it’s massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic’d to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or a couple of photorealistic guys punching each other.
the actual cost of making games is now almost completely decoupled from their graphical fidelity and that’s a good thing. every task in game dev takes less time than it ever took. everything is cheaper to do.
so when you see a big company grind their workers into paste forcing them to deliver more and more on tighter and tighter schedules, please be aware that it has nothing to do with graphics or hardware or gamers’ demands for anything, and everything to do with the capitalist thinking that says: oh, you can work twice as fast now? i will give you half the time
there’s been a shift from better hardware directly meaning “better graphics” to it meaning “devs can make a wider range of stuff more quickly using systems/workflows/techniques that weren’t previously feasible”, which to players (or even devs not using the stuff) looks the same as nothing changing.
so you’re like, “this looks like a game from 10 years ago! or near enough! why’s it need a 10 years newer computer!” because being able to target that higher spec meant we could waste less time, work more iteratively, experiment more and make better stuff. we can be more expressive because we’re less limited by process. that doesn’t even mean you’re going to like the output more, but it does mean it’s less compromised and closer to what the author wanted to make. unless the boss is a prick
games all want an SSD now, including games that don’t appear to be doing anything so very much wilder than was happening in 2009, but the SSD is letting us do that stuff in less time. like development time. the cleverer ways we were making it work back then took time, and forced premature commitments, and limited what we were able to do. invisible compromises nobody ever found out about were getting made constantly. remember how thief 3 had all its levels awkwardly split into chunks so it could run on the xbox? that’s just an unusually visible compromise. it’s surrounded by worse ones you’ll never hear about
tech people have been chasing “dynamic global illumination” for years, and now it’s here, and players don’t care, because we had many ways to make stuff be fine without it. but it’s expanding vastly the range of stuff you can feasibly do as a dev. think of the lighting in Mirror’s Edge that everyone loves: it took many hours to bake every time they wanted to see it, then you’d make a tweak and have to bake all over again, so you just didn’t iterate on your lighting all that much, it wasn’t practical. now we can get those same results 60 times a second, but you need better hardware. but you’re making better art because you don’t have to wait ages every time you want to try something.
this is the same issue we always have in trying to convey the value of good level design and narrative tools: players (or anyone but the author directly benefiting) don’t see the value. but the value is in everything: you make different, differently interesting stuff, because of the better tools.
every time i have the job of advocating for writers to have better tools (i make this my job everywhere i go) someone insists it’s pointless because there are words in the game already. some people just cannot be convinced there’s a benefit to a thing unless you can jump into a parallel universe to show them exactly what the result would have been without it
and another thing: when you hear about a game costing bazillions of dollars to make? that’s not how much it costs. that’s how much they’ve blown on it on account of their own mismanagement. it’s a completely different situation if you don’t have some rich goober at the top fucking everyone around
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
Idk about the rest but it’s true that those new games expecting you to play in 480p upscaled definitely have the “worse graphics” part covered
nothing does that
not yet. not until I complete… the device [mad gamedev cackling]
I’m not sure which part of my joke wasn’t true, aren’t DLSS/FSR considered upscaling? Or just that they don’t look worse? (of course they don’t, I’m still a weirdo who doesn’t like those weird artifacts noone cares about)
Anyways from what I’ve seen for recent big games, DLSS/FSR (and frame generation) are the default settings on consoles, and kinda expected on PC too?
Playing Aveum recently, without it it seemed like a game that should have run way smoother, exactly like you describred above, so I’m guessing making stuff with DLSS etc. in mind does save efforts the same way making games for SSDs did?
(and I know there are also a bunch of UE5 stuff that also makes devs’ life easier at a performance cost but the whole thing is a balance right)
I just meant that 480 is a lot lower than anyone expects to get away with upscaling from. Cool upscaling technologies are a good thing imo, it is basically free and only looks bad if you do go absurdly low. Spiderman gets 60fps on Steam Deck now.
I don’t want to speak for Joe here but it feels like this post is in conversation with this thread, and I think multiple things are simultaneously true here:
- Graphics technology has plateaued, ie increases in the visual quality and aesthetic appeal of games are no longer driven primarily by new technology. And thank goodness for that! It was killing us.
- Hardware will continue to get more powerful because, as Joe says, more horsepower and capacity give devs more freedom to iterate, more headroom to be “inefficient” in the particular ways that get us good creative results quicker and less painfully. (That said, I am in favor of the console hardware generation rat race ending; console generations are no longer about expanding the creative medium of games, they are about marketing and tribalism and exclusion, and they have disastrous environmental footprints.)
- We are living in the shadow of the AAA game industry’s decades-running ideological project I call the aestheticization of capital, the careful cultivation of an ideal consumer (yes it’s a gross word and yes that’s why i’m using it here) that perceives and responds primarily to the deployment of capital in games. The companies with the most money would prefer to cut off 99% of their competition by gating success on who can spend the most money on a game. We see this not just in gamer dudes online pissing on any game that doesn’t bring Last Of Us 2 production values, but in the incessant whining about random indie game prices on steam forums: with “value for money” as the quanta, the thing of highest importance is how expensive a game looks.
- But because hardware is no longer the primary driver of how expensive a game can look, the capitalists running big game productions have doubled down on the now-antiquated conventional (bad then, bad now) wisdom of the 90s and 00s: throw more people at it! Crunch them til they drop! Work harder, not smarter! Throw out perfectly good tools for worse, newer tools that support the current hotness! Rely on the inexperienced but exploitable labor of young people, so nobody ever learns to expect any better! etc.
- And yet at the same time, the capitalists want to keep telling the same story they’ve been telling for decades, that it’s simply the power of the PS5 that makes the billion dollar game look so good, don’t worry about those labor relations happening under the hood to get that billion dollars on screen.
- It is natural to look at all this and see straight through the artifice, and conclude that the technology drive is what’s behind it all, and if we stopped that dead in its tracks, things would start to improve. But I think it’s critical to understand the relationships between technology and capital here. Over the 80s and 90s and 00s, the capitalists built up all these narratives to link “the concept of technological advancement” with all the ways the creative space of games was expanding during that period, in the minds of their customers, simply because that was the most effective world view for selling them new hardware every 5 years. But in the 2010s and today, that narrative has frayed, and we’re seeing the more fundamental ideas at play here – capital, labor, creative control, the shaping of mass perceptions of value – more clearly. This increasingly manifests as crisis, and so much in the past 5+ years – the consolidation, the layoffs, the creeping conservatism, the victories and setbacks of labor power – spins out of that.
So I think we need a deeper consciousness around games and technology and capital. The old narratives are crumbling, but they’re holding on very strong. In reality, we know what makes games better, what allows more people to make games, what is better for the creative medium of games – what nourishes humanity, the most, about games. I don’t think stopping the clock of technological advancement at 1995, 2005, or today gets us any closer to that. I think we need more equitable systems of labor, more open technology and platforms, a greater diversity of tools, a greater diversity of voices, and way way more noncommercial work (entrepreneurship in 2024 is the Wile E Coyote tunnel of social mobility). “Tech == Progress” is just one of many illusions we must tear down to get to that better world.
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