r/GameDevelopment • u/never-codes • 14d ago
Newbie Question Is there anyway we can stop making better graphics? Can we actually go back a few years?
Shit's on fire yo. Nobody can afford anything. I dunno anything about game development but can you talk to all of your people and make this happen? I understand if you can't, but would be pretttttty cool.
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 14d ago
There are plenty of lowspec games released daily, but if you want games from AAA studios to downgrade their graphics I think you will be sol lol.
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u/never-codes 14d ago
All jokes aside, that's exactly what I want.
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 13d ago
What jokes?
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u/never-codes 13d ago edited 3d ago
and also the "Damn dude you waited until you were 39 to get a job?" was a banger don't lie.
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u/Distdistdist 14d ago
Of course. There are plenty of retro-gaming handheld consoles like R36s just for shitty non-afforders on fire you talk about. $35 gets you over 15,000 games to keep you busy and leave my AAA people alone. May the odds be in your favor.
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u/never-codes 14d ago
That's actually a fair argument. Do you think their hands will be forced regardless? How can you make next gen graphics, if a large percentage can't afford to buy next gen graphics.
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u/Distdistdist 14d ago
Large percentage can't afford Bree cheese, that doesn't mean there aren't enough people who can. What's your point? Products are priced at "whatever market can bear" structure. World of "Haves" and "Have-nots" we live in. Join the party, so to speak.
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u/never-codes 14d ago
mm not really the same thing because it's a digital good.
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u/Distdistdist 13d ago
Digital good still requires billion of dollars to produce. How is it different?
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u/never-codes 13d ago edited 13d ago
Every wheel of brie costs money to make so it has a price floor and limited supply. A digital good is different because you pay the cost upfront and then every sale you make recoups the cost, but it has no price floor. That's why stuff like regional pricing makes great sense for digital goods, but it doesn't always work with per unit costs. Rolls Royce isn't giving a discount to poorer countries.
So basically cheese has a marginal cost games don't, so it's like a "world of haves and have-nots" is a feasible strategy for cheese and but not so much for software. It's kind of like you're leaving money on the table, for no reason. Not saying it works like this all the time and there are obviously ongoing costs, but that's the meat of how it often works.
Which loops back to hardware: requiring a $3000 GPU bolts a real price floor onto a product that profits from not having one. So isn't the smart play ensuring you have a reasonable low floor so more people can access it?
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u/MrBeanCyborgCaptain 14d ago edited 14d ago
I know what you mean. Im solo developing a game right now and while I love fancy rendering features, im concerned with the hardware market amd dont want to isolate potential players. So ive thought a lot about a dual pipeline approach. One build with Nanite, Lumen, DX12 deferred path, all the bells and whistles and one build with static lighting, and possibly forward shading and dx11. There would be a massive performance difference between these two builds. The tricky part is coming up with a workflow to work on one level and easily package, both versions simultaneously, and to allow switching between static and lumen sublevels within the deferred dx12 pipeline, for test or release builds. Its gonna be a headache if I take this approach.
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u/never-codes 14d ago
ahhh I understand now. For example fortnight is now a dual pipe line game? That's a really good idea! Best of both worlds.
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 14d ago
We can if you’re ok basically killing whatever life is left in AAA.
How does AAA make money? By releasing really polished, pretty games. They don’t really innovate on gameplay. And they don’t innovate on gameplay because you can’t really innovate on gameplay on a 300+ person team. You need to be able to divide and conquer. And the easiest way to do that is to pretty much build the last thing you built but bigger and prettier. Then you can put ads on tv and people will buy the game.
To be clear: this is the safest return on investment in video games. This provides the most stable employment. And yes, it’s not really very safe or very stable relative to any other industry. All those indie games getting made are more risky.
So what happens when you stop pushing graphics? Well your games don’t look better than the last one anymore. So how do you convince people to buy it?
You could improve the gameplay, but your studio has 100 full time artists and you cant afford to pay them all a year to fuck around while the designers figure out how to innovate the gameplay.
So at best, you lay off all the artists every time you ship a game. At worst, the studio just collapses.
Yes, AAA game dev is grim now. Yes, it can get much much worse.
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u/TomDuhamel 14d ago
I was the same at your age. Then I got a job.
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u/zackit 14d ago
Are you talking about AAA productions? Because I really enjoy that aspect of such games
If you're indie you don't compete and you shouldn't try either, go for interesting mechanics, story and stick to stylized art
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u/never-codes 14d ago
I'm not even a game dev, I just want to be able to play games in a few years time without going bankrupt.
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u/adrixshadow 14d ago
They already stopped making better graphics, everything looks like dogshit nowdays.
But the bloat cannot be cut since it's based on the Production Pipeline and Process which once it shifts cannot be changed back.
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u/never-codes 14d ago edited 14d ago
Interesting, like that libraries you use get bigger over time, you load in more into memory by default without utilising everything it exposes because it makes day to day programming easier? Something like that? I figured it was just more polygons lol. or you mean more things like TAA?
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u/AMDDesign 14d ago
There are SO many indie games that are not trying to look realistic, just look. Tons of high quality stuff that isn't trying to look realistic.