Video Games Can't Afford To Look This Good (nytimes.com) 80
Major video game studios' pursuit of ultra-realistic graphics has led to diminishing returns and industry-wide layoffs, as younger players gravitate toward simpler, more social games, New York Times is reporting.
Sony's Insomniac Games spent $300 million developing Marvel's Spider-Man 2, triple the budget of its predecessor, before laying off staff amid Sony's 900-person reduction in February. The industry has cut more than 20,000 jobs in the past two years. Meanwhile, games with basic graphics like Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite continue to dominate, particularly among younger players.
Genshin Impact, a mobile game by Hoyoverse, generates approximately $2 billion annually through frequent content updates rather than cutting-edge visuals. The shift has forced studios to reevaluate their strategies. Warner Bros. Discovery lost $200 million on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, while Sony shuttered its Concord studio shortly after launch. Some industry figures see AI as a potential solution to reduce graphics development costs, the report adds, particularly in sports games.
Sony's Insomniac Games spent $300 million developing Marvel's Spider-Man 2, triple the budget of its predecessor, before laying off staff amid Sony's 900-person reduction in February. The industry has cut more than 20,000 jobs in the past two years. Meanwhile, games with basic graphics like Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite continue to dominate, particularly among younger players.
Genshin Impact, a mobile game by Hoyoverse, generates approximately $2 billion annually through frequent content updates rather than cutting-edge visuals. The shift has forced studios to reevaluate their strategies. Warner Bros. Discovery lost $200 million on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, while Sony shuttered its Concord studio shortly after launch. Some industry figures see AI as a potential solution to reduce graphics development costs, the report adds, particularly in sports games.
Bad examples (Score:5, Insightful)
While their were multiple reasons why both Suicide Squad and Concord failed, ultra-realistic graphics was not one of them.
Several people unfavorably compared the graphics of Suicide Squad with earlier Batman games from the same developer.
Concord was widely lambasted for having some of the most hideous character designs in the history of video games. In particular, color composition and proportions showed a large lack of knowledge of the artistic theory behind.
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Re:Bad examples (Score:5, Insightful)
> While their were multiple reasons why both Suicide Squad and Concord failed, ultra-realistic graphics was not one of them
The point of the article is that inflated budgets due to the graphics is an extra and unnecessary burden to these projects. While I agree that if the graphical design budget was a lot smaller the games would still have been failures, they might not have been catastrophic failures.
This is true regardless if the visual aspects of the game are actually good or not. (Re: Concord)
On the flip side, less money spent on visuals might mean more budget available for things that would have made the game more successful (emphasis on 'might').
=Smidge=
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A budget is a budget. The problems which led to mass layoffs is making crap games, not the budget which was assigned to them. There's also a bit of ignorance in TFS. The games listed as failures weren't killed by high costs due to bad graphics, they were stuck in development hell for years, not just poorly made games, but poorly remade over and over again games which have fundamental game style changed mid development.
Re:Bad examples (Score:4, Insightful)
Profit is revenue vs budget. Spend less on graphics, and you don't need to make as much money to turn a profit.
Similarly, spend more of that budget on testing and iterating on game design, story, testing, etc and you're likely to have a better game.
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With the above examples, you'd have to spend negative dollars on graphics to make a profit.
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You didn't read my post, the examples given had nothing to do with graphics budget. The cost blowouts came from other reasons and not investing in graphics would not have helped these games in any way.
Your point applies well to shovel ware and mobile games. But console / PC games absolutely can afford to look good. They just have to actually be good and also have to be competently developed as well.
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they probably would have been better games.
Except no, that's kind of the point I was making about the examples in TFS being in development hell. The games were incompetently developed, poorly thought through, dictated to chase trends by management. Concord's budget wasn't put into its graphics, it was put into its incompetence, many games are like that, they emphasise size and length over meaningful gameplay. Develop a meaningful and exciting game, have a proper lead and well managed art team, and you'll achieve amazing graphical fidelity at a fract
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It's kind of disingenuous to claim the graphics are the heavy burden for these games, and that the game would've been successful if the graphics hadn't needed such a spend.
Graphics are, for the most part, just advertising and marketing. The quality of the game is almost entirely unphased by the spend on graphic quality. It should be treated as such.
Spend more time and money on making a good game and the graphics are going to matter less.
