Graphical fidelity is only part of the reason that game budgets have swelled to hundreds of millions of dollars

From Jason Schreier. “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that they can continue to get work done.

  • missingno@fedia.io
    1·
    2 days ago

    To me, what I dislike the most about the direction the industry is going is that consolidating more resources into fewer megagames means there’s less room for experimental side projects and spinoffs. I especially miss all the kinds of B-games that used to go straight to handheld. Of course part of the reason they disappeared because we don’t have handhelds to put them on, but I think that half the reason handhelds died was because publishers weren’t going to make handheld games for much longer anyway.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      As games keep getting easier and easier to make. Single or small team indie developers can take on doing those kind of games.

      • missingno@fedia.io
        1·
        7 hours ago

        Of course there’s still a lot of cool stuff coming from indies, but there’s a wide spectrum between indie with no budget and AAAA with $10 trillion budget. We’re losing everything that was once in between.

        Also, spinoffs. I do like seeing alternate takes on IPs and characters I like, but those are rare now because all the resources go into developing one main project. Like I’ve always wondered, if Splatoon had debuted a generation earlier, what kind of DS companion piece would have accompanied it?