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[ChorizoPicozo]

It seems like there is some bullshit going on with the people in charge of making video games, but I can't pinpoint what the actual problem is.

Clearly, it's not about the scope of the game (Avowed and Hellblade 2) are more "focused" games, yet they took as long to develop as a big, expansive AAA title.


But I have an idea:
Make a game for the PlayStation One with a hard deadline (12-18 months). Then remaster and remake it for the PS5/PS6. (12-18 months) BOOM. Chorizo is a Genius!!

 

[Loomy]

The top talent isn't evenly distributed though. If there are 80 people working at a dev, 5 of them might be top quartile material. If you fired the other 75 and hired 15 that were top quartile the game would absolutely come out faster and better quality. (ok this is probably an exaggeration, but it also probably isn't that far off.) That is why I say there are too many developers - the good talent is spread out. Indie games exacerbate this, because a guy who would have been an absolute star in a large dev is now working by themselves or with a small team making indie games (who all may have also been stars at a large dev). An AAA behemoth like Ubisoft might have 50 quality people on a team of 1000 because if you are high talent why would you work at Ubisoft?

I'm basically saying flat out there are far more people making video games than people that have the talent to make good video games. Saying top 25% isn't really the best way to put it because there is always a top 25% regardless of the overall pool, but I am using top 25% to simply say high quality, like the equivalent of even simply a competent developer in the 90s or 00s.

And I'm trying to explain that it's not how that works. Most software development team out there in every industry is like that. Let's see you have a team of 10 developers. There's probably 1 "top tier" developer in there. That person is probably a lead or staff level developer. Everyone else is above average or average. If you get rid of all the average people, you're left with something you can barely call a team.

Now let's say you have 5 hundred people studios. You decide to consolidate all the "top tier" devs into 2 fifty people studios and fire everyone else. Do you really think those 2 fifty people studios will be putting out games at the same scope and the same quality as frequently as those 5 hundred people studios?

They won't. A restaurant can't run with a kitchen full of head chefs. You need line cooks. It's the same principle here. You need rank and file developers.

 

[Gamer79]

It seems like there is some bullshit going on with the people in charge of making video games, but I can't pinpoint what the actual problem is.

Clearly, it's not about the scope of the game (Avowed and Hellblade 2) are more "focused" games, yet they took as long to develop as a big, expansive AAA title.


But I have an idea:
Make a game for the PlayStation One with a hard deadline (12-18 months). Then remaster and remake it for the PS5/PS6. (12-18 months) BOOM. Chorizo is a Genius!!

They are already doing that but with just lazy remakes of older games.

 

[ProtoByte]

Less bureaucracy, fewer cooks in the kitchen and of course:

Ban WFH for people on the team where it just doesn't work. Work-life balance is great, but if things don't change, a lot more people in this industry are going to be out of work to balance against anything.

Lmao at this thread. I didn't realise I was posting on NormieGAF. Are you guys seriously whipping out the becuz Gr@f1X excuse? It's got nothing to do with visuals.



Arkham Knight took approximately 3-4 years to run as well as it did on the PS4, with a custom augmented version of UE3. Suicide Squad took more than 7 with UE4, more devs, and much more powerful hardware. Aspects of Arkham Knight are obviously lower res than KTJL. But be honest, AK looks better, has more environmental interaction, deeper gameplay systems, more complex animation systems, etc. Same goes for Gotham Knights

The bloated dev time issue is ENTIRELY organizational and workflow related. Critical thinking exercise here, people: Why would it take coders, game designers, sound engineers, writers, and practically everyone who isn't working on art and visual assets (probably 70-80% of the team) longer because of graphical fidelity with heavy asset re-usage on pre-made engines (literally just UE4 and 5 at this point) with all the support in the world from Epic to boot?

Another critical thinking question: What is the last major game from a major studio that released that blew the doors off graphically? Have you not noticed that we're getting up-rezzed PS4 games at best here?

 

[VideoGameEnjoyer]

Reversing everything that Digital Foundry has done to the hobby. Stop with insane bloat and ‘biggest possible world’.

