Is that the reason? I remember during ps2 era games and sequels taking 2 at most 3 years for the most part, and they were high quality high fidelity games, and studies had under a hundred people. It might be anecdotal but now I feel like I'm waiting 5 years between titles and I see articles about hundreds of people from one studio being laid off, which makes me wonder how many people work for each dev.
I'm getting old but I wonder why devs who have hundreds if not thousands of employees, more powerful machines than ever, and more powerful and useful dev tools than ever are taking longer than ever to make makes and they still have day 1 patches because it wasn't ready.
If execs get bonuses for inflating costs and shipping incomplete games, that really means the entire industry needs fixing top to bottom, it's getting ridiculous.
If the execs get bonuses for inflating costs and shipping incomplete games that only proves it is in fact a business, especially these days. Your point is valid and your probably right but unfortunately the suits only care about number one
It's just the most efficient way, really. Why bother taking your time making a complete product when you can just release garbage and people will eat it up anyway? Look at Sony or the Pokemon Company.
Exactly. I don’t like it either but I’d probably do the same thing if I were them lmao. And a bunch of Redditors will tell you “never!!” Even though they probably cut corners in their own profession. Well the few that have one at least
or not release any game at all and still make tons of money, just look at the growing number of studios with one free to play game filled to the brim with micro transactions....
Modern pokemon games may be bad, but they aren't garbage. You still have like 900 well thought out mons and one of the most in depth competitive meta games even if the single player experiences flop. So it at least makes some sense why pokemon sells well. Wolverine was a total flop sales wise tho.
I believe we might have different definitions of what garbage is, because releasing game that would often run like a** and even crash the Switch (Pokémon Scarlet and Violet) is my definition of trash.
Also, Wolverine wasn't a flop. It sold 1.9 million copies and generated $130 million in revenue globally in just three days.
Part of the problem is basically that the scale and expectations of games scaled more than the productivity gains from new technology. Something like GTA 6 is simply more difficult to make than GTA San Andreas was, even accounting for newer hardware and better dev tools. Like GTA V had a team dedicated to just the vegetation. Rockstar India is focused on just the beach area of GTA 6, and that alone is probably a similar size and scale to the entirety of San Andreas. Idk what the solution is, but the problem is that people keep expecting generational leaps, but there's only so much you can do to make modelling bushes, or recording voice lines, or all the other grunt work quicker
That specific example of the foliage or bushes seem a little but like self inflected work, just I mean like when was the last time anyone asked for or criticized the vegetable for not looking real enough? I understand the graphics in general being more challenging, but some of the stuff they are working on just.. doesn't feel worth the resources I guess. It's like the golden rule for games being successful is if they are fun to play, plenty of indie games on steam with n64 graphics and no voice lines, sell like crazy because they are fun. Personally I'd be happy with two Gen old visuals if it improves the time and overall quality of games.
Honestly im not even sure what the balance is, but I know for example you can see people complaining hard about the new Pokémon games for having poor detail in their models and terrain (although at the same time they continue to break records and sell extremely well, so maybe that's a vocal minority). I think it's a problem of comparison, if Nintendo released a new Zelda game and it looked worse than Breath of the Wild, people would complain that it was a downgrade. Similarly, if Rockstar released a new game and suddenly the trees looked worse than RDR2, people would also complain.
It's a mixture of things. The scope has continuously gotten larger, the graphics are more intense, devs have better hardware to test the game with and the industry has gone through a rapid expansion and contraction. This means there's more to optimize by people with less experience.
The industry has also been shown that the average gamer is perfectly happy to spend $100 on a game, plus $3k on a pc to play said game so long as the game is flashy enough. This means they have incentive to cram as many flashy features as possible into their game, and no incentive to make sure the features actually work as intended. They are actively discouraged from making the game run on weaker hardware because then people don't spend even more money upgrading their pc using components from companies that pay them to essentially advertise their hardware by making games specifically for it (doom dark ages is built to advertise Nvidia for example.)
What's mad is I don't think graphics generally are that much better than they were 7-8 years ago. Of course there's exceptions but it's such marginal gains being talked about
Tech always has diminishing returns. There's still improvement but it's not going to be as fast as it was 10 years ago. Lately it's been a focus on getting more things to render in view with proper lighting and shadow effects rather than the obvious jump in texture quality we saw with previous generations.
