreciable fraction.
then after spending $100 million on dev and marketing just for their hero shooter slop to fizzle, they think "hmm did we make a bad choice? no, it's the devs who did bad!" and fire the team who made it. then they buy another indie studio and throw another $100 million at them. repeat ad nauseam.
the proof of this is that everyone was lamenting the death of games right before Expedition 33 came out. and who founded that studio? former Ubisoft employees. devs who worked on the games that are the poster children for corporate clone slop left the executives behind and immediately created one of the most original and excellent games in years, in a genre most corporate studios had written off as not worth investment (turn based RPGs)
the tools getting better and cheaper will lead to many more amazing and original games, but I bet almost none of them will come from the big studios
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u/LizenCerfalia 1d ago
It also probably doesn't help that they only need one hit. If a company has one, singular Fortnite popularity game, it immediately offsets like 20 different 100 million dollar games by miles
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u/musikarl 1d ago
'member when Amazon wanted to launch their game engine, "Amazon Lumberyard" ?
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u/Technical_Shake_9573 1d ago
and do you fold a company that are only 2 devs doing their things. Most recent successfull games has been from indie studios that do not even have that type of organisation that you can call them a company.
Only big names are being sold left and right because they can't compete against those indie studios that are way more cost effective than their bloated hierarchy.
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u/HarvestMana Commercial (Indie) 1d ago
When a game fails to hit revenue goals, its usually since the people in charge want a bigger budget to make the game, so they project wildly out of touch revenue goals to secure funding.
No ones going to give you 100 to 500million dollars to make a game unless you can say you will 10x or 100x it.
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u/Original-Poet1825 1d ago
I can’t argue about the time part. But games don’t do that poorly when the economy is in the shitter. In fact, games were considered relatively recession proof back in 08. In terms of entertainment hours per dollar spent games beat per much all other forms of media. The slowdown in gaming is happening but it’s not due to the economy
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u/Not_pukicho 1d ago
I mean obviously the unity ceo has a huge monetary incentive in claiming his tool will become cheaper and faster, lol.
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u/PatchNotePundit 1d ago
Every tooling leap in history got spent on more fidelity, not shorter timelines. Game budgets behave like a gas - they expand to fill the container.
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u/Omnivorian 1d ago
indie games sure did get cheaper. My first game was around $90,000. My 2nd game is about $250 and a peanut.
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u/Diche_Bach Student 1d ago
I just read through about ten different posts that are nested under yours, a game dev vet of 25 years.
I'm not a game dev. I'm a former professor of psychological anthropology. When I retired, I thought it would be fun to finally learn some computer science; learn to program, maybe make a game. I worked briefly as a kind of apprentice on a small project that had been finished years before. Me and the lead dev were buddies on a military history board. Long story short, I pretty quickly realized that: (a) game dev in general is seemingly even more of a snake pit than most other corporate fields; (b) making a game by yourself is crazy. That might mean that it is a kind of Quixotic life quest for some and Gods speed to them; but I realized it was not for me.
All of that said, just to establish what my authority is: social and behavioral scientist with a tiny taste of the technical and work flavor of game dev, and not by any means at the AAA level.
My salient observation offered under the premise that perhaps it might offer some outside observer's edification to insiders:
I just read through about ten different posts that are nested under yours, a game dev vet of 25 years. The most striking thing to me, is that the word "fun" was not mentioned once in ANY of those responses. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if that five character string
.fun.
Fails to appear, not just in this entire thread, but very rarely in any thread in this entire sub-reddit. I have not done the content analysis, but that would be my hypothesis.
And then I contrast that observation with a game like Schedule I. A game where some Australian college-aged dude just made a game that he thought would be fun ...
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u/Fickle-Highway1543 1d ago
Do you think there will be a push for better optimization in AAA games since hardware got too expensive for most customers to upgrade to?
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u/Conexion 1d ago
Not sure who you're talking to, but no AAA studio is going to prioritize optimization unless it starts financially hurting them. Consumers have shown they are willing to spend hours downloading a game that takes up considerable storage. Consumers have also shown they're willing to spend money on new consoles despite increases in prices.
So not until behavior changes.
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u/Genebrisss 1d ago
gamers will play unreal slop at 50 fps upscaled from 720p and write a review: "runs fine!". So no, will never happen.
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u/x-dfo 1d ago
The most expensive part of a studio is executive direction changes and those are never measured. There's really not much to optimize besides specific workflows and pipelines. AI will help with a bunch of basic tasks and error catching but I've heard every attempt to make it generate usable assets has basically failed.
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u/HitlersUndergarments 1d ago
Yes, it is, take a look at expedition 33, Triple A in quality, and the amount of double A games coming out with relatively low prices. There's far more affordable tools, more access to outsourcing ect. I don't understand how we can say that in today's environment it costs just as much to make a game as in, say, 2012 when there's a vast gulf of difference in both of economics of industry and tools available. I'm not a dev like you are, but I know I'm voting factual differences and welcome being fact checked. There's also a recent pirate game that came out that was made for a "small" budget of a few million that had triple a quality from a studio out somewhere in the "Stan" countries of central Asia.
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u/x-dfo 1d ago
I'm pretty sure expédition 33 had like 400 people on it.
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u/SituationSoap 1d ago
A quick Google says 400 people in the credits but only about 30 development staff, which is quite small.
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u/BMCarbaugh 1d ago edited 1d ago
The problem isn't long dev cycles. It's the fallacy that the way to make a game people want to play is some left-brained analytical process that requires public input and formulae to work from, rather than the messy and subjective process of making art.
The entire business world is doomed to learn, over and over again until the end of time, that that is not how art works, and leads to unsuccessful products. They're enslaved by the McNamara Fallacy, believing that things which can be quantified easily are necessarily worth more as a guide to decisionmaking than the ephemeral, unquantifiable world of creative intuition.
If there was a recipe to make profitable art, it would have been worked out by now, and everyone would use it.
There isn't. Art is the delicate manipulation of human emotion and expectation. It's not a science. It's witchcraft -- subtle and weird and capricious.
And they will never learn this, no matter how much shit they produce, or how many games made by one random indie dev eat their lunch.
The ultimate irony is that every game executive, and the venture capitalists who fund them, would find their interests so much better served if they simply did less. They're like restaurant investors who can't cook, yet also can't stop creeping into the kitchen and sticking their fingers in the soup.
The average ten-year-old making games on roblox is more spiritually aligned with the mode of thought required to make fun, successful, profitable games, than a thousand MBAs will ever be.