Style>highest possible IQ that takes ages to make and polish.

 

[T-0800]

Limitations. 100 devs and 3 years. Max on both. Go

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

Start buying and playing more indie and AA based games OP, if you're just buying/playing AAA then you're the problem.

I enjoy heaps of Game Pass games that go on to purchase DLC or the game at a discount later on etc all the time. The list of games my wife, daughter and I have enjoyed that are not development cycles of AAA is endless in the last couple/few years of Game Pass.

 

[lh032]

they could slowdown the "visual" upgrades in their games, but i guess thats not happening.

 

[TheChumpNation]

Where does the bulk of time get spent in game development?

Is writing a major time sink (this is hard to imagine unless you're talking a massive BG3 type game)? Is graphics and presentation? Is it animation quality? Voice acting? I'm genuinely asking as I've no idea.

My impression has always been that making games graphically impressive is what takes the most budget and dev hours. In which case the easy answer is that consumers need to be less entranced by particle effects, ray tracing or whatever the latest rage is. As long as publishers think (probably with some justification) that audience attention is caught more by flashy graphics than anything else, they'll put absurd resources towards those graphics and we'll have to wait longer for sequels to our favourite titles that are often inferior in every way except graphically to predecessors.

If my impression about graphics being the most time and resource intensive part of game development is incorrect, then we need to look elsewhere to see where this time and these resources are being spent, and whether anyone gives a crap about what they're being spent on.

 

[chakadave]

pay actually creative and skilled professionals to make the game and stop bloating the industry with HR and inefficient creative processes.

 

[SkylineRKR]

Reversing everything that Digital Foundry has done to the hobby. Stop with insane bloat and ‘biggest possible world’.

Style>highest possible IQ that takes ages to make and polish.

DF really isn't good. I stopped watching their videos years ago.

Its like 20x zoom looking at some wall textures not being correct. This gets into the mind of gamers, who are going to look for all kinda of graphical issues and fps hiccups and instead forget to enjoy the game. This last week I spent all my gaming time on Tomb Raider 4. Which I beat earlier today. Its not insanely detailed, and I even played quite a bit with retro visuals straight from 1999. The game was fun, challenging and for sure more fun than I had with idk, God of War Ragnarok and Spider man MM?

 

[a multicultural team of v]

And I'm trying to explain that it's not how that works. Most software development team out there in every industry is like that. Let's see you have a team of 10 developers. There's probably 1 "top tier" developer in there. That person is probably a lead or staff level developer. Everyone else is above average or average. If you get rid of all the average people, you're left with something you can barely call a team.

Now let's say you have 5 hundred people studios. You decide to consolidate all the "top tier" devs into 2 fifty people studios and fire everyone else. Do you really think those 2 fifty people studios will be putting out games at the same scope and the same quality as frequently as those 5 hundred people studios?

They won't. A restaurant can't run with a kitchen full of head chefs. You need line cooks. It's the same principle here. You need rank and file developers.

Yeah but the problem is what is average? Average 25 years ago would have been a very competent developer. Average now is someone who probably could barely hobble together a Unity game. Under normal circumstances I would be more inclined to agree with what you are saying, but I just don't think the talent pool is there. In your example the average line cooks aren't dependable and competent line cooks, they are line cooks that never cooked anything without a recipe and a microwave.

That said, disregarding my line of argument I would say that software development is probably one of the few places where I would take a cracked out god-tier programmer over large numbers of average people. if I had to pick between 1 (one) prime John Carmack or 23,000 current Ubisoft employees combined, I would take prime John Carmack without batting an eye.

I dunno I am just extremely disillusioned to the quality of video games currently and I think the issues are structural, in that these devs keep pushing out slop because they flat out don't have the talent to make anything better. They are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at these games, taking years and years and years to make them, have better and more sophisticated tools and resources than ever, yet they are still slop - the only way that happens is if they are genuinely incapable of making anything better.

 

[Punished Miku]

Obsidian solved it in the other thread.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

It's crazy to talk about graphics, AI, and other tech when this is exclusively a human resources problem.

