Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good: The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market?
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good: The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market?
Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.
That level of detail did not come cheap.
Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.
It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.
“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”
Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.
Looks at Balatro, the game I spent most time playing this year. Or Vampire Survivor, the game I spent most time playing last year.
Yes, they did! They certainly misread the market!
It feels like very few progress was made graphically in the last eight years. We've reached a plateau. I mean, STAR WARS: Battlefront (2015) to me is as good as it gets and that was almost ten years ago. We used to have massive leaps in graphics all the time, but that's no longer the case.
The big difference is that, that game ran at 60 fps on the Xbox One and the PS4. Games barely look better or as good as this, but are atrociously harder to run. That's the big difference. The death of optimization and the "just throw more hardware at it" era.
Most executives at large publishers aren't gamers. Pretty pictures are more likely to entice them than deep mechanics. They could assign 5 people to make a game like Balatro or Stardew Valley, but they never would because they don't work like that, they came up through the MBA route and think in terms of enterprise software development lifecycles. Also, "making money" isn't good enough for them, they want to make so much money that they can pay themselves millions of dollars despite never actually contributing to the game.
They're simply drawing all the wrong conclusions here:
even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
The layoffs don't mean the game or company were unsuccessful, it means they found other ways to eliminate those jobs.
Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad
That's nothing to do with graphical fidelity, it was a shit game that followed up a shit movie.
Sony closed the studio behind Concord
Lots of potential reasons for this. If you ask me, they released a $30 game into a genre chock full of "free to play" games.
Personally I appreciate "cinematic" games but titles like Balatro and Stardew Valley (neither of which I own) are proof of the simple fact that making games that are actually fun to play is far far more important, and far more profitable.
Did executives misread the market?
The problem isn't detailed graphics, the problem is shit performance. The new generation of UE games look average, and require ridiculous hardware + upscaling to run smoothly
The problem is shit design, the same games we've played before mechanically over and over with increasing price tags
Photorealism just puts a lot of constraints on gameplay mechanics and art direction.
Many people (including me) consider the best game of 2024 to be Balatro.
Balatro. A game made by one guy who legitimately didn't even think anyone other than his friends and family would buy it.
AAA studios do not understand what people enjoy at all.
Balatro is 1) a fluke, an exception, a rarity and 2) not something big studios could even possibly replicate. What would be the point of a big studio trying to make a game that one developer can pull off? The closest the likes of Ubisoft in particular are getting to games like Baltro are their Indie-esque side projects that parts of their bigger studios engage in on the side, like Valiant Hearts. Those can never be enough to finance a big operation though.
I am literally playing minecraft without any of those shader texturepacks because I kind of prefer games not being ultra realistic. If being realistic was more fun than we would not need games to have fun because we have real life which is as real as you can get.
Texture packs or not, IMHO the key point is they're optional, not a requirement for the game to be playable. Games that depend on photorealism, are bound to end up in deep trouble.
Realistic does not equal to good looking. In example Zelda Breath of the Wild looks good, but its hardly realistic. And if all games are very realistic, then it gets a little bit boring, as all games start to look the same. The AAA gaming industry is too much focused on lip sync, realistic faces, grass and puddles. I don't feel like getting lost in a game, but more like watching a movie. It's so boring to me (I'm looking at you Red Dead Redemption 2).
Rdr2 was a fanatic game though...
I've always disliked how washed out BotW looks. It's like they could only process limited colours so they reduced the contrast and everything is light grey with a hint of colour.
It's actually a deliberate stylistic choice. The colors are washed out with a post-processing filter. Textures are actually much more colorful. You can fix this in an emulator, but the problem is that it's difficult to find a color preset that works in all lighting conditions. BotW has a consistent, almost painterly art style, even if it's relatively muted.
Turns out you have to make a good game too. Who would have guessed?
Good games don't automatically sell, on the contrary. Your average Ubisoft open world slop is "good", but that's not enough. Even very good, exceptional games don't automatically sell. Game development is inherently risky. Large publishers tried to game the system by making "safe" bets, by offering spectacle in combination with tried and true mechanics and narratives. This worked for a long time, but due to changing market conditions, the core audience for these types of games getting tired of them and younger gamers not caring about the presentation, these publishers are spending more on a shrinking segment of the market.
The problem is that they maneuvered themselves into a corner. They have built huge, art-heavy studios in expensive cities to make large games that bring in large sums of money that finance this costly development. You can't easily downsize this kind of operation, you can't easily change your modus operandi after having built entire companies around it. I'm convinced that this will result in the death of most large publishers and developers. Ubisoft is only the start.
Why should EA, Microsoft or Sony fare any differently? Each can only hope that enough of their major competitors die so that they don't have to fight around the same segment of the market anymore. They are all fundamentally unable to meaningfully capture the P2W and Gacha markets (same thing, really), especially in Asia, a segment where companies that were built to serve these types of games are truly at home. Those will slowly take over, until they too are too large and bloated to respond to changing market conditions - or until some event outside of their control, like a major conflict and/or economic crisis, wipes them off the map, paving the way for someone else entirely to lead the industry. The only thing that will remain constant is millions of small Indies fighting for scraps, with a tiny handful having the right combination of luck and skill (although mostly the former) to make a decent living.
"too"
Amen
Just saw a video today about how on steam roughly half of the best rated games are indie titles. Needless to say that the 2D graphics are not photorealistic.
