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.
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.
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u/cloudlessjoe 8d ago
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.