In the Avowed thread, someone was trying to convince me that rebooting a project twice was ok.

No, it's NOT ok.

Hire incompetent people, get incompetence.

 

[archangelmorph]

Production Values and content creation are part of the problem here.

I think if devs want to get more games out in a gen now they need to reuse content more.

Akin to what Insomniac did with Miles Morales.

We could have had a God of War spin off after Ragnarok as well as a H:FW spin off, perhaps with a a different main character.

You can do a lot IMHO with even the same open world with minor tweaks to areas, new enemies, change the main character and give them different abilities and skills, and roll out a completely new story.

With all the spit and polish going into these game worlds to bring them to life it’s such an utter waste to just leave the whole thing on the sidelines and try to scrap everything and start again for a sequel.

There must lots of interesting stories you can tell in the same world.

Hell GaaS titles proved you can make this work well.

 

[Guilty_AI]

drugs and hookers

 

[ReBurn]

They just need to work faster. Simple.

 

[Jesb]

Go back to just hiring people to make a game. Instead of hiring people that has nothing to do with developing the game. Cut off all the fat. Scale back on budgets.

 

[Gamer79]

Go back to just hiring people to make a game. Instead of hiring people that has nothing to do with developing the game. Cut off all the fat. Scale back on budgets.

no doubt DEI and politics plays a role

 

[BouncyFrag]

Backlog. There are amazing games unseen for you to discover. Just look, see, and experience.

 

[REDRZA MWS]

Get rid of DEI and simply hire the most qualified people for the job.

 

[PeteBull]

What I do know is the current model is broken. Games that are nearly 10 years old can keep up and at times look better than newer releases. Games have not gotten better and often times do not look better than they did a decade ago so these insane cost are not justified. Does anyone know of a way to where this issue will get resolved or is this just going to get worse? We are already seeing 5+ years between certain Game releases.

Lemme put it this way, gaming industry is extremly competetive business, u need devs who know what customers want, who listen to their future/potential/current playerbase.
We all are hardcore veteran players on this forum, we know exactly what is needed to be done with many western AAA dev studios, basically this:

And then:

TLDR: What Musk did to twitter employes who were useless, u gotta let them go, those devs(and in some cases, like bungie) whole dev studios are responsible for regression in the industry.

Problem is- u gotta start from the top, only then its possible, twitter would have stayed like it was before, aka heaven for lazy leftists liberal workers who did shit all, if not new onwer who knew exactly how fucked it was and what was needed to fix it- fire slackers, dei hires.

 

[simpatico]

In-person at the office 5 days a week. Dress code. Firing under performers. It all comes down to management. These companies are willing to pay.

 

[squeakywheel]

Not everything needs to be open world. Set your scope early on and stop adding useless shite.

 

[KungFucius]

AI and procedural generation could help reduce development time. We're seeing some studios experiment with AI-driven NPCs, voice acting, and animation. If used properly, it could cut development times significantly.

FFS No! Games are filled with shitty bloat that wasted the dev team's time and wastes the player's time. Unless the AI stuff is good and they don't make what should be a 30 hour game into a 100 hour slog then OK use it.

 

[HRK69]

FFS No! Games are filled with shitty bloat that wasted the dev team's time and wastes the player's time. Unless the AI stuff is good and they don't make what should be a 30 hour game into a 100 hour slog then OK use it.

Nah, I truly believe we’re going to get even bigger games, there’s just no way around it. With AI implementation, larger and more expansive games are practically inevitable.

 

[ProtoByte]

Start buying and playing more indie and AA based games OP, if you're just buying/playing AAA then you're the problem.

Look man, none of us have time to play any old indie game, or minmax the search engine to find "hidden gems". I'm only interested in the best of the best in indies.

And if you haven't noticed, those are taking forever too. 4-5 years if you're lucky, and never-ending early access periods.

Silksong is the cliche example, so how about I blow your mind with this: Playdead (Limbo and Inside) hasn't released a game in NINE YEARS.

