You kinda moved things to a bit of a pre-decided set of rails there. I donāt know that the previous poster was particularly concerned about the concept of āfunā or the economics. But hey, I get wanting to find a place to say your piece.
FWIW, youāre not wrong about a lot of that, although I wouldnāt express it that way. I do have a few caveats for you.
For one thing, chasing the hardware hasnāt been as big of a deal for a while. I donāt think most game devs or execs are dumb enough to notice that WoW, Minecraft, The Sims, Roblox and a bunch of other major hits are not on the visuals cutting edge. Competing on high end visuals is comfortable for studios with access to a bunch of funding because it cuts off some of the competition, but there are big chunks of the industry where being flashy and high-tech cuts off big pieces of the potential market (mobile, handheld and PC, traditionally). A big part of this conversation is nerds consistently conflating home console and high end PC with the entirety of the gaming market, when itās a small corner.
Iām also not sure that the investment boom and crunch thing is a cycle. Investment has been there for a long time, it is now leaving. Iām not sure itāll come back. That will probably have the consequence of moderating budgets, as you say, but donāt underestimate how much that vacant top end for visuals will remain appetizing to some as competition there dries up.
And conversely donāt underestimate how big āindiesā can get. I brought it up elsewhere, but Expedition 33 is making waves for being a small team, and they themselves have identified as ādouble Aā a few times. But if you look at that next to, say, Persona 5, those lines start to blur a lot. As the tools evolve and, unfortunately, a bunch of experienced devs brain drain right into unemployment the ability of indies to reach scopes that were AAA just a few years ago will also increase.
On that comparison, by the way, I would not be surprised at all if it turns out all that sleek 2D UI art in Persona or Metaphor (not to mention the anime cutscenes) turned out to have been more expensive than the heavily middleware-reliant cinematic presentation in Expedition 33. Perception of cost is already out of whack and it will probably get weirder in an environment of consolidated engines and weird vectors for machine generation of assets.
Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks Iām demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.
I confess I donāt read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews Iām all ears.
I do like that there are āuglyā games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that thereās money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that theyāll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I donāt have a context to make sense of it. I havenāt even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesnāt go as far as it used to, I guess.
Youāre right that itās not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. Itās too large and slow to really say how itāll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there arenāt as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like itās becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything Iāve ever heard of. Thereās so much, everyoneās bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess Iām on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.
I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasnāt done.
2D isnāt even necessarily cheaper. For small games there are plenty of devs who have the skillset to get some 3D models in place but absolutely could not even begin to hand-animate the same volume of assets. Itās not a linear thing anymore, if it ever was.
Itās true that most of what you hear in publicly available forums is business talk. In the industryās defense, itās hard to live life on a constant doomsday clock and a lot of the stuff that keeps people employed has historically been some combination of appealing to investors and successfully gaming the marketing game (and I donāt just mean for āAAAā, whatever that means).
Itās not that the artistic conversation doesnāt happen, but it lives in game jams and watercooler talks and academia. It doesnāt help that itās often dry as all hell. Itās one thing to watch famous actors running around in costumes and talking about how long they spend on makeup every day, but who wants to hear about burndown charts and the finer points of coding some random tool to make sure every drawer in an RPG has at least one handkerchief inside it?
For the record, I agree with you that part of it is that in a world without centralized media consumption and driven by algorithm filtering of on-demand content we are no longer all talking about the same five things. That is not just about games, but people still havenāt fully wrapped their heads around how much itās messing things up. I one heard a games industry person say that he firmly believed the goal for an indie developer should be to āown a word on Steamās searchā, and he was not wrong, but thatās still a depressing thought. Just like if youāre making a TV show the goal is now to break the Netflix top 10 in multiple countries and so on. Storefront placement has replaced the old human gatekeepers and itās not all bad on that process, but itād be nice to have a door number three we can open somewhere.
Itās a little surprising that 2D and 3D are such different skillsets for game dev, since Iāve seen so much indie 2D and 3D animation being done in blender in the past few years. Itās not something I know much about in practical terms though, Iām not in the industry and I donāt know the practical tools or workflows at all. The one thing I do know is that the number of Aās there are in a conversation about game developers is roughly equal to how loud one feels like screaming.
I do worry that Steam is getting too big for its britches though, and Iām trying to spend more money on places like GOG or Itch.io. The one good thing about there being such an unremitting storm of content these days is that you can easily decide to spend the majority of your time away from the more commercially driven stuff.