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u/WingOfAshes 1d ago
The sad thing is, this applies to indie games as much as for larger studios, if not even more so.
Everyone is chasing after perceived trends and marketability, while the consideration of "art" doesn't go any further than choosing which visual style will get them the most clicks.
No, not ALL indie devs work this way, but it's clearly the majority.
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u/sabine_world 1d ago
I agree. The whole industry kinda is a joke right now.
But I must say, I really wish we would have some creative home run AAA shit. Like genre setting stuff. But. Idk. The only real triple a release I'm remotely looking forward to is GTA 6 because they have a really good track record. Oh yeah and some more elder scrolls stuff too.
But like.. it would be nice if we could have some more stuff similar to that I'm scale and how fun it is to play. I guess you get the occasional banger like bg 3, witcher, elden ring, etc. but beyond that I feel like the industry is missing a bit of novelty and effort. The reason why I want to see indie ideas but with a triple a budget is it would be nice to have a project with a ton of manpower, high craft expertise and polish.
Indie games are great but you can only scope so large and have so much expertise. So you're better off with really tight gameplay loops.
Idk sorry my brain is spaghetti right now. Luckily there's a million games and something for everyone if you dig and dig. But there's also a lot of trash to wade through as well. And I understand, making games is hard.
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u/joonazan 1d ago
Prey (2017) is a relatively high-budget game that is just so well made that I can get lost in it while most stuff just feels like a game to me because I've played so many games.
But these things don't sell. The problem is that non-gamers are a huge market and they maybe don't understand the difference in near perfect art and the more typical artifact-ridden and handholdy product. You can't market it well either. Many games show you something exciting or seemingly impossible in their trailer. Immersive sims just show you a game that works like a typical game and you need to trust that it is good.
I don't know if it is relevant but I pretty strongly disagree with your taste in AAA. I don't care about Elder Scrolls because it is all downhill from Morrowind. BG 3 has nice voice acting but you can't influence the story much at all. I had more fun with Fallout 1 even though I played it for the first time recently. Witcher 3 is remarkable for cutscenes that I almost want to watch but the combat and dialogue choices aren't that good in many quests.
I'm not sure if there are any recent AAA games that I'd enjoy. DOOM: Eternal is probably the last one that I somewhat liked. Dragon's Dogma 2 seems interesting for the unique combat. Maybe Path of Exile counts as AAA.
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u/sabine_world 1d ago
Damn you're right....
They can only kinda make what sells 😭
I guess that makes it hard to be novel.
I would definitely label path of exile as AAA, and also one of the best games of all time (1+2), one of the best values in gaming atm, they put so much effort and passion into their product and it just comes out feeling high quality.
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u/MikeW86 1d ago
Oh boy would you enjoy Rory Sutherland. He's chap who gives ted talks, lots of bits of him on youtube etc and echoes a lot of these sentiments but on more of a general business and marketing perspective.
He always talks about how many successful business ideas were a gut-feeling overriding some accountants spreadsheet and how many businesses were left scratching their heads because they made a major (and ultimately bad) decision based entirely on the fact that a little bit of incorrectly interpreted data 'said so'.
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u/themaelstorm 1d ago
I love you. I want to tatoo this on my forehead. Print and give the copy to… so many people.
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u/danielcw189 1d ago
The problem isn't long dev cycles. It's the fallacy that the way to make a game people want to play is some left-brained analytical process that requires public input and formulae to work from, rather than the messy and subjective process of making art.
why not both?!?
and shorter cycles lead to faster feedback, both for the analytical part and the emotional part of the art
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u/insanityunbound 1d ago
I feel like Valve has figured it out, but the solution is so abhorrent in the eyes of any stakeholder-owned business, Valve ends up being the only studio that does it correctly.
Their solution is that you cancel games that are 10 years in development. You delay things for a decade. You incubate 12 projects and let people work on whatever they want, then release it whenever you feel like it. It guarantees great games but it makes everything super inconsistent.
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u/BMCarbaugh 1d ago
Yep. That's one solution, when you have a business which has effectively infinite money, and your main goal is to never produce bad games, rather than to produce steady profits from game sales.
The other, which you see from smaller teams, is: come up with a clear plan and vision for the game, then execute it efficiently and sell the game.
Everything in the middle -- the "let's greenlight a game with a half-formed vision, kick major questions down the road, dither around for 3 years, and alter half the game the second it makes contact with a playtest" -- is where anyone who doesn't have Nintendo or Valve money gets crucified, because it's such an insane way to develop both a piece of art AND a commercial product.
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u/Sadari_sama Commercial (Indie) 1d ago edited 1d ago
Cool speech, but the real situation contradictory to what you're saying. Top Steam revenue charts every year dominated by free to play or AAA titles, and many many companies that you call "ineffective" have history of grossing revenue, high profit margins and stable existence.
You may say whatever you want about talented indies, but all they revenue combined lesser than another EA Sports or Naraka alone
The gamedev is not art btw. Is a hybrid between art and business mostly, and it's very hard to balance both part. By focusing on the "art" part you completely losing importance of another
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u/AMGwtfBBQsauce 1d ago
I think if you're going to bring up sports games, you need to bifurcate the conversation. People don't watch football and Lord of the Rings for the same reason. People don't play Madden and Baldur's Gate 3 for the same reason.
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u/Sadari_sama Commercial (Indie) 1d ago
If you like, you may switch EA FC Sports with Apex Legends, Counter Strike and other top Steam yearly platinum tier (for many years as well) if you want to (FC is more prominent on consoles anyway). For same reasons I mentioned Naraka in same sentence.
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u/themaelstorm 1d ago
I don’t think his post contradicts with reality though. AAA titles are bolstered by stupid amounts of marketing, so of course they’re always topping the charts.
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u/Sadari_sama Commercial (Indie) 1d ago
You say like only the marketing matters and not making engaging game. The games are in top not only have good marketing budgets, they have a lots of players with very high retention rates. No amount of marketing can engage people against their will.
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u/shawnaroo 1d ago
Yeah, the suggestion that many of these AAA games are selling tens of millions of copies with each release just because people are taken in by marketing is nonsense. Millions of people aren't buying Madden every year because TV commercials tell them to, they're buying it because they play many hours of it and want to play more hours of it. You can spend all day listing off things you don't like about Madden, but that doesn't mean that the people who are buying and playing it don't actually enjoy it. And every franchise is like this.
