Gaming industry insiders say cutting-edge graphics cost too much to make for AAA games
The ongoing industry crisis may finally teach that more graphics do not equal more sales.
Speaking to The New York Times, several game developers and some industry figures spoke out about how the gaming industry's AAA studios couldn't reasonably handle the stress of creating cutting-edge graphics— particularly in light of major waves of layoffs throughout the past two years, and several high-fidelity AAA games underperforming in the market. Even live service games, which are known to be cash cows when successful, are noted to be a mature market and thus a dangerous investment, particularly when end users tend to despise particularly greedy live service business models.
As former Square Enix executive Jacob Navok noted to The New York Times, "It's very clear that high-fidelity visuals are only moving the needle for a vocal class of gamers in their 40s and 50s. But what does my 7-year old son play? Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite."
While this may be a somewhat reductive take, there's certainly truth to it when one considers just how much the most popular titles veer toward being playable on low-to-mid-range hardware rather than high-end PCs. For example, the broader genre of single-player action games has mostly diminished to Soulslikes and gacha games a la Genshin Impact. While Soulslikes usually look good, they aren't typically operating with an entire AAA budget and are often hard-capped to 60 FPS. Meanwhile, most gacha games are playable on mobile phones, with standard ports playable on low-end PCs or last-gen consoles.
For most players, it seems that even if you have high-end hardware, pushing it to its absolute limits isn't necessarily the priority. Relatively unambitious live service games aren't either, considering the brutal failures of Sony's Concord and Warner Bros. Discovery's Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, cited by the New York Times.
Kill The Justice League is a notable example. It was billed as a sequel to the immensely popular Batman Arkham series of single-player hand-to-hand action games, but it is now rebilled as a live-service third-person shooter. Studios are not doing a particularly good job listening to their audiences when these mistakes cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
One independent developer quoted by The New York Times had particularly cutting comments about the industry's current status, especially regarding greater generative AI adoption. Rami Ismail, co-founder of development studio Vlambeer, known for titles including Nuclear Throne and Luftrausers, remarked, "The idea that there will be content from AI before we figure out how it works and where it will source data from is really hard."
Rami continues, "How can we as an industry make shorter games with worse graphics made with people who are paid well to work less? If we can, there might be short-term hope. Otherwise, I think the slow strangulation of the games industry is ongoing."
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Considering how unsustainable AAA gaming practices seem—at least in terms of keeping people employed, the executives are well-paid—Rami is almost certainly correct. The question is: Will things change, and if so, will they take a form gamers can actually appreciate?
Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
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hotaru251 outside of games that are cinematic....2000-2010's graphics were good enough for rest of games.Reply -
ohio_buckeye Graphics are cool but story is what to focus on. For example, the uncharted games, red dead redemption 2, the old assassins creed games, and recently Indiana Jones. I personally like great graphics, but makes a game with decent graphics and a good story and you have a winner.Reply -
closs.sebastien we can have both.Reply
See Horizon forbidden west, pc. (2024).
Good story, good ambiance, immersive, totally bug-free, and, graphically wonderful.. just a perfect game. and a total success.
without demanding a rtx8090 1500w 150 gb vram. :)
so beautiful and well optimized doesn't equal to last super-expensive hardware -
Alvar "Miles" Udell The problem is the modern cost of gaming.Reply
$1300 to build a PC for 4K (As TomsHardware did)
$700 to build a PC for 1920x1080 (As TomsHardware did)
$700 for a PS5 Pro
$450 for an XBOX Series X or PS5
The vast majority of the market isn't going to be able to take advantage of extremely high fidelities, especially on FPSs and other fast moving content, and especially not with ray or path tracing, and it's only going to get worse as the cost of GPUs continues to increase. AI will be able to help streamline costs by hopefully taking a lot of man hours out of the environment and NPCs, but that means little if people are still playing on low resolutions and frame rates. -
salgado18 I belive AAA games from the last 5 years or so are already beautiful enough. This push for more graphics is hitting a wall of diminishing returns. Unless new tools emerge to increase content creation speed, studios should stick with current graphics and focus on other aspects of games.Reply -
salgado18
That's the opposite of the problem. Expensive hardware should sell less, meaning less people can run high-quality graphics, meaning studios would try to make less demanding games. But the news says otherwise, they want better graphics but the cost of *creating* those graphics is too high.Alvar Miles Udell said:The problem is the modern cost of gaming.
$1300 to build a PC for 4K (As TomsHardware did)
$700 to build a PC for 1920x1080 (As TomsHardware did)
$700 for a PS5 Pro
$450 for an XBOX Series X or PS5
The vast majority of the market isn't going to be able to take advantage of extremely high fidelities, especially on FPSs and other fast moving content, and especially not with ray or path tracing, and it's only going to get worse as the cost of GPUs continues to increase. AI will be able to help streamline costs by hopefully taking a lot of man hours out of the environment and NPCs, but that means little if people are still playing on low resolutions and frame rates. -
ohio_buckeye It also comes down possibly to optimization. If you look back at games like Assassin's Creed 3, Unity and the Uncharted games, they had good graphics without needing a huge amount of hardware, at least by today's standards. Though I recall Unity when it came out was supposed to have been very buggy which is too bad because years later I played through it and it was a great game. It seems like back in the day that developers were much better at optimizing games or programs in general to run on less hardware. But maybe those ideas have gone away as we have multicore cpus, ever increasing amounts of ram and bigger/faster gpus.Reply -
closs.sebastien See Horizon forbidden west, pc. (2024).Reply
Good story, good ambiance, immersive, totally bug-free, and, graphically wonderful.. just a perfect game. and a total success.
without demanding a rtx8090 1500w 150 gb vram. :)
so beautiful and well optimized doesn't equal to last super-expensive hardware