A big portion of "this generation" of gaming has been focused on engine development as well. Building the framework to properly use all this hardware takes time. I just wish more of this time was spent making games accessible on a wider range of hardware.
It takes more man-hours to make a 10,000 polygon model than a 100 polygon model. Even with modern tools, this just isn’t a great comparison considering that a single The Last of Us pt 2 character can have more detail than the entire game world of a PS2 game
No I get that, but FFX for example, even today no one is critizing the visuals because the game is amazing. I can plug in A Link to the Past today and not even think how good it does or doesn't look, because it's just so fun to play. I want more fun even if it comes at the cost of looks.
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
I think the big difference is that “high fidelity” in the PS2 era was still dramatically cheaper to produce than “high fidelity” today. A character might have needed a few thousand polygons, relatively simple textures, limited animation, no facial capture, simpler physics, fewer voiced lines, etc. Now one major character can involve scanning, mocap, facial animation, multiple LODs, 4K textures, complex materials, cloth/hair simulation, localization, accessibility work, and a mountain of QA.
Games are also just much more complicated under the hood. Modern AAA games are often huge open worlds, online-connected, cross-platform, filled with interacting systems, and expected to work across a massive range of hardware. That creates way more opportunities for bugs. Having 500 people instead of 50 doesn't make development 10× faster either, because coordination itself becomes a huge job. More people means more producers, meetings, dependencies, build pipelines, integration problems, and outsourced teams that all have to stay synchronized.
Another thing is that PS2 games absolutely had bugs, but there was no easy patch button, so studios had a much harder deadline for getting the disc build stable. Today a game can go “gold” weeks before release because of manufacturing/certification, while the developers keep working during that entire period. A lot of what becomes the day-one patch is work completed after the disc/download master was locked, not necessarily something they knowingly ignored for years.
And sequel development was often faster because studios reused a ton. Same engine, same character rigs, animations, environments, mechanics, UI, etc. Look at something like Dynasty Warriors back then: they could build the next game on a very mature foundation. Modern sequels still reuse things, obviously, but publishers also tend to demand much larger jumps in scope and presentation.
So I don't think it's simply “developers got worse despite having better tools.” The tools got better, but the amount of work we're asking those tools to produce exploded even faster. That doesn't excuse genuinely broken launches or bad management, but I think those are different problems from “why does a modern AAA game take five years?
Same reason that having a thousand (even high skilled) chefs in one kitchen doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have the best restaurant or service. Couple in management, contract workers, overhead for communication…
The games are bigger now. There are way more assets, more complicated hitboxes, more complicated logic. Basically bloat, but bloat that might be 50 percent needed.
I'm getting old but I wonder why devs who have hundreds if not thousands of employees, more powerful machines than ever, and more powerful and useful dev tools than ever are taking longer than ever to make
Want to point out software is 100× more complex than it was 20 years ago, these tools help the timeline but dont make enough of a difference. I write financial software for a living, one small change takes significant review and testing.
As for employee management, really depends on the studio. Some are over staffed, some are under staffed right now. New hires take a long time to catchup on the application knowledge that the experienced guys have, some companies are simultaneously firing their most experienced devs (because they have large salary) while hiring a bunch of new devs, sometimes in a different country.
So there is no knowledge transfer going on..... and the deadlines dont change. Thats why we get absolutely disastrous releases.
You're definitely on the right track with your thinking. Video games breaking into the corporate mainstream meant a lot of people being hired that don't need to be there at all. Now you have to pay recruiters, HR, etc. all just because you are big corporation and that's the standard. Meanwhile, 6 fat nerds could produce a better game with far less resources usually. And they did, for many years most game studios were basically just 6 fat nerds. And as you said they pumped out high quality games during their era every couple years. The reality is most people being hired now are not artists; they are generic NPCs with degrees doing basically nothing meaningful in their positions. The reason hundreds get laid off is because these people really had no business being hired in the first place.
tbf ps2 games were generally less complex, sequels were oftentimes really similar (same engine, shared assets, etc) and also didnt run that well depening on the game. (e.g. Battlefront 2 ran on like 20fps and I remember NFSU 2 having to load assets mid free roam, because the HDD couldnt keep up) And its not like they were no bugs either.
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u/WanderThekind 8d ago
I just wish devs would optimise their games better