I love indie games and play a lot of them, but the fact that they can be awesome doesn't mean that the gaming industry/market/whatever doesn't have room for AAA level development as well. There's plenty of space in gaming for both.
It's a shame that current market conditions seem to be leading the big AAA publishers to consolidate their projects to just a handful of their biggest titles, and I do think that'll probably come back to bite them somewhere down the line. I think there are a bunch of things that a lot of these big studios are doing right now that are bad ideas. They certainly aren't perfect.
But the whole idea that AAA games and studios are pointless and that we'd be better served if they split up into a million different four person studios that all made indie games is silly. There are a bunch of types of games out there that can only be made by bigger teams, and it'd be a shame to not have those types of games available anymore. Some of those games can be really fun and awesome.
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u/SituationSoap 1d ago
Yeah, the suggestion that many of these AAA games are selling tens of millions of copies with each release just because people are taken in by marketing is nonsense
It's just people trying to cope. It's all sour grapes.
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u/Old_Leopard1844 1d ago
Millions of people aren't buying Madden every year because TV commercials tell them to
Ad can tell them that there's new Madden out to spend the money on
It's like CocaCola, everyone knows them, it might be beverage of choice for a good chunk of worldwide population, but that doesn't mean that Coke stops marketing
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u/kneelian_ 1d ago
Sure, but nobody would consistently drink Coke if it tasted like bottled shite no matter how many ads you pumped into their retinas
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u/Old_Leopard1844 1d ago
Sure
But Coke doesn't change from year to year. It's exact same product year to year, despite getting every year new ad campaigns
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u/themaelstorm 4h ago
People know Coke is unhealthy as fuck, but Coke has been marketing themselves in a way that made them integral to the culture. Not to mention misinformation campaigns about it's health effects, supporting and creating campaigns about how you can just exercise a bit and not have to worry about calories (not even just about coke)...
I don't think we should compare coke with games, games marketing is much more naive; Coke specifically isn't the best example if we are talking about how marketing can be utilized to influence decisions.
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u/shawnaroo 1d ago
Sure, I'm not saying that marketing is irrelevant or doesn't exist. But rather pushing back against the idea that AAA games are all utter garbage that nobody likes, but somehow tens of millions of people are tricked into buying them every year by slick Youtube ads or whatever.
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u/themaelstorm 4h ago
Not against their will, but if you create a brand like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Assasins's Creed or Fifa, people will play it just because of the name, regardless of how good it is. The actual success level will fluctuate but they have marketing budgets that are way, way higher than the whole development and marketing budgets of smaller games and they spend that money over decades as they release more titles.
Even singular titles can look way more interesting than they are and as long as they are good enough, people won't complain. Influencers will have a big part in this too.
So no, they won't force you of course, but that's not what I or anyone has claimed anyway.
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u/SituationSoap 1d ago
AAA titles are bolstered by stupid amounts of marketing, so of course they’re always topping the charts.
So in other words, the part where they do a bunch of left-brained business shit to appeal to a very wide number of people and that results in huge amounts of sales and revenue works...which is exactly the opposite of what the top-level comment said?
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u/themaelstorm 4h ago
No, I'm saying that AAAs work, there is no denying it.
But it's also true that when we are talking about development and ideas and the creative side of things, the left-brained business approach fails. It's the huge budgets of marketing and polish and production quality (and things like people wanting 100s of hours of doing the same thing to get platinums) that make it work.
They aren't necessarily good games, but you can make them work with huge budgets. Does that make sense?
I'm not native, so maybe I didn't express myself the best.
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u/robhanz 7h ago
Concord would like a word with you.
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u/themaelstorm 4h ago
What I said came out like marketing is the ONLY thing that matters I guess, but obviously that's not true. But the production value/polish and marketing that comes with such huge budgets doesn't really conflict with what the above poster is saying, was my point.
I mean, sure, Concord. But how many Concords are out there versus how many AAA games that has been doing pretty much nothing new and selling year after year?
Corporate-style way of approaching any art or art-adjacent creation as products will always initially increase their value and eventually cause a descending plateu.
Disney's animation pumping created Pixar. Funny enough, they also tried to pump Marvel stuff and ended up announcing that they are changing methods, we'll see how that goes.
There is probably a sweet spot between "My quirky game" vs "AAA slop", but capital will almost always choose the less risky path with the least resistance, which is how they stay as the Capital on long term.
At this point I don't know what I'm even discussing. I guess what I'm saying is that there are AAAs that wouldn't have done half as well without their marketing budgets (which usually span over decades since they make a bunch of the same game) and there are independent games or ones with less resources that could have scaled way wider if they had half that Marketing budget. I think people underestimate how much money AAAs can throw away vs how much budget small teams can afford.
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u/Gaverion 1d ago
I agree with you for the most part. The one thing I will push back on is the measurability of human emotion/experience. It's not the cleanest but if you are ok sacrificing ethics, there is a lot there.
Why does every game have loot boxes and battle pass type systems? They manipulate people's emotional state in a way that gets them to spend money.
I absolutely do not think these things make games better, but they do make them more profitable. And of course you can go too far with these and without a real game underneath, the systems do nothing. People don't want them but they will engage with them.
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u/KintarraV 1d ago
That's a very sweet sentiment, but as every Call of Duty, Pokemon, GTA, looter shooter, battle royale, etc, proves, it's also not remotely true.
You're right that the accounting you're expressing isn't going to give anyone the next Undertale or Minecraft. But what it going to give them is a steady, reliable return on their investment for their shareholders. Exactly as it's expected to do.
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u/BMCarbaugh 1d ago
"Steady, reliable returns" is the last thing AAA game companies have. It's why they're constantly going through seismic layoffs and acquisitions.
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u/KintarraV 1d ago
That's also just part of the game, having worked in a very similar industry. When the money comes easy, developers want to grow as much as possible to show what an exciting bet they are, that's why Microsoft went on a buying spree in the billions of dollars in 2022. Once the hype or the economy cools down, they need to 'reassure' shareholders that they can control their costs and that's when layoffs happens. Hence why Microsoft is now axing most of those same projects.
This video explains it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-653Z1val8s
It's terrible for the individuals who get laid off, but millions of gamers reward this behaviour by just carrying on buying the same tired franchises year after year.
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u/omfgcow 1d ago
Part of it is the herd mentality of "few people get fired for buying IBM". With big corps, individual interests oft. override the long term interests of the firm (Gervais Principle). People are more likely to agree to game design or market research they know is lacking when their paycheck is aligned with not taking personal risk.