Meanwhile, I just saw that most of the top games on Steam are something
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This seems like it's going to be used as an excuse to do more AI generated artwork in video games to cut their development budgets. Which will probably lead to a bunch of video game characters that look eerily close to real life, but not quite?
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Space Marine 2 seems to be doing ok.
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When GTA 6 comes out, then it's all going to be.. all Game Need realistic Graphics!
A bad game is a bad game, no matter the graphics.
a good game does not need realistic graphics (Score:4, Interesting)
... and sometimes it even reduces the playability, e.g. when they changed the easily recognizable symbols for units and on the map in Civilization to more realistic but difficult to recognize pictures.
The same goes for Jump&Run games. Why make the characters look like people or real animals?
But yes, some games need graphics as realistic as possible.
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Yeah, there's a huge misconception that expensive graphics equals good visual experience.
More realistic is not even necessarily better looking. A lot of video game developers' idea of "realistic" is some sort of drab-looking, faded blue or brown world that had their sun dialed down to 10% brightness. I'd much rather stare at the Minecraft landscape. It might be low-poly, but it is beautiful, especially with 3rd party shader mods. Genshin is even more so, but maybe not a great example because their budget is
can't polish a turd (Score:5, Insightful)
shit game + costly graphics = shit game
spend more time on the game instead of figuring out how to bleed kids dry with subscriptions and microtransactions, or encouraging addictive and gambling-like behavior with loot crates and card packs, or leaking out incomplete games and then asking for more cash for DLC. Oh and maybe for once when you have to backpedal on dumbass plans because of overwhelming outrage from your fanbase, actually use the word SORRY in your white-text-on-black-background non-apology apology.
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shit game + shit graphics = shit game
shit game + costly graphics = shit game
Exactly. There is a reason retrogaming is popular; the games are actually fun and can be played without having to master a bunch of moves, while still requiring some skill to get to higher levels. Plus, as you point out, they don't keep asking for quarters to keep playing.
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shit game + shit graphics = shit game
shit game + costly graphics = shit game
Exactly. There is a reason retrogaming is popular; the games are actually fun and can be played without having to master a bunch of moves, while still requiring some skill to get to higher levels. Plus, as you point out, they don't keep asking for quarters to keep playing.
I even re-tried Zork a little bit back. No graphics at all. What was cool was how much memory map I remembered after maybe 30 years.
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shit game + shit graphics = shit game
shit game + costly graphics = shit game
Exactly. There is a reason retrogaming is popular; the games are actually fun and can be played without having to master a bunch of moves, while still requiring some skill to get to higher levels. Plus, as you point out, they don't keep asking for quarters to keep playing.
I even re-tried Zork a little bit back. No graphics at all. What was cool was how much memory map I remembered after maybe 30 years.
I blame Zork for the current rash of in game money. If they never minted the Zorkmid...
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shit game + shit graphics = shit game
shit game + costly graphics = shit game
spend more time on the game instead of figuring out how to bleed kids dry with subscriptions and microtransactions, or encouraging addictive and gambling-like behavior with loot crates and card packs, or leaking out incomplete games and then asking for more cash for DLC. Oh and maybe for once when you have to backpedal on dumbass plans because of overwhelming outrage from your fanbase, actually use the word SORRY in your white-text-on-black-background non-apology apology.
100% this... I've been saying for years that graphics don't matter.
Give us a game with good gameplay and an engaging story and we'll play it for ages. Also +1 on the endless microtransactiosn, DLCs, and Pay2Win can FRO as well.
When I think of the failure formula for games, I think of Mass Effect Andromeda... It was a game with three loved predecessors, it wasn't particularly risky content wise to begin with but it had a solid base of enjoyable gameplay to start with. So they threw that out the window
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You mean like movies? Movies used to rely on a strong story line, strong character development and good dialog. Then came special effects.... gone was the story telling and in came 2 hours of action packed special effects....
Re: can't polish a turd (Score:2)
Instead of 2 minute "songs" that go straight to the hook, at full volume?
Stairway to heaven could never be made today .
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When it comes to music there is a reason for this! Just listened to a show all about Marketing and this was a topic. Basically it used to be you heard music for the first time on the radio, or record/tape/CD/8 Track or what have you. So when the next song came on you just had to listen to is. Now it is released online and today's generation need to be hooked in the first dozen seconds or so or else the next button is pushed.
