It feels like so much of the games industry is a weird circle jerk. Big game companies feel this weird pressure to make giant games that have 3TB of textures because they’re building everything to be cut into a trailer that looks as flashy as a big blockbuster film, requiring hardware no one can afford. Meanwhile, they add 13 layers of organizational overhead, so no one can do anything on their own because the writing team have to have a meeting with the texture art team and the modelling team and the voice acting and SFX team just so they can even ask the question of ‘How much time will it take to add this NPC in this area and will it justify that much extra artist time/pay by selling another X units?’ much less actually make a good estimate as to the answer. Then you have players, a bunch of whom somehow still get suckered in by those trailers but then spend the next year complaining how much the AAA game sucks but unable to play anything else because of network effect lock in, only to do it all again the next time they see another flashy trailer.
Nobody learns the lesson. Everything just repeats until it breaks down as is replaced with the next generation of misery.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 day ago
It feels like so much of the games industry is a weird circle jerk. Big game companies feel this weird pressure to make giant games that have 3TB of textures because they’re building everything to be cut into a trailer that looks as flashy as a big blockbuster film, requiring hardware no one can afford. Meanwhile, they add 13 layers of organizational overhead, so no one can do anything on their own because the writing team have to have a meeting with the texture art team and the modelling team and the voice acting and SFX team just so they can even ask the question of ‘How much time will it take to add this NPC in this area and will it justify that much extra artist time/pay by selling another X units?’ much less actually make a good estimate as to the answer. Then you have players, a bunch of whom somehow still get suckered in by those trailers but then spend the next year complaining how much the AAA game sucks but unable to play anything else because of network effect lock in, only to do it all again the next time they see another flashy trailer. Nobody learns the lesson. Everything just repeats until it breaks down as is replaced with the next generation of misery.