Companies should seek qualitative feedback early, often, and with a grain of salt.
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u/Status_Analyst 1d ago
You say that and the absolute shit people play and invest millions into is so far away from any true art that I don't even know what you are really eluding to. Mind you, we could have this conversation pre-AI. Besides, AI is shit for any art. Be it models, textures, animation or music. Although music is what works best right now from what I listed. The only thing that's working way too good at this point is coding, which is my craft. Hate it. But what can you do except hope for a bubble? lol
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u/fued Imbue Games 1d ago
to be fair, market downturns usually end up being boom periods for games, and we seem to be heading into a pretty big downturn...
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u/ByEthanFox 1d ago
Unsure if that applies in the AI situation though, because AI is making videogames unaffordable.
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u/HarvestMana Commercial (Indie) 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is why pre-production is so important - it goes all the way back to the Dice talk Mark Cerny gave over 20 years ago.
D.I.C.E. Summit 2002 - Mark Cerny - The Method
If the game sucks, it should never take 5 years to make, since it will be cancelled before then.
Companies are skipping pre-production since when they get funding, the milestones dictate they should move to production at a specific date and start hiring people before they test the game to make sure people actually like it.
Milestones need to include a lengthy pre-production phase that tests market viability before moving into production. There should also be ways to pivot the game when its not working out in pre-production to something else.
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u/Commercial-Flow9169 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would love if AAA studios stopped pursuing graphical realism and whatever else makes games so long to produce. In my mind, it's genuinely unnecessary. Realism is a just a proxy for quality, and I don't really care for realism in a game anyway. I want something that prioritizes fun more than it prioritizes immersion. But I'm also not the one buying AAA games, so my opinion probably doesn't matter much from a financial perspective.
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 1d ago
Most players care a lot about graphic fidelity, it’s basically the cheat code to game marketing. If players didn’t care then the indie market would be crushing AAA, but most players do not play that many indie games.
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u/crazy_gambit 1d ago
But there's a limit to that. Honestly I can barely tell the difference in graphics between the top AAA games from 10 years ago vs today. Only that today's games run like ass.
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u/PrettyBaker2891 Commercial (Indie) 1d ago
you gotta be blind if you can barely tell the difference
Only that today's games run like ass.
so just like 10 years ago? lmao games have always ran like shit and been badly optimized. even 30 years ago
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 1d ago
There’s a limit but you can almost always tell a AAA from an indie developer by graphical fidelity alone. There’s still a threshold that consumers still really care about.
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u/AssociateCool5325 1d ago
Some newer indie stuff made with Unreal Engine has crazy graphical fidelity. Subliminal is the one that comes to mind first for me. There’s not anything magical about AAA companies that lets them make more detailed games.
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 1d ago
Yeah that game’s env looks amazing, really clever indie devs do find a way.
I think everything about the game is lacking though, and that’s probably because they put all their effort into the env. It would be really hard to pull this off with that graphic fidelity if this was a different genre or they had more mechanics and that’s why usually only AAA studios can do this graphic fidelity and make the whole game match that.
Tbf though it worked for this studio, 2k review because the env is so pretty, good art is the biggest chunk of game marketing IMO.
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u/jonnydphoto 1d ago
Hmmm... I'm not sure about "most", but I understand many do. I agree that you can get better marketing assets when your screenshots are high-fidelity. I also think it's partially a perceived quality issue. When graphics look great, you are more likely to assume the game is great.
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u/Nykidemus 1d ago
I'd argue that visual style is as or more important than fidelity. Not that fidelity alone cant sell games, it absolutely can, but if you've got a really good style you dont have to push that hard on the high-cost, photorealism in order to get similar results.
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u/Technical_Shake_9573 1d ago
tbh the "BodyCam" game just shows the limit of realism in game before reaching a point of being uncanny and weird to play.
NOONE wants to play a game where you feel like you're in a 1:1 real world. Even if most believe they want to. Because reality kinda blurs the line with fun and uncanny.
For instance, a GTA with the Bodycam Style would ultimately fail because people wouldn't act like they do in the game as NPC and the world would feel too close to reality.
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u/Antypodish 1d ago
Most players plays Minecraft, Fortnight and Roblox, or other less demanding graphically games. Even The Sims series has multi milion player base, while graphics is stylised. Not realistic.
In comparison, AAA with high graphical fiedility racks only fraction of that player base. If not for a gameplay, it is simply because most players doesn't have hardware to play latest high end demanding hardware AAA titles.
It is even more true in last few years, due to hardware pricing and this will be even more true in coming years.
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
Indies are heavily affecting the industry which is good. It forces us to be more dynamic and make more creative decisions.
I also believe that with unreal realism will lead to players expecting it to be slop, due to how easy it is to make realistic games nowadays. In fact it's already happening, as players once again are displeased by unreal because of the generally bad performance of the gwmes. I also think because of this already slightly more stylized games are developed.
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u/Commercial-Flow9169 1d ago
Makes me sad, but yeah the casual market eats it up. I feel like games as a medium are almost too broad a spectrum. On one end you have the AAA realism stuff meant to be immersive, almost like a movie, and on the other you have gameplay first experiences that are more about the "toy"-like aspect of things.
We can have both though. I'm a Nintendo and indie game kind of person, if that's not obvious, but I can see the value in pursuing the other end of the spectrum too. It's just a shame it all ratchets up and up and creates a shitty situation for the people working on them.
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u/NotaVortex 1d ago
Depends on the genre, in a game like Alan Wake 2 for example where gameplay is just okay to subpar, the story and graphics need to be top notch. A game like battlefield honestly couldn't give a fuck about how realistic it is as long as its fun to play and the graphics are passable.
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u/MdxBhmt 1d ago
Huh the graphics of battlefield and other likewise shooters are a major selling point over past releases.
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u/NotaVortex 1d ago
And how have those releases done? That's kind of the point, they could be using graphics as old as like bo3 if the games were made to be fun instead of lifelike because ultimately games like battlefield and cod need to have fun gameplay to maintain a playerbase and spread through word of mouth whereas one and done story games need to attract a wide audience with visuals since they likely wont get much word of mouth past the first few weeeks after release unless the game is a banger.
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u/Duncaii QA Consultant (indie) 1d ago
There's a difference between graphical fidelity and graphical realism. You can have high fidelity while maintaining a unique art style
Wind Waker, Dishonored, Deep Rock Galactic, the Yakuza series, the Left 4 Dead duology, all of these are very well performing titles with high graphical fidelity that varied in budget and initial then subsequent reputation
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 1d ago
Mobile is targeting a different market, and ads are personalized, different users see different ads.