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Yep, there's a reason, and unsurprising
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G is a simple key (just one sharp in the key signature) and is probably the most common key for writing guitar music; simple to read the music and easy to play on the guitar.
A lot of popular piano music tends to get written in simple keys with flats in the key signature, like F and Bb.
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Indeed. And that is all it is. I am wondering whether the root of the problem is some c-level idiots that only ever see demos and do not play games themselves. You have to understand a product to make good decisions regarding it. That clearly is not the case far too frequently (and not only for games).
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Re: Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRAT (Score:2, Interesting)
The games does not tell people that "boys should be girls". They merely state that SOME human beings have been misclassified as boys / girls.
This should be about as controversial as saying that slaves are not stupid animals but real thinking, breathing human beings and no human deserves the treatment slaves usually get.
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misclassified as boys / girls
You mean the doctor didn't recognize correctly their reproductive organs? I think you mean "don't feel inside like their sex".
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You mean the doctor didn't recognize correctly their reproductive organs?
True of about 1.6 million human beings (0.02% of population), those with a serious difference in sex development (DSD). A lot of legislation and regulation meant to discriminate against transgender people has unfortunate and (doubly) unacceptable collateral damage on people with DSDs, also called intersex people.
don't feel inside like their sex
That is correct. These male children and teens are so disgusted with being male that it limits their ability to function as human beings. They have better outcomes in a feminine gender role than in
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"The equivalent for FTM, of course, but there are fewer of them."
And people should seriously ask why that might be...
Re: Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARR (Score:2)
Shave your beard and buy a Prius, then tell me you don't feel like less of a man.
Almost like being a man is more than your chromosomes. Hmm...
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This doesn't account for the number of self-proclaimed transexuals, but every year in the US there are a couple hundred babies born with XX or XY chromosomes that nonetheless present as the opposite sex at birth because of issues with hormones, hormone receptors, or other problems. That doesn't include those born XXY or with other serious chromosomal issues. Nor does it include more common issues like girls born with viralized clitorises,
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The games does not tell people that "boys should be girls". They merely state that SOME human beings have been misclassified as boys / girls.
This should be about as controversial as saying that slaves are not stupid animals but real thinking, breathing human beings and no human deserves the treatment slaves usually get.
At risk of being downmodded, let me attempt to put this in a different light.
If there is a reason to put a character who identifies as anything they want to identify with into a game, sure. But how often can that happen? Gameplay is not about nuance of who characters want to have sex with. Or who a character wants to dress like. Indeed, is not a delineation of men's clothing/women's clothing one of the most sexist ideas ever foisted upon humanity, and yet it is a touchstone of transgenderism?
In real li
Re: Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRA (Score:3)
The fact you feel the need to object to a main character being gay or trans or, heaven forbid, a 50-something grandma, just for the sake of it, no point really except they felt like putting it in there - that says a to about you as a person.
Why does this upset you? How are those artistic choices any different than putting a plumber as the main hero, or a 20 something female with a gun that has the ability to open wormholes, or a female archaeologist whose main defining characteristics are their DD sized che
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The fact you feel the need to object to a main character being gay or trans or, heaven forbid, a 50-something grandma, just for the sake of it, no point really except they felt like putting it in there - that says a to about you as a person.
As does your outrage over a reasoned post.
Why does this upset you?
Sorry homie, don't look at yourself in a mirror, and pretend I am upset.
Your belief that I am angry is merely a manifestation of some sort of self victimization. You are the more likely person with an anger problem. Read my post without your eagerness to be triggered.
Here's a challenge for you. Since you want to classify me as angry, with an underlying accusation of transphobia and direct accusation of misogyny , Point that out where, and give a reasoned anal
Re: Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRA (Score:2)
I am asking why it even matters in the first place whether the creator of a video game choose to have a bimbo with a DD rack (Lara Croft) or a person belonging to the LGBTQ+ crowd as the protagonist of a video game.
Why is it ok with a video game with Tifa Lockhart, Chun Li or Princess Peach (or, for that matter, Duke Nukem) as a protagonist, but not a Transperson or a homosexual person?
And obviously you are upset over this. Why would you otherwise spend the energy to type the above post?
