I don't know why this happens but it seems to occur again and again in gaming with indie studios that get acquired.
A single character model can have more polygons then a whole game back in the day. The textures are also way more detailed, animations are more fluid/realistic, etc.
This is why a lot of effort is being put into helping developers to make content faster with things like automatically generating large parts of levels/worlds (basically a developer puts in the important parts manually and some system fills in the rest) and automatically generating and animating humanoid models (MetaHuman), etc.
For example here is nice video about using MetaHuman with basically just a phone for face capture as input https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72
UE5 procedural generation stuff https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435
I mean… if this is the case, how did Vampire Survivors become a huge hit and win multiple game of the year awards, and result in countless clones?
Even if we have brain-interface full immersion virtual reality, you can still have fun throwing cards into a hat. In fact you will prefer it.
Games are like food rather than cars. In food, high quality food doesn't really push out low quality food. Even a billionaire will want a grilled cheese sandwich sometime. While in cars, you can say that in general people would like the more expensive cars rather than cheaper ones.
To me this puts a hard limit on upside of quality for games. It doesn't matter how many thousands of hours of dialogue you have voiced and motion captured if a vampire survivors could always eat your lunch.
This is very different to something like Call of Duty, Diablo, The Last of Us, etc where you put a lot more money into the game and if you actually make a good game (and fund a large marketing budget) it will most likely sell well. Same recipe works for Disney and other large movie studios.
Basically if you went to watch the next Marvel movie and you were greeted with $50 000 budged indie movie special effects and the no big name cast it gets you would you be a satisfied customer? (and you were expecting Marvel movie special effects and big star actors)
And something like Call of Duty makes more money every month then Vampire Survivors has made in the ~1 year it has existed.
This is nonsense. Very few gamers actually care about how many polygons make up each tree and that some texture in the background is 10mb compressed. Meanwhile the actual product of video games from AAA companies has stagnated immensely. You can make your game ugly as sin, and if it's actually fun, people will love it. Every indie darling is an explicit disproving of this claim. We have Minecraft, factorio, cruelty squad which is entirely built around being horrible to look at but fun to play, an entire genre of "old" looking games that don't actually look old. There's even an entire world of games that look good with assets that you can buy on an open market for a few dollars each.
* The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products.
* You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.
* Google is still mostly search
* Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception with AWS, but that was charcoal[0])
* Meta is still mostly facebook (unique products were acquired)
etc.
0 - https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
What? I would express the opposite of this sentiment. Amazon is mostly AWS. Their online store's profit pales in comparison to AWS.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-ama...
> Amazon overall generated $24.8 billion in operating profits in 2021, and AWS was responsible for $18.5 billion (or 74%) of it. Basically, a business segment that contributes 14% of overall revenue is generating roughly three-quarters of Amazon's total operating profits.
https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
It was developed by a small independent team within Blizzard who iterated like crazy and created prototypes with Adobe Flash. At one point they transferred basically the entire team to work on finishing StarCraft 2 temporarily and left the two principal game designers to continue iterating for 10 months.
Hearthstone ended up being a smash hit and their first properly new game since they released World of Warcraft. All because they gave a small creative team the freedom to explore those ideas.
The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do approach.
Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible and process heavy nature.
The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1] in the original StarCraft wouldn't really be an issue today. Teams are operating in a very different way.
[1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...