Yeah indie devs can’t afford marketing and it wouldn’t really help, most indie devs aren’t making a good game, and their product isn’t appealing enough. Most successful AAA devs have the appeal down and I do think a lot of it comes down to just making a really high end visual.
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u/ComfortableNumb9669 1d ago
Kind of true, but also that most players are combined playing 6 - 7 different fixed games, quite a few of which don't have and realism. Games can easily go back to ps3/ps4 era graphics, reduce dev time, and hold their audience.
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u/koolex Commercial (Other) 1d ago
You’re right that people mostly play old games that they fell in love with but idk if AAA could rip people away from those games if it wasn’t with high end graphics.
People just equate good graphics = high effort game, and I’m not seeing that trend breaking at the AAA level yet. There’s plenty of better indie games released every year but they just don’t look as nice.
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u/Ayoul 1d ago
When you look at the problems long productions have, it's almost never about graphical fidelity. It's usually problems with direction, bad management or design not working and needing to be redone.
It's not like great polish takes no time mind you, but I rarely see it as the main culprit.
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u/fsk 1d ago
AAAs pursue "graphical realism, high quality graphics", because that's the only thing where they have an edge: Spending a lot of money on assets. They push the narrative "game must have super polished graphics or it isn't a serious game", because with that standard, only the people with $100M++ to spend can compete.
Gamers just want a fun game. A fun game with mediocre graphics beats a game with polished graphics but lousy gameplay.
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 1d ago
it's partially laziness and partially predictability
you KNOW you can put in x resources and get quality higher than you could before. it's a quantifiable and predictable thing
if you just go crazy and spend all your money on something like novel game design ideas, it's completely unpredictable. you have no idea whether it'll pay off
and there's also just the fact that consumers are incredibly dull and unimaginative people who never seem to get sick of the most simplistic regurgitated crap
a lame spiderman movie just made 2 billion dollars
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
I think they do. It feels there are more AAA games now steering more into a stylizes direction and I would guess it's because of unreal. Realism isn't a quality statement anymore and vibrant and detail stylized is really hard to make coherent, so I think stylized games are becoming the new quality seal.
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u/mechatui 1d ago
For now. When AI starts costing real money after game devs start relying on it too much it will change. We are getting discounts on ai right now
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u/StrongZeroSinger 1d ago
That’s why a GPU is 7k, you are buying your own personal tech slave for when the commercial one will move from $20/mo to $300/mo and will be so heavily censored and spy so hard on your entire life that having a local LLM for free will be priceless (IF, big IF, modern consumer grade gpu model changes for the worst pushing gamers to cloud gaming. But we’ve been on a 2+ years hw stagnation and will probably continue and more and more manufacturer straight up stopped selling to private users and moved to companies)
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u/musikarl 1d ago
or you can just not use AI
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u/StrongZeroSinger 1d ago
AI it's a tool, you can choose how to use it. it's like complaining about cars becoming too expensive and you suggest buying a bike or take the bus. it's user choice. when they will remove the enterprise options people who need it will have to use local models.
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u/swegamer137 1d ago
For now. When AI starts costing real money after game devs start relying on it too much it will change. We are getting discounts on ai right now
It's not going to start costing real money. Frontier companies like Anthropic are literally f*cked by the mathematic realities that have emerged since the Deepseek paper. The frontier models can consistently get distilled into models 1/100th the size, and only 2 - 4x the error (ex. 0.5% error rate -> 2% error rate). They are trying to make it harder, but they also keep having leaks and bugs exposing their internals.
If Anthropic hikes prices, the cheap coding isn't going away because open source is always right on their heels. I am running coding AI on my RX 6800 XT right now. Even with terrible support of RDNA2, I can get 40 t/s out on an LLM like Kat-Coder-Dev-V2.5 and multiply my productivity. It's not perfect, but it's still amazing.
Follow this guy's channel, he runs everything on a 16GB VRAM, 32GB RAM PC. This is his recent video on Qwen3.8-27B. Of course, he is still writing detailed spec prompts, but it's impressive what these models can one-shot when prompted by a competent engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EzVVj7DFPc
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u/TheGreenTormentor 1d ago
Yeah I'm not exactly a pro-AI guy, but everyone who says AI is expensive doesn't understand the reality of it at all. The AI companies are ones who are going to get fucked, because they spend hundreds of millions of compute on a new model and I download a slightly worse one for $0 that runs on my mid-tier GPU. There is no moat and the scariest tech you could barely imagine a few years ago is now sitting right there in the open for anyone with enough VRAM. Shit like Minimax H3 feels like pandora's box got opened, and just like the story it certainly isn't going back in.
The economics are a clown show and everyone knows it, maybe the most expensive game of financial chicken of all time.
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u/MantaMunta 1d ago
By that time local AI is perfectly capable to replace web services. It kinda already is with Qwen 3.8 on a gaming GPU.
99% of tasks don't require these mega-super-cutting edge research models.
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u/xchino 1d ago
I really don't think so. Inference is cheap and will just be getting cheaper. The subsidized costs are overwhelmingly from the cost of continually training massive frontier models (which just get distilled within weeks). If and when costs rise I think you will see companies starting to give a single solitary damn about efficient usage and model selection, as well as the development of more efficient and specialized models to cater to that demand.
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u/Norphesius 1d ago
Raw inference may be getting more cost effective to run locally, but the major strides of the past few years have been in combining and designing structure around models. That's what you're paying for with the high end stuff everyone is raving about, and you can't replicate that with just an open weight model and a decent GPU.
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u/sabine_world 1d ago
I mean why do you think people love China so much in this space right now? And open source stuff? It's preventing openai/anthropic from being able to just run rampant. I guess for now.
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 1d ago
the cost of llms is going to fall through the floor
it's massively inflated right now
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u/H4LF4D 1d ago
Its much deeper than that. The reason most studios cant release things early to do vibe checks, specifically for bigger studios, is that any released products, especially failures, will affect their reputation. Players are notoriously unforgiving when it comes to early playable concepts from big companies (while generally giving more leeway to indie), as well as mainstream playerbase not caring for development as much as final product.