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I am asking why it even matters in the first place whether the creator of a video game choose to have a bimbo with a DD rack (Lara Croft) or a person belonging to the LGBTQ+ crowd as the protagonist of a video game.
Why is it ok with a video game with Tifa Lockhart, Chun Li or Princess Peach (or, for that matter, Duke Nukem) as a protagonist, but not a Transperson or a homosexual person?
And obviously you are upset over this. Why would you otherwise spend the energy to type the above post?
I see, women with large breasts are bimbos Your most very specific words. You expose yourself,
No, homie, I'm not upset or angry in the least. Just typing on Slashdot. And if your metric of anger is replying, let us not forget that by your metric, since you keep replying, and you saw fit to replay to my initial post - you are quite angry, and projecting.
That I rather enjoy wrestling with hypocrites is undeniable - there is no anger involved. You're projecting homie - and need reminders of that fac
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I think it comes down to being able to relate to the main character. That's basically going to be a straight person 99% of the time. It doesn't mean we can't have a transperson as the main character, but honestly, how do you even point that out? Done correctly, you wouldn't be able to tell anyway. This means you then have to inject that into the story and if it's done just to be done, as opposed to support the story, then it's just noise.
It also has to do with demographics for video games. Hot women with ti
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Re:Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRATI (Score:5, Insightful)
And what exactly do you mean hear more of this stuff? Are you really that upset from having to be aware there are gays and minority people in real life that you rage on the internet because a game dev gives you the choice on gender in a game, or that Witcher 4 is going to have a 30 something woman as the player character instead of a barely legal teen girl or basically anytype of hetero man? These are exactly the sort of things people complaining about 'wokeness' in video games have raged about recently and are literally adding games to 'woke' lists for.
Re:Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRATI (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, yes they are. If there is a single gay or minority person anywhere on the planet, they'll be upset. That's how they live their life, being upset at something which has no bearing on their life.
Re: Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRAT (Score:2)
If I've learned anything from all these anti-woke gaming idiots.
It's that Zelda tricked little girls into playing as a boy and exposed little boys as wanting to be princesses, Metroid was about an unrealistic girl-boss with a spaceship, power suit and lasers, Mario was an incel who's arranged wife was always in another dude's castle and constantly being fooled by cross dressing toads, and the ninja turtles, big muscly half naked teens with cloacas was peak video-game masculinity. Or were they tucking their
Re: Games are LOSING money due to DEI, Woke NARRAT (Score:2)
he's not wrong about any of it though
Yes she is though, because all this anti-woke bullshit isn't consistent with reality.
My daughter plays Mario, does that make her gay? Playing Zelda as the elfish twink boy Link - is that making _everyone_ gay? Should Link have big glistening muscles, you know, so we know he's straight... lol.
Samus Aran is an insufferable girl-boss now? Did Tomb Raider make you gay? Oh, I get it, it's because Lara was very fuckable, that's what made it not gay, the same way oiled up hunk Link would make him not as gay?
Fuck m
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Bullshit. Games are losing money because they are bad games.
Incidentally, here is a definition for "fanatic": A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. (Churchill). You nicely qualify.
I *prefer* cartoonish graphics (Score:1)
I prefer obviously cartoonish graphics anyway.
Maybe it's just my weird brain, but I suspend disbelief and get into the game more if the visuals very obviously aren't real.
It's not about "looking good" (Score:4, Insightful)
Slapping fancy graphics on a bad game is like covering a dog turd with marzipan. Yeah it might look appealing but that stops as soon as somebody bites into it.
Graphics, gameplay, mechanics, story, exploration all play a part in a good game, but you can't supplant one without another. Most AAA games that flop do so not because of the graphics but something else.
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Slapping fancy graphics on a bad game is like covering a dog turd with marzipan. Yeah it might look appealing but that stops as soon as somebody bites into it.
They say there is no perfect analogy. I think you just proved them wrong.
Well played indeed, even if I threw up in my mouth a little 8^)
It only took 3 decades... (Score:2)
Sure took a long time for enough people to realize the truth. It's always been amazing how many fell into the graphics marketing all this time; flash but little substance. Movie CG effects are beginning to fail as well. However, a moronic painted evil clown with no substance or team got elected over competence and people couldn't tell the difference or fact from fiction.
