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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

I get the impression that the future of gaming is not going to be massive AAA titles. They will start to not be economically viable very soon as we get to a max saturation of peoples time playing video games. With the over-abundance of good and "good enough" titles that took 1/100th of the time and money to create what sense does it make to have a 200 million dollar project?

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There are game types that just aren't possible without massive budgets. Huge open world games in particular can't be made without a large team of content creators[1]. For games like Red Dead Redemption, Breath of the Wild, etc... there isn't anything close to comparable coming out of a small studio anytime in the near future.

Even CD Projekt Red, which is based in a low cost of living country spent $81 million developing The Witcher III. A small studio with a $2 million budget has absolutely no chance of making something that players who expect The Witcher III will think is good enough.

And as technology (and budgets) progress, gamers expect more. More art, more story, more quests. The kind of content that we are nowhere near auto-generating.

1. I shouldn't say can't be made--can't be made up to the standards players expect. No Man's Sky and other games have tried, but procedural generation just doesn't come close to matching the quality and detail of more hand crafted open worlds.

I would like to mention Avorion. Its sandbox space game developed by two guys with heavy emphasis on user-created content and procedural generation that I've bought on Steam sale two years ago for 7EUR and devs are still updating it adding new features and fixing issues:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/

Its considerably small and limited in scope, yet game progression feels rewarding enough that some people (me included) have clocked hundreds of hours doing it.

This is the kind of game I feel we need more of. Small games focused on limited number of features, continously improving those features.

I don't mean to suggest that it's not possible for indie studios to make great games by limiting scope--clearly it is, and I'm working on one myself. Just that we have to remember that the key is that they are limiting the scope. There will always be a place in the market for games on a grander scale.

For the same reason it still makes sense to make very expensive movies even though anybody can invest a few grand into good equipment and make their own.

You should study how markets work. Sadly customers are not the well educated, disciplined people we want them to be. Especially for entertainment they are often exhausted office workers who just want to relax in the evening. They really need some relaxation and some escape from reality. And they pay for it not as a political choice but like VAT, something they can't avoid. They are the slaves of whoever produces the best solution for their relaxation.

So the power comes not from the customers but from the investors. Because investors will bring money for developing these products and they will do so with the very intention to influence the market to their own advantage. And these people want a more and more centralized monopoly around their source of income.

That's why companies like Blizzard get worse and worse, they don't care if they lose their current player base. They can gain another and make their investors more happy with that.

That's why a company like EA exists for so long and is so successful.

The market is not getting better but worse. The more easier to use and open worldy and better graphics the AAA titles get the harder it becomes to find players and investing for your indie titles. Probably we will also see that regulation will set in more and more, creating real legal requirements to sell games.

Indie games will always exist. Like indie movies, and indie music. But they will make less and less money, get less and less actual funding, and become more and more a personal hobby and art form.

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