Maybe, instead throwing money on graphics alone, focus on making fun games?
I like that we can get both indie and AAA and that indie developers can successfully create a whole of the former without big business. Not many places any more where a single person can offer a quality product that sits next to a business' with hundreds of millions of investment.
Guess I'm alone, I really do love good graphics, I love getting lost in the digital world... I'm just not going to pay $100 per game for that experience. It's the endlessly growing list of shit they want you to buy on top of buying the game itself that's destroying the video game market. Every new game that comes out has DLCs and expansions and season passes and skins and bullshit bullshit bullshit. Piracy is back in the rise because all the corporations forgot and got too greedy again.
What, you mean you don't play games and go "Well that looked great! Well worth my time!" like an awful lot of the AAA game industry appears to think gamers do?
Huh.
Seriously though, I'm curious how we ended up in the make-shit-prettier race and not a make-the-writing-good, or make-the-game-actually-fun, or even things like make-more-than-two-dungeons (looking at you, Starfield) race.
Especially given the cost to me, personally, to keep upgrading my GPU has reached an untenable level: I'm sure as crap not paying $2000 for a new GPU just so we get a few extra frames of hair jiggle or slightly better lighting or whatever.
People from outside the industry have seen a profit opportunity and decided to invest. As investors, they think they’re smarter than everyone else, even the people they pay to do things for them. Since they have no attachment to games as a medium they’re wowed by flashy visuals, and since investors have the money you need to produce a game, you cater to their tastes if you want to get paid.
That, and I think graphics is the easiest part of a game to min/max. You can take any pile of garbage and hire a couple animators, 3D artists etc etc to make it look gorgeous, but it's difficult to find someone who can write a really good story every single year for a release
Graphical realism is an easier metric than good writing or fun.
All MBAs, in all industries, need to be done away with.
It's also far easier to reliably create at scale. It's relatively easy, with enough money and experience, to create art and programming teams that each make their own horse testicle textures, but how do you compartmentalize the creation of fun?
The Michael Bay method of video game production - overproduced with no substance
I would argue fancy graphics help sell it. It’s the easiest way to grab attention, be it in a trailer or while watching a streamer. Depending on the game it also helps immersion, but not all games need that. All AAA games need to be sold though (at least that’s the aim of any AAA publisher). And people have bought them. And they still do. But they’re starting to learn that attention grabbing graphics doesn’t equal good game.
I spoke against the need for realistic graphics last time the topic came up, and I'll say a word in favour of it now: It's pretty awesome having realistic lighting and shadows when you're admiring the scenery in Skyrim. My 6600 can barely keep up, but the work it's doing there is fully aesthetically worthwhile. The same can't be said for every GPU-hungry game that comes out, and it may not have the central importance that it used to, but nice graphics are still nice to have. I say that as someone who appreciates NetHack at least as much as any new AAA game.
Games industry tend to have realistic graphics since the begining. End of the story.
I remember being absolutely blown away when this game came out at how realistic it looked. But I was young and clearly it isn't realistic, just great looking.
At that time Flashback was very realistic
I think the issue is a bit more nuanced. Graphics have gotten so good that it is relatively easy to get character animations which sit in the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is bad. You can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics everywhere, but if your characters are in the uncanny valley, the overall aesthetic is more similar to a game which didn't have the photorealism at all.
In the past, the goalpost was at a different spot, so putting all the resources towards realism still wouldn't get you into the valley, and everyone just thought it looked great.
Kinda seems misleading considering they said they need 7 mil copies sold to break even and 6 months after release it had sold 11 million. Blaming the layoffs on this seems like a transparent misdirection to make people think they lost money here. They want to spend less money, and I get that from a business standpoint, but it seems like they're looking for reasons to make people accept worse looking games. I don't really play high graphics games, but if they start decreasing the graphics budget I expect to see a decrease in cost. Don't pay the same for less.
I agree with the other comments saying it's about fun and not graphics, but this seems to have been published to get people to expect worse graphics regardless of fun.
To be fair, I don't think all of the blame can be laid on execs. Game directors and Art directors are often the source of the issue.
I've seen execs come to a studio and say: "Make something AAA, a single player game with unique gameplay and a great 10 hour story, and get it done in a couple of years. Don't worry about the bottom line, we want a showcase experience."
Then the directors come back with: "Okay, showcase you say? How about a AAAA 20v20 open world multiplayer shooter (nobody is doing that!), SaaS (to keep'em coming back), with ultra realistic graphics (it'll be epically fun that way), a $100million budget (we'll outsource to save money), MTX so we can make tons of money (we get profit sharing right?), and we do it in 3 years (for work-life balance)?"
Devs are just sitting there shaking their heads and thinking... "Here we go again..."
How about a AAAA 20v20 open world multiplayer shooter (nobody is doing that!), SaaS (to keep'em coming back), with ultra realistic graphics (it'll be epically fun that way), a $100million budget (we'll outsource to save money), MTX so we can make tons of money (we get profit sharing right?), and we do it in 3 years (for work-life balance)
I 100% believe most of these unrealistic expectations come from the execs. Decisions like these aren't made by art directors. They come from on high. Art directors and game directors aren't the ones making the monied decisions.
I've seen it first hand. Repeated statements by the corp execs asking for one thing, studio directors trying to push something else.
I mean, I've also seen execs ask for ridiculous shit as well, I'm just saying sometimes it really does come from the studios themselves.