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Indeed. I think some of the idiots in charge overlook that graphics is a secondary thing used to support the actual game mechanics and story. Maybe they only see demos and never play games? In demos, graphics can make a lot of difference, but if you discover the gameplay sucks after an hour in, no amount of graphics will do anything. And players find out before buying or can even refund.
It is really simple: Make a game that is fun to play. Everything else is secondary. Ignore that rule and fail.
Nethack (Score:3)
And here I am, enjoying a game of Nethack...
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Larn r00lz!
LEGO games proved this years ago (Score:2)
When others were trying to squeeze as much detail as they could into games, the LEGO games were blocky but lots of fun to play.
Minecraft, Terraria, and Stardew Valley were originally low-budget games that have had amazing success. Even Popcap used to follow that model before EA bought them and decided that they needed to re-work Plants vs Zombies 2 to completely change it around to try to squeeze more money out of their players
Silly me (Score:2)
Management (Score:1)
Forcing a premise (Score:2)
The article is wrong. They've picked an initial cause for the industry problem then wrote about particular instances then shoved the article out the door. Not unlike the shit games they mentioned. But the article didn't highlight games which failed because their visual budget exceeded some alternative, the article literally point at games that failed because they were garbage. They might have had excessive budgets, but they made crap games with those budgets.
I've repeatedly said to my game playing friends t
Budget vs Commoditization (Score:1)
The ballooning labor cost of artistic talent to develop graphics assets for a video game is but one component. The post mentions the temptation to use A.I. as a solution, either by eliminating the human flair from the equation resulting in overly generic graphics, or by undermining graphics fidelity a.k.a. shooting oneself in the foot.
Consider, however, that one component of the cost of graphic
Nintendo figured this out when they launched Wii (Score:2)
Instead of going with the latest, greatest GPUs, they went with a lower resolution, older, cheaper GPU for the original Wii. The result was the most successful game console launch in decades. People loved the Wii, and because Nintendo chose the cheaper hardware, it was highly profitable for them. The never-ending push for better graphics, misses the point of what makes games fun to play. It's the gameplay, stupid!
Re: Nintendo figured this out when they launched W (Score:2)
I would love a breakdown of the costs... (Score:2)
I would love a breakdown of the costs- how do you spend $315 MILLION on a game? 3rd one is set to have a budget of $385 Million
With video games, i keep hearing outlandish figures - with apparently Star Citizen holding 1st place at $514 Million (at last glance- raised $644 Million in crowdfunding)... I can understand if some of that is hardware... but where are these piles of cash actually going?
what is even more mind boggling- Marvels Spider-man 1 cost $156 Million, and made $3.8 Billion in it's first yea
The returns have diminished too much (Score:2)
Genshin isn't cheap (Score:2)
Genshin Impact is the most expensive video games ever developed with an ongoing budget of over $900 million.
It is not about graphics. It never has been. (Score:2)
It is about fun to play. Graphics just need to support that to the right level. Anything more becomes a distraction. The whole problem stems from c-level idiots making decisions on things they know nothing about. Same for sound. Same for "pretty language". All these things are nice to have, but only on the right level and not above. No amount of stellar photo-realistic graphics and bombastic sound will make bad writing or bad game mechanics not suck. And players have gotten wise to this.
Death spiral capitalism nonesense (Score:2)
Oh, you are forcing us to make something... so pay more and more.
Well dont do it then? No they wont do that either, because of course this is nonsense logic. The games industry got captured by late stage capitalism. The only thing that matters is more money every year. It doesnt matter how much they make, its not enough. RDR2 sold over 60 million copies, this made rockstar choke so bad they dropped the online component like it was cancer.
The only bright side is that the indie game scene has renewed the old
Not at all (Score:2)
People that are just bad at making games have been put in charge of making games. A few companies like FromSoft (Darksouls, Elden Ring, etc.) and Nintendo know that good, commercially successful game designers are t
Locking out onboard GPUs (Score:2)
Game studios spend increasingly more time and resources by providing extremely complex graphics that require a discrete GPU, but are unplayable on PCs with integrated GPUs. They spend more, while locking out a vast source of potential revenue.
If your latest game requires a dual RTX 9000 with a liquid nitrogen cooling system and 3 kW of power usage for the highest settings, be my guest, but do not lock out potential users of your game at the lower end. In doing so, you're saying to millions of would-be gamer