You kinda moved things to a bit of a pre-decided set of rails there. I donāt know that the previous poster was particularly concerned about the concept of āfunā or the economics. But hey, I get wanting to find a place to say your piece.
FWIW, youāre not wrong about a lot of that, although I wouldnāt express it that way. I do have a few caveats for you.
For one thing, chasing the hardware hasnāt been as big of a deal for a while. I donāt think most game devs or execs are dumb enough to notice that WoW, Minecraft, The Sims, Roblox and a bunch of other major hits are not on the visuals cutting edge. Competing on high end visuals is comfortable for studios with access to a bunch of funding because it cuts off some of the competition, but there are big chunks of the industry where being flashy and high-tech cuts off big pieces of the potential market (mobile, handheld and PC, traditionally). A big part of this conversation is nerds consistently conflating home console and high end PC with the entirety of the gaming market, when itās a small corner.
Iām also not sure that the investment boom and crunch thing is a cycle. Investment has been there for a long time, it is now leaving. Iām not sure itāll come back. That will probably have the consequence of moderating budgets, as you say, but donāt underestimate how much that vacant top end for visuals will remain appetizing to some as competition there dries up.
And conversely donāt underestimate how big āindiesā can get. I brought it up elsewhere, but Expedition 33 is making waves for being a small team, and they themselves have identified as ādouble Aā a few times. But if you look at that next to, say, Persona 5, those lines start to blur a lot. As the tools evolve and, unfortunately, a bunch of experienced devs brain drain right into unemployment the ability of indies to reach scopes that were AAA just a few years ago will also increase.
On that comparison, by the way, I would not be surprised at all if it turns out all that sleek 2D UI art in Persona or Metaphor (not to mention the anime cutscenes) turned out to have been more expensive than the heavily middleware-reliant cinematic presentation in Expedition 33. Perception of cost is already out of whack and it will probably get weirder in an environment of consolidated engines and weird vectors for machine generation of assets.
Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks Iām demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.
I confess I donāt read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews Iām all ears.
I do like that there are āuglyā games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that thereās money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that theyāll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I donāt have a context to make sense of it. I havenāt even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesnāt go as far as it used to, I guess.
Youāre right that itās not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. Itās too large and slow to really say how itāll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there arenāt as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like itās becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything Iāve ever heard of. Thereās so much, everyoneās bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess Iām on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.
I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasnāt done.
2D isnāt even necessarily cheaper. For small games there are plenty of devs who have the skillset to get some 3D models in place but absolutely could not even begin to hand-animate the same volume of assets. Itās not a linear thing anymore, if it ever was.
Itās true that most of what you hear in publicly available forums is business talk. In the industryās defense, itās hard to live life on a constant doomsday clock and a lot of the stuff that keeps people employed has historically been some combination of appealing to investors and successfully gaming the marketing game (and I donāt just mean for āAAAā, whatever that means).
Itās not that the artistic conversation doesnāt happen, but it lives in game jams and watercooler talks and academia. It doesnāt help that itās often dry as all hell. Itās one thing to watch famous actors running around in costumes and talking about how long they spend on makeup every day, but who wants to hear about burndown charts and the finer points of coding some random tool to make sure every drawer in an RPG has at least one handkerchief inside it?
For the record, I agree with you that part of it is that in a world without centralized media consumption and driven by algorithm filtering of on-demand content we are no longer all talking about the same five things. That is not just about games, but people still havenāt fully wrapped their heads around how much itās messing things up. I one heard a games industry person say that he firmly believed the goal for an indie developer should be to āown a word on Steamās searchā, and he was not wrong, but thatās still a depressing thought. Just like if youāre making a TV show the goal is now to break the Netflix top 10 in multiple countries and so on. Storefront placement has replaced the old human gatekeepers and itās not all bad on that process, but itād be nice to have a door number three we can open somewhere.
Itās a little surprising that 2D and 3D are such different skillsets for game dev, since Iāve seen so much indie 2D and 3D animation being done in blender in the past few years. Itās not something I know much about in practical terms though, Iām not in the industry and I donāt know the practical tools or workflows at all. The one thing I do know is that the number of Aās there are in a conversation about game developers is roughly equal to how loud one feels like screaming.
I do worry that Steam is getting too big for its britches though, and Iām trying to spend more money on places like GOG or Itch.io. The one good thing about there being such an unremitting storm of content these days is that you can easily decide to spend the majority of your time away from the more commercially driven stuff.