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.
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 think the point is that it would have still been a fantastic game if it hadn’t sunk a load of money into looking like a movie.
I disagree. The art design and realism was one of the reasons why it was so good. It’s still one of the best looking games of all time. It also proves that you can make a good looking game that also is fun and fulfilling. It’s honestly a success story all around.
In fact, the “cinematic” shit was the worst part of it IMO. There were gameplay segments where it got very tedious.
Ok, but… shrinking horse balls. That’s realism!
I had the good fortune to have a medical emergency that allowed me to be on sick leave long enough to play through it at a leisurely pace.
Worth it.
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.
Turns out you have to make a good game too. Who would have guessed?
Amen
The Michael Bay method of video game production - overproduced with no substance
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.
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?
Video: https://youtu.be/qiNv3qv-YbU
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.
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.
What do you think is easiest to show in a 1min trailer: industry leading graphics, good writing or fun gameplay?
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.
Photorealism just puts a lot of constraints on gameplay mechanics and art direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
