>Hardware get better
>Tools get better
>Documentation and knowledge is spreadly available
>A market bigger than ever
>Somehow games get worse and AA devs are almost a dead entity
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>AA devs are almost a dead entity
they aren't, they just got absorbed by the "indie" label, which now means "every game not made by an AAA studio"
>Hardware get better
>Tools get better
>Documentation and knowledge is spreadly available
Cool, no need to hire skilled programmers to work on hardware level, any pajeet who read C++ For Dummies will do
>A market bigger than ever
Thanks to everincreasing amount of casuals, yes
>AA devs are almost a dead entity
You either get shareholders happy or go indie, that's it. Especially after Switch killing non-HD market
Hardware gets better
Graphics get better
Expectations keep growing bigger
Budgets balloon because good graphics take long time and effort
Publishers don't want to risk losing a bunch of money so they make safe games
Pretty simple.
>Expectations keep growing bigger
Expectations? Like in sale expectations?
What the average consumer expects from a game
the tools to do that has never been better, pic related took just as much time as making tomb raider 1s lara's plogynals breasts
Imagine being so disconnected from reality you actually believe this.
The budget mostly balloons because of advertisement actually. It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: yes, costs ARE increased by technical concerns, which does therefore require a bigger advert budget, but the advert costs are so high you need bigger advets to pay for the adverts. Typically 80% of a game's budget is adverts.
>AA devs are almost a dead entity
AA sector is doing great! unfortunately Embracer has a damn near monopoly on it
Japan has a lot of AA developers, even some studios under AAA publishers (or other large conglomerates) have AA budgets and production.
I thought this thread was going to be about lack of modding.
Think about it, the more games, the more divided the modding community will be. It's not a limitless resource, that is why so few games has a big modding community. I think.
Gamedevs are still too individualistic and fall for the "auteur meme" they think having a bunch of snowflake ideas and tropes with shit execution is good game design, when they could have had a game that would have been hundreds of times better if they just agreed to a "blue sky" project with the aid of a team as opposed to some unfeasible under-developed half-baked "passion projects" (clones) that have to ship 99% incomplete over and over.
Their hubris is their downfall, always trying to do everything alone because "muh one man army" "muh japanese game designer man he's just like me" and then they can't finish a single project because they're trying to ideas guy and theorycraft an overscoped and underfunded game and fail to properly manage distribution of labor. Nobody wants to play shit homages to nostalgia crap and souls-likes, roguelikes, card-games, basically any barebones generic soulless easy indie project.
They want an order of magnitude improvement over what the current indie market can provide. If indies don't learn how to work together, they'll collectively fall apart. Stop being a gay about passion projects. Learn skills and become an asset to a team of common-interest. Work with others to make projects of a higher quality.
>Tools get better
This one is false
Elaborate.
It's the same thing as with the Hollywood and Pixar before this - computing technology finally accomplished the task of getting outside of the nerd area. Comoanies capitalize on talent and drive down the salaries, a cg animator for film in early 2000s could get paid for 200k a year but now because of the global economy you are lucky if you can get 50k as a senior. They (companies) have driven both film and game industries so hard down the barrel it's so commodized you're as good as working at Wall Mart or working at MPC as a junior.
The same mentality goes for games.
Games were way faster to iterate on back then. I still think PS2 gen was the sweet spot for fidelity and expression.
Because its a gigantic money pit where they will have absurd expectations of wanting to make CoD numbers. Dont ever forget that studios like Bioware and publishers actively changed their games and direction so they can reach the "CoD audience". After the fricking absurd attempt to copy CoD they then saw Overwatch's Lootboxes and everyone wanted a piece. Then came Fortnite being huge and all of a sudden everyone wanted to have a Battle Royal mode. They all advocated for these changes even though it would actively harm their customer's goodwill. Its israeli to the highest degree.
2 and 3 are false. 4 is not as straightforwardly true as you think.
Tools are worse than ever and it's not just the tools' fault per se: tools are more complicated than ever because the hardware has become increasingly complex. In the c64 days you had a hardware instruction to blit pixels to the screen. You literally needed just a loop and instr to draw your game. Consoles often had hardware scroll support, which is why many games had this scrolling effect.
Nowadays, you need a dedicated GPU to draw to the screen (even when doing software rendering, in fact the term software rendering has become so overloaded it is now sometimes used to refer to hardware rendering where everything happens in the fragment shader instead of happening through the classical pipeline). The systems are multi-task, you have a fragmented memory model with virtual memory instead of having full access. There are page protection features everywhere that you have to bypass for some things and that force you to be slower than before otherwise.
There's the programmable pipeline instead of the fixed function pipeline in graphics programming.
Things that have not improved whatsoever and that can easily be improved by any indie, let alone AA+ dev:
- AI
- TTS/STT
- Terrain generation
- Story generation
- Gameplay
- Fun
- Music
Things that are now way out of reach of anyone but AAA devs:
- Graphics that don't look like ps1 or early PS2 era games
- Animations (because lolmocap, although to be fair you can use cool techniques like the wolfire game guys)
- Voice acting (because lolexpensive actors)
- Physics (performance and replayability issues. Actually doable by indies but huge waste of time)
So now if you want these features, you have to pay out the ass for the tools and then pay out the ass for a full dev team + art team.