It’s not necessarily even more expensive to develop, it just impossible to do with the management techniques brought in recent years. Techniques brought in with the intention of streamlining personnel management and to make lay offs easier.
It’s not necessarily even more expensive to develop, it just impossible to do with the management techniques brought in recent years. Techniques brought in with the intention of streamlining personnel management and to make lay offs easier.
MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 day ago
It’s added complexity, which costs effort and thus money. The lack of established teams of course does not help
samc@feddit.uk 1 day ago
But you could also make the same argument about graphical fidelity, which has been pushed further and further for decades, greatly swelling the cost of production
MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 day ago
Because it is an easy metric and looks good in trailers. Indie games prove again and again, that good games come from good gameplay and not from photo realistic graphics
samc@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I agree, but my point was that cost isn’t a sufficient explanation.
I think I particularly agree with @megopie@beehaw.org: one reason we see photo-realism instead of more stylised graphics is that it is more generic, and thus less dependent on a specific team.
The more artistic/creative your work, the less interchangeable your workers are.
megopie@beehaw.org 1 day ago
It’s a question of longer development time with smaller teams, or short timelines with big teams. A small team working on content in series is more cohesive, but, requires a longer timeline. A big team can do a lot in a short time by making content in parallel, but this necessitates that content be siloed to prevent needing constant revision. A few long quest lines with lots of outcomes, or a bunch independent quests with simple outcomes.
A small team working longer will cost the same as a big team working shorter (generally speaking). But the priority is short timelines, for the sake of chasing trends and packing the latest greatest tech in. This same kind of priority, trend chasing and insisting on the latest and greatest tech, also leads to spectacular failures of long timeline games, like “black flag” or “duke nukem forever “, but the issue there is not the long timeline, but the constant changes in priority to chase trends.