• Hades II - coming up to 5 years since Hades 1, and won't be leaving early access until some time in 2026 at this rate
• Jonathan Blow/Thekla Inc. last released a game in 2016
• Hyper Light Breaker stuck in a very poor state of early access after a 2 year delay, now 4 years after Solar Ash

I could go on. There are so many indie studios that put something out that was good/promising that are nowhere to be seen at all now.

 

[Gamer79]

Very true

 

[j0hnnix]

Stop with focus groups and third party consultants that come in and have you change everything that has already been completed to fit certain people, agendas, etc.

Trust your product and put it out there like it was 30 years ago.

 

[Rhazer Fusion]

Stop chasing Hollywood movies and make actual games again.

Make shorter, more linear more structured games that aren’t 100 hours long. Work on AA games as well.

Reduce the scope of games especially when development costs start ballooning out of control due to size and content.

You don’t have to hire Hollywood actors everytime.

Stop with so many bloated open world games.

Reuse assets sometimes if you need to?

The push for raytracing isn’t necessary.

 

[AmuroChan]

1. Reduce bloat in games.
2. Open studios in locations with lower cost of living.
3. Improve efficiency in development process.
4. Promote stability and retention in the studio culture. When there's constant turnover in staff, it makes it more difficult to be efficient.

 

[DeaconOfTheDank]

People give FromSoftware a lot of shit for making the "same game" over the past decade and a half, but can you point to any other studio that matches their quality and volume?

• 2009 - Demon's Souls
• 2011 - Dark Souls
• 2012 - Armored Core V
• 2014 - Dark Souls II
• 2015 - Bloodborne
• 2016 - Dark Souls III
• 2018 - Deracine
• 2019 - Sekiro
• 2022 - Elden Ring
• 2023 - Armored Core VI
• 2024 - Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

You can complain all day about asset re-use, unoptimized engine, last-gen visuals, etc., but their output is nothing short of insanity. They have an engine they're extremely comfortable with, they retain in-house talent, focus on moment-to-moment gameplay, prioritize art direction over graphical fidelity, and they produce games that smartly iterate/build on top of prior titles even when the underlying gameplay is different (Bloodborne vs Sekiro vs Armored Core vs Elden Ring).

How else could they have built something like Elden Ring in the time-frame they did? Shit, it took Nintendo 7 years to develop Breath of the Wild (2017) after Skyward Sword (2011), whereas FromSoftware produced Elden Ring only 3 years after Sekiro and 6 years after Dark Souls III.

 

[Lumpyoatmeal]

It seems the issue is that games just do not come out as fast and frequent. Look at the generations before the PS4/x1 era and you typically see whole trilogies of games that release on one generation. Prime example is look at a game like Uncharted. 3 games on just one system alone! Now it's your lucky to get one game from your favorite franchise per generation. For fuck's sake it has been over 12 years since the last Grand Theft Auto. Half life 3 has been on the side of a mile crate forever. God of War Ragnarok was one of the earliest PS5 titles and was cross generation. I highly doubt we seen another God of War on the PS5. Sony has really shit to bed with their first parties this generation. I would call it by far and away the weakest from a software side. Nintendo and Microsoft are guilty too. Nintendo franchise games are few and far between. It's often 5+ years between Zelda/Mario releases. Microsoft seemed to buy up any third party who was willing to sell and the question is, where in the fuck are the games?
I Know there are a select few who love every game coming out and think it's the best thing since sliced bread but they are in the minority. Software/hardware sales are down because the Quality is shit. Unless you fall into the Madden 97th edition of the same game or Call Of Duty the same old shit, it's rough out there for big releases.

So it's clear this is not sustainable in the long run. Games take too long to develop, cost way too damn much, and one game can sink an entire company. I am smart enough to know that I do not know enough about the in's and out's of game development. What I do know is the current model is broken. Games that are nearly 10 years old can keep up and at times look better than newer releases. Games have not gotten better and often times do not look better than they did a decade ago so these insane cost are not justified. Does anyone know of a way to where this issue will get resolved or is this just going to get worse? We are already seeing 5+ years between certain Game releases.

Development teams right now are not big enough as crazy as that sounds. Once GTA 6 releases the standard for AAA titles will be at one billion dollars.

