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by tonymet1 days ago |
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upvoteby OkayPhysicist21 hours ago|
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The problem is that the market has basically bifurcated. In the Indie space, people want novelty, and that's too risky for AAA (even 10 year old AAA) scale games. Over in the modern AAA space, you've got a more reliable user base (in that they're more eager to buy slight changes to the same game over and over), but you're competing more on "Wow" factor. And ever-better graphics have been a pretty easy way to convert investment into "wow", without much risk (compared to changing game mechanics more, which might kill your golden goose).

I find it far more plausible that AI-assisted game dev will help indies catch up in scale to 10 year old AAA than the modern AAA studios deciding to throw in the towel on the graphics arms race.

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upvoteby tonymet21 hours ago|
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I would argue AAA are avoiding the safe bets by forcing "new experiences" into safe money-making genres.

At Xbox Showcase, many of the popular beats were bringing back elements from Halo or Gears of War that fans missed.

The formula for making hits seems to be pretty clear, but the studios are bucking it.

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upvoteby pelotron1 days ago|
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A question for the ages.

indie games community has joined the chat

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upvoteby dude2507111 days ago|
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You are describing indie games.
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upvoteby tonymet23 hours ago|
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not quite. Indie games don't yet publish titles with the scope or ambition of 2013 AAA titles.

I mean publishing titles with the polish & breadth of content of Arkham City , 2013 Tomb Raider , Titanfall 2 etc.

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upvoteby d3Xt3r21 hours ago|
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Indeed. I guess one reason is that PC gaming hardware was always a moving target, and so newer games and graphics APIs exploiting features found in newer hardware, and hardware makers enabling them (driven by capitalism) created a vicious cycle.

Luckily the market did find a sort of stable target to aim for with the Steam Deck; many modern titles do aim to work well with those modest specs, such as Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 etc. And when Blizzard launched Diablo IV on Steam, they explicitly announced that they had partnered with Valve to ensure the game was heavily optimised for the Deck and very playable on Day 1 (and it was indeed, from my experience).

Hopefully we see more such examples with the Steam Machine. And I do agree with you that they could've gone with specs worth $250, but sadly with the current pricing crisis, $250 won't get much and I bet many people would've laughed at the specs. Even the Switch 2 now costs $500. :(

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upvoteby tonymet21 hours ago|
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i agree about steam deck and i think a couple solid hardware players need to take a risk, like xbox did with series S. try to draw a line and encourage game studios to join in
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upvoteby tonymet21 hours ago|
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that's what I'm working to figure out. The business model worked until around 2018 . Software could target gen + 1 , and things would balance out as hardware got cheaper. Now we have the inverse, where hardware is only going up, so why are software developers still pushing hardware into unattainable territory?

The capitalism part actually made sense until it didn't

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