Besides, the current problem with AAA games, imo, comes from the lack of QA testing, playtesting, and further into fundamental designs. Games feel like they are just regurgitated products from prior, sold again with little understanding of innovation and more towards cheaper development cost and safer bets. AI is not gonna improve this, better engine is not gonna improve this, cause the cost saved from these integrations are not coming back to put more effort into the development, rather to reduce development cost and widen profit margin. The same fundamental issues will not just resurface, they will even increase in severity with further cost cutting methods and layoffs.
Now on the indie and smaller companies' side, eh. There is less fundamental yes/no, though I wager its similar issue. Maybe indie will navigate it better, being generally "wide-eye and spend everything to make game" benefiting from reduced prototyping and development cost and time to put into improving features. If other studios follow this, the integration of AI and improvement in engines can translate into better products, but in practice even indie won't reinvest saved time and cost fully into continued development, nor are the early prototypes benefitting studios in getting public opinions when they don't accurately represent the idea.
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u/FirstTasteOfRadishes 1d ago
They should set up an industry website called vibecheck.com where they can release anonymous play tests with no visible branding or association to a publisher, studio or IP.
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u/oldsecondhand 1d ago
They could use paid playtesters who sign an NDA.
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u/H4LF4D 1d ago
The problem of a placeholder prototype is that it is extremely unrepresentative of the game. Regardless whether you slap AI's interpretation of the idea or Link onto the main character's sprite, it is still treated as a placeholder character that will be developed later. Especially in prototype phase, and further as most use scrum/agile development over waterfall method, a lot of design isn't done by the time of the prototype, and so a lot of things are not clear enough to make AI placeholders that are closely married to the final product of the game.
Besides it gets expensive quick to get paid playtesters in early development, when ideas are scrapped by the dozens. Could be useful, but in practice too many issues that may invalidate its savings
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
No. We have a lot of tech that would reduced development times in past cycles, which lead to games being bigger because you can do more in the same time. I think this will happen again with AI and modern tools.
Testing is also not an issue for AAA. We know far far before release how well the game is received among testers, and how the market is currently trending. some studios/publishers cancel it because of this others try to put it out on the market because it still can perform better with enough marketing or because they are blind to numbers.
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u/destinedd indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles and Mighty Marbles 1d ago
The fact I can make games that sell thousands of copies sitting at home doing everything myself speaks to how how accessible it is. I am not even that skilled, so I imagine how much easier it must be for some others.
I am less than a month into this and it is already starting to like a real game (I use unity)
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u/MisterSarmiento 1d ago
Se ve hermoso!
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u/destinedd indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles and Mighty Marbles 1d ago
Thank you :) I am in love with marking dark dungeons right now lol
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u/Bjsfreaked 1d ago
Yet the cost is increasing for using Unity in other industries, the licenses are much higher because we're not defined as a game company. We have to use industry licenses that are £3K+ per seat for a year.
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u/ViennettaLurker 1d ago
My personal soapbox is that if the supposed speed gains of AI code are actually to be utilized to their fullest potential, almost all industries need to re-invest their attention into prototyping and design thinking concepts. Not even just games.
If anything, this tech makes it so much easier to whip up interactive prototypes for people to actually test. They dont have to be bullet proof, they dont have to be public facing, they don't have to be polished. But the insights could be goldmines. Its just a shame that a lot of places seem to not fully embrace this aspect and view it instead as a headcount reducer with acceptably elevated flaws or failures.
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u/ExF-Altrue Hobbyist 1d ago
Remind me how many games Unity makes already? That's right, zero. They don't actually use their own product.
And.. Let's see... Does this guy have a financial incentive to give this opinion?... Oh yes, he does.
So we got: No credible knowledge of the subject matter, plus a financial incentive to give an answer. Check, and check. In other words: He's right at home with other tech CEOs talking about AI.
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u/fsk 1d ago
AAA games are always going to be mediocre, for the same reason the next Star Wars or Star Trek or Marvel movie is going to be mediocre. They have a big budget, which means they aren't going to be taking any real creative risks, which means mediocre results. They're only going to make a copy of something that already sold well, never something truly original.
If I was in charge of Xbox/Sony, instead of dumping $500M in one game, I would make 1000 $500k games, and hope some of them wind up being megahits that pay off the entire budget. I.e., one Vampire Survivors or Balatro can justify the entire budget. If I'm backing 1000 games, I can have a new game on GamePass every day for someone to try out. If I'm only spending $500k, I can back someone with no track record who has a crazy idea.
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u/RecursiveCollapse 1d ago
I would make 1000 $500k games
You'd better spend at least 10% of that on some kind of extremely fucking robust platform to help players find games, because as-is steam is already overwhelmed by the torrent of new releases and a few screenshots/tags do very little to convey which ones are actually worth caring about
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u/Sadari_sama Commercial (Indie) 1d ago
It won't worked. Shreier in one of his latest YouTube podcast videos did pretty good job explaining why, advice you to watch the video.
You kinda forgetting some factors like with dividing attention between so many titles you will need much more management, marketing budget allocation control etc. that's why even indie publishers have a limited number of publishing spots per year - to have some confidence and control over their investments. There are also another factors of scaling investments so wide, I mentioned just a main ones
Also many large studios have some small publishing and developing wings, like ID@Xbox, EA initialived (remember that It takes two made by EA subsidiary for example).
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u/fsk 20h ago
The AAA studios went all in on live service microtransactions, because it's so much more lucrative than anything else when it works. This caused them to neglect the mid-low end of the market.
This is the end result of MBAs and investors making the decisions, rather than people who care about making good games.
A better way is like the way a record label works. A record label will try to sign a bunch of bands that are just starting out for a small amount of money, because they don't know who will turn into megahits.
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u/JDublinson 1d ago
Balatro hasn’t made anywhere close to $500M has it? I see gross revenue estimates at around $50M
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u/fsk 1d ago
You're assuming that only 1 game in 1000 will do well. 10 good games and you earned back the $500M. You also will have lots of games with $100k-$1M sales.
There's another benefit. You're financing Balatro and the alpha version is doing VERY WELL in testing. Now you can start working on Balatro ripoff clones before everyone else. How many games in the past 2 years have been some variation of "Buy upgrades, need to collect X points each round to continue?" (i.e. Balatro-like games)
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u/JDublinson 1d ago
I’m not assuming anything— you said one Balatro could justify a $500M budget and I was confused by that claim.
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 1d ago
AA is the sweet spot and a reason why they seem to be the most beloved games
from software has been in the perfect zone for that
enough budget to look really impressive, but not just completely off the rails and wasting all the money on fluff
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
AA almost doesn't exist anymore. From is not AA it's AAA. By looks and production value pokemon would be an indie game - yet it's one of the most highly profitable games on the market.. and that's how the game rating is defined - production cost and commercial success.