This is why companies like Valve has opt out of making AAA titles like Half Life 3.

 

[Gamer79]

Development teams right now are not big enough as crazy as that sounds. Once GTA 6 releases the standard for AAA titles will be at one billion dollars.

This is why companies like Valve has opt out of making AAA titles like Half Life 3.

IF that is the case, the industry is doomed to failure. A blind man can see the industry is heading towards some kind of crash or at the least a dramatic rework of how things work. If more staff is needed, that just means that more money is needed. If we continue this path, it will get to the point that even the Largest of development houses will crumble with just one Flop.

It's the main reason why we do not see certain genre's of games or see many unique ideas. Teams are so scared to deviate from the trusted formulas because of financial risk. It's a big reason we are seeing all the lazy remakes because they are taking known successful games and splashing new paint on them. Indies are small teams and are highly inconsistent. Asking them to carry this role is unrealistic. One thing is for certain, if something does not change there will be a major crash.

 

[Lumpyoatmeal]

IF that is the case, the industry is doomed to failure. A blind man can see the industry is heading towards some kind of crash or at the least a dramatic rework of how things work. If more staff is needed, that just means that more money is needed. If we continue this path, it will get to the point that even the Largest of development houses will crumble with just one Flop.

It's the main reason why we do not see certain genre's of games or see many unique ideas. Teams are so scared to deviate from the trusted formulas because of financial risk. It's a big reason we are seeing all the lazy remakes because they are taking known successful games and splashing new paint on them. Indies are small teams and are highly inconsistent. Asking them to carry this role is unrealistic. One thing is for certain, if something does not change there will be a major crash.

If you look at the landscape for videogames this problem is making “good” content for streaming hustlers like Asmongold ect; They are making crazy money off their platform channels taking advantage of retarded ass gamers thinking DEI ect is the problem, straight clockwork.

 

[P:axMagellanic]

They're lazy bastards. And they're soft as fuck.

I'd never be able to get away with half the shit these cunts do in any of my jobs over the years.

Missing deadlines, years pissed up the wall with fuck all to show for it? Are you for real?Absolutely ridiculous mindset they've developed.

 

[Sephimoth]

It's AI.
And someone needs to go DOGE on these gaming companies.

 

[Idleyes]

ray tracing is a good tech to push, but 4k was a mistake, most games ll look great at 1440p in any modern TV on the market.

I have this nagging feeling (probably wrong) that most gamers need glasses just to read, let alone fully appreciate 4K visuals.

 

[Idleyes]

No work at home

Just a feeling budgets will be more efficient and less delays, just a feeling

Anthem & Battlefield V over here giggling.

 

[LimanimaPT]

I'm currently playing Elden Ring and I must say that this game is absolutely insane. The dimension, detail and polish on this game is just crazy. I ask to my self. How is it possible that this game only took 5 years to make with about 300 people? There are games with a scope much smaller, much less polished made by bigger studios that take longer, how can this be possible?
I bet that half of the people in this western studios do shit all day, I bet there are 3 managers for 1 developer and I bet half of this developers time is spent on meetings. I also bet this studios use methodologies like Agile and shit. It's the only explanation I can find.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Roll back the fidelity. The biggest-selling games of all time are GTAV and Minecraft. One is a PS360 port and the other has the polygonal density of something released in the '90s. Breath of the Wild has the performance profile of a PS3 game. Most Roblox games look like upscaled PS2 games.

Graphical fidelity would always hit a sustainability threshold and we passed that as we entered this generation. Time to scale back and focus on art direction, writing, performance and mechanics. Really don't want to spend the rest of the generation playing 900p games at sub-60fps for the sake of slightly more accurate reflections and shadows.

Arkham Knight took approximately 3-4 years to run as well as it did on the PS4, with a custom augmented version of UE3. Suicide Squad took more than 7 with UE4, more devs, and much more powerful hardware. Aspects of Arkham Knight are obviously lower res than KTJL. But be honest, AK looks better, has more environmental interaction, deeper gameplay systems, more complex animation systems, etc. Same goes for Gotham Knights.

