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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?

www.nytimes.com /2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics-budgets.html

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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.

54 comments
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

54 comments