this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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I love seeing those videos about game making up until 5th and 6th gen, how creative developers were, managing console hardware capabilities to bypass limitations and find other ways to render faster, wider, more colors, or fit more stuff in less space, pushing the system to its limits.... am I wrong, or is the modern game industry just about using an unoptimized engine to make games, not optimizing shit, releasing games that don't get close to reaching the full hardware potential, and then releasing a next gen of hardware even though the next gen games would probably run even better 2 gens ago if devs had half of the talent and problem-solving skills of past devs?
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
Games, like movies and TV, have become so expensive to make because studios and publishers have consolidated so much that they can’t keep the machine running with modest budgets to make modest profits. They have to slop together content with the lowest effort to extract the highest revenue from microtransactions and season passes because every game has to be a Call of Duty/Fortnite/Pokemon level hit or the studio is shuttered by the publisher.
Great games are still being made, just like great movies that aren’t remake or superhero slop are being made. Just not from big money but independent studios instead.
Well, putting together a trailer with Aerosmith or Beatles music playing over it isn't helping the ballooning "development costs" either.
Neither is studios overhiring and then figuring out you can't just hire 500 people and then not let them go. Game studios have become bloated. Overstaffed. And so have their games.
They just can't understand not every game needs to be a 150GB+ open world game, or have the latest realistic graphics. Small games are okay, good even.
Imagine how much more detailed a game could be from a AAA studios if it launched with highly stylized retro inspired graphics. They will never do this of course, but just imagine it. Imagine how much more there could be, with way less time and money being required to do it. A single barrel that might take an artist a whole day to make could easily mean multiple variants of barrel in the same time. They could drop a 20GB game that feels like a 200GB game, and do it in like 6-12 months.
It would be so easy to split their already massive studios into like 20 smaller teams of 50 or less people to work on these kinds of smaller games and they could pump them out quickly. Just flood the market with these highly concentrated titles. But they won't, because its easier to convince a shareholder to make billions from a single game that looks really good visually but plays like trash with MTX for short term profit than it is to convince them to play the long game and make trillions with the volume of smaller games sales and the massively reduced development costs.
Its all about short term profit these days, and its why all the businesses in the world seem to be racing each other to the bottom. Because why play the long game.when you might be dead before you hit the jackpot? Nevermind that you can't take any of it with you to the grave.