Bad comparison. Arkham Knight was a single-player iteration of a series they'd worked on since 2007. SSKTJL was a complete pivot to an online-only, multiplayer live-service looter-shooter, and a shift from a highly customized version of UE3 to an OOTB version of UE4.

 

[ThisIsMyDog]

AI

 

[Shadowstar39]

Make more single player games. Have multiple games per studio. Insomniac used to make ratchet and resistance back to back and release one and then the other. Cod studios had teams ready for different release years. Why isn't this done more?

Split dev teams in half, have them make two games. The teams can have the art department specialize in what is needed at the time and share resources.
This could solve having one studio only focus on one series for 15-20 years. It didn't use to be this way. Devs made multiple games in the past.

 

[Gamer79]

I do not know what the long term solution is but this shit is broken. A franchise game every 5 years or so is ridiculous.

 

[Interfectum]

ChatGPT

 

[CLW]

(1) games NEED to be shorter 12-40 hours MAX

(2) cut the DEAD weight in the studios

 

[DaichiChan]

Ask Nintendo. They doing a pretty solid job so far. We arent ready for 4k Pixel quality games, and Nintendo does the right thing.

 

[LordCBH]

The solution is make lower budget games.

Unfortunately, the general public is so goddamn retarded that they won’t buy those lower budget games because “it don’t got dem graficks tho….”

 

[Gamer79]

I heard Black Myth Wukong was made under a budget well under $100 million dollars. If that were an American team it would of been at least 5x that. There is the problem. I do believe there is too much wasteful spending. Throw the bullshit DEI politics out of gaming and just make a good fucking game. I don't care what you think about issues just make a good fucking game and don't virtue signal your bullshit I may or may not agree with in the game. Wasteful Spending, Focusing on Politic Issues, Gaas, and other issues has put videogames in a shit spot right now. I envy the people who are loving this shit. It's like the dude from the Matrix said, "Ignorance is bliss."

There are studios that do seem to cater to their fans. From Software, Insomniac, Nintendo. The main issue is there are far too few of those companies these days. Think of why we haven't had a Main Stream Racing game outside of Forza or Gran Turismo, or why they don't make boxing games or <insert any game they no longer make> It's all about the financial cost being too high and the risk not worth the reward. Back in say the 360/PS3 era and before, a company could take a risk and make a unique Idea and it would work. No fucking way you get an orignal IP like ICO, Project Gothem, Eternal Darkness, or <insert any unique Ip in there> It comes down to the cost being too high so publishers want to stick to the tride and true working formula. As I stated earlier, Game devleopment has inflated to the point where one bag game can sink a mid tier development house. ON this trend it will get to the point that one non seller could sink even the biggest development houses if things do not change.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

Look man, none of us have time to play any old indie game, or minmax the search engine to find "hidden gems". I'm only interested in the best of the best in indies.

And if you haven't noticed, those are taking forever too. 4-5 years if you're lucky, and never-ending early access periods.

Silksong is the cliche example, so how about I blow your mind with this: Playdead (Limbo and Inside) hasn't released a game in NINE YEARS.

• Hades II - coming up to 5 years since Hades 1, and won't be leaving early access until some time in 2026 at this rate
• Jonathan Blow/Thekla Inc. last released a game in 2016
• Hyper Light Breaker stuck in a very poor state of early access after a 2 year delay, now 4 years after Solar Ash

I could go on. There are so many indie studios that put something out that was good/promising that are nowhere to be seen at all now.

Fair comment mate.

There are some like Balatro only 1.5 years and It Takes Two @ 3 years but I agree with your overall statement.

This is where AI tools are going to speed things up and keep the quality hopefully, areas like -

• Conceptualisation
• Asset sourcing, designing, editing, iterating
• Coding overhead
• Rendering e.g. AI upscaling, framerates
• Optimisation
• Porting/compatibility
• Localisation
• Voice acting sourcing, creation, iterating
• Automated modelling
• NPC behaviours

Many of these technologies are existing and useful for dev pipelines now. It's likely another dev cycle or two away from heavily reducing game dev times from start to finish though.