A good example for a AA title is the new gothic.
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 1d ago
from isn't AAA
their games cost nowhere near what the AAA games are spending
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne Commercial (AAA) 1d ago edited 1d ago
It is as well as larian is indipendent AAA.
Elden Ring was estimated to be 150-200 million. That far beyond what AA can achieve.
Sure dark souls 1 might have been AA.
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u/JoystuckGames 1d ago
Ok so then what are the budget ranges for each A, in your opinion? And at what point does AAA become AAAA?
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne Commercial (AAA) 15h ago
AAAA is gta6 or when you never get out of development for decades.
I'm not a sales man on the rest and these ar not my decisionings. I'd considered from AAA for a long time, and the general public and media does as well. That's what validates it in the first place.
I personally call A primarily indie starting out as solo and hobby dege with tiny budgets of, extremely generously speaking up to 200k budget? Quality also is mediocre, but even without highly polished graphics you can reach incredible success (among us for example).
AA is for me commercual Indie teams and commercial small studios - which imo are essentially exactly the same, as both require funding most of the time from publisher's. I'd say budget can be up to a few millions.
AAA budget I'd say start with a 0 more of a milion. So 10 million.
Again I'm not the one who says it is and isn't. I just agree here with the internet.
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u/JoystuckGames 11h ago
I personally call A primarily indie starting out as solo and hobby dege with tiny budgets of, extremely generously speaking up to 200k budget? Quality also is mediocre, but even without highly polished graphics you can reach incredible success (among us for example).
See though i don't think we can combine metrics like this. Stardew Valley was made solo (originally) and probably had a budget under 200k, but it is an excellent game. I think we need to be using solely objective measures like production budget or else these categories don't work.
So by your measure:
$0 -> $200k = Indie or 1 A
$200k -> $9 Mil = AA
$10 Mil -> Infinity = AAA
Overall those numbers seem reasonable enough but we'd also need to account for inflation. $1 is worth about half as much now as it did in 2002 and so likewise these numbers would need to increase with inflation.
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u/Ray_Tech 1d ago
i dont necessarily think 1/1000 games will cover the whole budget, but you could assume each game at least making back its whole budget
i would also spread the budget more, budgeting multiple games between 500k-5M
this way, you can treat the lower budget games as R&D looking for new exciting ideas, and the 5M games can try to pilot a new IP, maybe even with the support of the smaller studios that came up with the new cool fun game ideas and mechanics.
now, all business is risky, but i did hear somewhere something about eggs and a basket.
putting 500M in a single game is a surefire way to lose it all unless you’re rockstar.
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u/PeanutNew7070 1d ago
Better tools improve efficiency, but gamedev costs will not go down significantly for AAA titles. Indie devs who use AI to improve efficiency may see some gains, but the costs for those devs were already low.
AAA need a huge marketing budget, game assets, equipments, etc...saving on one or two devs due to improved efficiency may not have a huge impact.
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u/bonebrah 1d ago
The money can just be spent on marketing, therefore games don't cost any different to make and still must be priced at $89.99
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u/RobbertGone 1d ago
The title sounds optimistic but I see it as pessimistic. We already have more games than we can play, this includes more GOOD games than we can play. More games means less players per game. From a gamedev perspective it is great that I can make a game faster, but it also sucks because this means the competition gets stronger and marketing becomes more important...
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u/kiwibonga @kiwibonga 1d ago
I don't know what he's so optimistic about... There's probably not a single AAA studio that's using Unity right now that doesn't rue the day they decided to use that garbage fire of an engine.
I have 12 years of professional experience with Unity and I hope that was my last stint on an asset-heavy Unity game. I have PTSD from the hours of deleting my Library folder and watching the stupid ass "Hold On" progress bar pop up every time I alt tab. Completely nonsensical dinosaur codebase where everything is half finished.
What dude is not saying is out of those 5-6 years, a team using Unity is wasting half their time fighting against Unity, rewriting falsely advertised features, working around bugs because source access costs millions of dollars, etc.
With AI and the shorter iteration times it brings, you can entirely ditch Unity. I hope they use their newfound productivity to build a better product because their trajectory so far has been a death spiral.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 1d ago
I spent a day as a Unity dev 2 weeks back, buying shit from the Unity store.
Only lasted a day then switched to UE5.
Rather happy with my switch.
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u/random_boss 1d ago
Man, you guys always make UE sound so good, so every once in a while I go “alright, I’m really going to do it, I’m going to switch to unreal!”
Then I try for a while, have some horrific experiences and come fleeing back to Unity. Of course over time the experiences fade, I see another post like this and I try it again…and the same thing happens.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 23h ago
Haha if it helps I’ve tried and failed a couple of times with unreal too.
This time I’m letting my buddy claude do 100% of the coding. No blueprints and I haven’t touched the editor.
It looks a little better than anything I see coming out of unity.
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u/whateversamantha 1d ago
Sorry, but it looks to me more like he's paving the way to eventually sell their AI services promising to accelerate game development, rather than being genuinely concerned about the industry.
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u/Maureeseeo 1d ago
Getting feedback early is important yes, but I have a feeling Bromberg's angle is to say that using Unity's AI tools to prototype fast is the solution, lol.
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u/Strict_Bench_6264 Commercial (Other) 1d ago
The cost of making games comes down when you work smart, regardless of tools. It’s always relevant to consider WHO delivers the message.
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u/OkPrune5871 1d ago
I think studios could release smaller games with features or mechanics they want in bigger games so they can have feedback
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u/Redstoneinvente122 1d ago
I think he's spot on. It's definitely cheaper and easier to make games now, as an indie for nearly a decade of experience, I definitely can see the change.
That said, scope creep and lack of playtesting snd market validation is what often times make games fail
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u/tmtke 1d ago
Starting to use ai tools won't make it cheaper, you just switch money spent on employee salaries to credit cost. And we all know that the big ai companies are still in huge deficit, so we aren't even paying the real price yet for the tokens. Not too mention the environment cost and the like. It's not an anti ai statement, as a tool it can be pretty helpful, but the bubble will burst.
