Video Games Can't Afford to Look This Good
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Often I look at modern games, and feel like I'd happily trade marginally worse graphics for a game that runs well on my mid-range PC. I tried the Dead Space remake, for example, and it ran so bad on my PC that I immediately uninstalled it and replayed the original, and the difference in quality wasn't huge, despite the fact the original ran better on a PC that has about 1/20th the computing resources.
I see the graphical spectacle of many new games similar to 3D movies. They catch your attention initially, but it quickly fades into the background. What keeps you playing and makes for an enjoyable experience are the mechanics, characters, and story. Beautiful themes and appropriate sounds really help with immersion. None of this requires hundreds of thousands of hours from hundreds of artists. What it does require is creativity and artistry.
The reason these AAA games fail is because they are bland, repetitive, uninspired gruel. With such large budgets they are driven to make their games as low risk and widely palatable as possible, which paints them into a corner of median, average, well-trodden ground. The potential upside of a break out classic isn't orders of magnitude above the average, but the downside could be a total loss.
I don't know the formal name, but this is an extremely common pattern of leadership failure and resource mis-allocation. It's just so easy to follow a sounds-good metric down an easy-at-first trail...which leads out into the desert.
Nothing is "fit to print" for the NYT unless it is interesting to people over 50 which is one reason why the NYT bungles youth culture (they sure did for the Boomers)
The "Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite." is interesting because:
1. The youngest of those games is just 7 years old, the same as his son
2. Story is absent in these games
3. Microtransactions
One big problem the game industry has is that video games have a very long playable life. For instance there are people who have 10,000 hours into Disgaea. I went to Gamestop and bought Rise of the Tomb Raider and Ryse: Son of Rome for $5 total. I'll skip the $60 new game because I know it will go on sale and someday I will get it for somewhere between $40 and $4. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is perfectly playable today and I think it's tragic that they gave up on the VR remake. If I was going to buy a game at launch (say a Type/Moon game) it would because of fanaticism for the brand which motivates studios to pump out more Hyperdimension Neptunia games and other sequels.
One answer is the "service game" like League of Legends which wants to retain you as a player forever. It is no longer a project and it retains developers indefinitely and thus the studio cannot develop a series of new games (even counting sequels.) That list of games is a example of the sort of business models that he'd like to force onto people, and in fact, that mobile gaming has to the point where mobile gaming dwarfs PC and console in revenue.
Then if it is javascript-walled, same but you must have a javascript web engine to access the content. There are web engines without javascript (not just disabled, there is zero javascript engine), namely noscript/basic (x)html.