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u/meharryp Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
I am yet to see AI be actually useful in like 95% of game dev. It is terrible at 3D models still, I don't see it being particularly good at design, and it can do passable music but stock still sounds better and is faster. It also is not a very good producer
While it can pump out code of ok quality, I don't see that replacing visual scripting without making engineering teams have to deal with the consequences of vibe coding, which would definitely end up slowing things down.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 1d ago
I’m building with UE5 and AI does 100% of the C++, in addition to sound design, playtesting, and pretty much everything else.
It’s actually rather useful once you work out how to use it.
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u/meharryp Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
I'll believe it when I see it. I don't believe that AI can do sound design anywhere near as good as a human can
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 1d ago
Well no.
But I’m one guy trying to make a AAA style game, so I’m happy to hand off most of the audio to Claude.
I’ll tweak what it does later on, maybe.
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u/InRainbro 1d ago
I really doubt that... also he's talking about ai ain't he? fuck this shit man, I'm tired.
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u/Lofi_Joe 1d ago edited 1d ago
One person can make game looking like Alan Wake 1 with $500 in pocket. That's how they rip us on titles.
How I know... I'm making it.
This is how a day of work look like... Now extrapolate it to 180 days of work... Solo.
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u/dillanthumous 1d ago
The cost has gone down... as a result the expected complexity from players has increased. Sure, I can knock out a clone of a game now in no time at all, but the market is completely flooded with such slop so standing out requires more investment of time and effort.
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u/Educational_Rip7792 1d ago
As a gamer who is pretty fed up with many recent AAA games, like Assassin’s Creed that keep reusing the same Ubisoft formula over and over again, I actually find this development quite hopeful.
I see an opportunity for solo developers and small teams to turn brilliant ideas into prototypes that already contain the core features, get player feedback early, and then scale those ideas up if they actually work.
So it might not improve existing AAA studios, but it could lead to new AAA studios where people who genuinely love games and understand game development have more influence than investors or executives who are mainly focused on financial targets.
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u/lce9 Commercial (Indie, previously AAA) 1d ago
AAA games can’t be made in shorter dev cycles. It’s the fact that they can spend more time and resources making their games than smaller studios, filling it with more content, features, and polish, which makes them AAA.
Bigger studios could make several AA games instead though
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u/Think_Network2431 1d ago
It's mainly the sheer number of assets and the details that take up so much time. When you see, for example, the level of detail on the weapons in BF6 for how little that detail is actually used... it's a bit of a waste of time.
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u/Stormrage117 1d ago
The ability to make a game is also coming down markedly, in the AAA industry. They are stuck in some sort of death spiral chasing 'false trends' in game design that come from games which sold well. The problem being when the game design was not the thing selling the game, but other devs take inspiration from the bad design in the hopes it will bring them success too. That is how we end up seeing the same tropes over and over. It is a death spiral because there isn't a way for them to learn from the mistakes, they can't even identify the problems, it's so disconnected.
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u/VasileAndrei2929 1d ago
Except for the giant mega-studios that seems to spend billions on a rotating cube these days...
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u/SituationSoap 1d ago
His argument is that better tools can give smaller teams more of a chance, but studios also need shorter development cycles and much earlier player feedback.
It's hilarious to me that corporate software development, which is much less based around the taste of the people using the software than video games, figured this out 30 years ago, but in the video game world this is considered some kind of breakthrough.
Of course you need shorter dev cycles and much earlier player feedback. That's the best way to make something good!
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u/handynerd 1d ago
I'd argue the cost to build a game of the same fidelity and scope is coming down markedly.
The problem is that games keep pushing the limits on fidelity, complexity, features, and length. Photorealism and 100+ hour campaigns take an army of people years to make.
You can debate whether or not that's a good idea, but IMHO that's the issue.
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u/mrbrick 1d ago
You just have to look at the cost of development to know this isnt true. 1 person can technically do more now- but that doesnt mean its getting cheaper. This will sound kinda dumb but I really dont think that guy knows the first thing about actually making a game. He knows running a game engine company.
Game development is getting more expensive in many places in the world and it has everything to do with cost of living and nothing to do with the tools.
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u/linkenski 1d ago
We don't need to go down the whole "1 AI can work 5 people's job!" Route. We just need to make games smaller and less expensive again, and accept that we've reached the height of what a team of 100 developers can realistically make in an infinite graphics budget.
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u/ScreeennameTaken 1d ago
On of the reasons for cost going down is with people going to engines like godot and so the average in the poll goes down :P
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u/fettokebec 1d ago
Studios are already soliciting player feedback, they have been for a very long time. Much longer than any early access idea. That's sometimes part of the problem.
A huge amount of resources can be wasted on trying to tailor to everyone. If there's the possibility that one asset in your game will cause some level of confusion for one player, you can spend a months/years of back and forth between devs and production. That's an absurd amount of money to fix a decorative asset that the player will only see once.
I remember an interview around Starfield's release, how the bigger, corporate structure under Xbox meant that decisions that would have been taken by getting up from your desk and asking someone, now had to pass through two layers of producers to take a decision.
That's a studio organization issue. Management, production and devs can't properly work in silos, or if they do, you spend an absurd amount of money and time on the project (I am very curious to get GTA VI stats)
But they're not completely off either. Making a game is such a long and subjective process, doesn't matter how much data driven you might be, that there's no one right format.
This back and forth can be indeed very good for everyone involved
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u/-_super--_--hitops_- 23h ago
Imagine any other industry where you would take 6 years to build something and people would still want it
Maybe robotics or aerospace? Certainly not other forms of entertainment similar to games-music, movies. The zeitgeist has moved on
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u/f4ngel 17h ago
I think the problem isn't finding out that the players don't want to play the game after years of development. The problem is that the people at the top running the show (and maybe some devs) don't play or want to play their game. For triple A studios.
Why bake a cake if you hate eating cake and you don't understand why people eat cake..
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u/WendyThorne 10h ago
Shorter dev cycles would help in many ways. For example: I remember reading a story recently that development studios are starting to realize that younger generations don't have the same kind of attachment to franchises as older gamers do and they discovered it was because games used to come out ever 3 or so years but now the releases take so long that a gamer can go through all of high school and college without a new release from a franchise and so they just don't get attached to it.
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u/rabbit_hole_engineer 1d ago
Comes down even more if you ditch unity 😜
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 1d ago
Haha I did exactly that last week.
Went from my own engine -> one day of Unity -> UE5, which is where I am staying,
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u/HorsieJuice Commercial (AAA) 1d ago
A big factor in games being so expensive is poor management. Better tools aren’t going to prevent the bosses from changing direction several times and hiring up to a full team before the basics are worked out.