This could easily apply to video games as well. I'm far from convinced you need 2 hours worth of endgame credits spanning multiple layers of personnel to create Assassins Creed: Five O'Clock Shadow of Tranny.
Many a year ago the Wii proved games don’t need super graphics to sell and that’s pretty much all AAA games seem to have. Their animations are trash though.
Recently I heard someone put it like this: "Companies mistake fidelity for quality."
Endlessly upping the polygon count doesn't mean anything when you have bad design or art direction. I'd say crappy animations also fall into that same vein.
In fact, I think that this is contributing to an observation I've had for a while now: Much of the games industry is trying to focus itself on presentability over other things to justify large budgets.
It may be an outgrowth of the growth vs profit mindset that plagues most of the corporate world. They think if they just pour more and more money into it then it'll get bigger and bigger returns on investment. Perhaps we've just hit the point where the industry is mature and needs to accept being profitable rather than endless expansion that isn't remotely realistic. This is just that reality finally catching up with them.
Turns out a modest budget to make a good game gets better returns, but that's not what business types want to hear because it requires them to invest in quality and accept that there's an upper bound on how much money they can make.
Wii games, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Among Us, Roblox, Valheim -- there are so many examples of games with "poor" graphics that make hundreds of millions or even billions.
To me, members of a dev team should be given 20 minutes to fire up a game they worked on and point to something they contributed - some menu UI they designed, a voice line they scripted, a camera angle they programmed, a texture or model they created etc.
If they can't do that, they are surplus to requirement. Like all the jeets on AAA titles.
I wonder how people will look back at this in a hundred years. The woke insanity got so far that they cast a very dark-skinned woman as a character from a Germanic folk tale whose very appellation refers to how white she is.
I guess it depends on whether things will continue spiraling.
I 100% agree. Too many movies, TV shows and video games have way too much money dumped in for basically no reason. Not everything needs to have a Star Wars budget.
Apparently the movie Godzilla Minus One had a less-than-$15-million budget because the visual effects workers in Japan there were "overworked and underpaid" and they were "exploited" by "capitalism" with slave driver whips and such.
This could easily apply to video games as well. I'm far from convinced you need 2 hours worth of endgame credits spanning multiple layers of personnel to create Assassins Creed: Five O'Clock Shadow of Tranny.
Many a year ago the Wii proved games don’t need super graphics to sell and that’s pretty much all AAA games seem to have. Their animations are trash though.
Recently I heard someone put it like this: "Companies mistake fidelity for quality."
Endlessly upping the polygon count doesn't mean anything when you have bad design or art direction. I'd say crappy animations also fall into that same vein.
I've been saying this since the early '00s about the 4th gen consoles: the hardware is capable of putting your vision on the screen.
If what appears on the screen sucks, it's because either your art direction sucks or your technical direction sucks.
In fact, I think that this is contributing to an observation I've had for a while now: Much of the games industry is trying to focus itself on presentability over other things to justify large budgets.
It may be an outgrowth of the growth vs profit mindset that plagues most of the corporate world. They think if they just pour more and more money into it then it'll get bigger and bigger returns on investment. Perhaps we've just hit the point where the industry is mature and needs to accept being profitable rather than endless expansion that isn't remotely realistic. This is just that reality finally catching up with them.
Turns out a modest budget to make a good game gets better returns, but that's not what business types want to hear because it requires them to invest in quality and accept that there's an upper bound on how much money they can make.
If infinite growth is required then the business isn't viable to begin with.
Wii games, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Among Us, Roblox, Valheim -- there are so many examples of games with "poor" graphics that make hundreds of millions or even billions.
To me, members of a dev team should be given 20 minutes to fire up a game they worked on and point to something they contributed - some menu UI they designed, a voice line they scripted, a camera angle they programmed, a texture or model they created etc.
If they can't do that, they are surplus to requirement. Like all the jeets on AAA titles.
I wonder how people will look back at this in a hundred years. The woke insanity got so far that they cast a very dark-skinned woman as a character from a Germanic folk tale whose very appellation refers to how white she is.
I guess it depends on whether things will continue spiraling.
At the rate things are going in a hundred years people will think Germans were always dark skinned Africans and Arabs and thus think nothing of it.
I 100% agree. Too many movies, TV shows and video games have way too much money dumped in for basically no reason. Not everything needs to have a Star Wars budget.
Apparently the movie Godzilla Minus One had a less-than-$15-million budget because the visual effects workers in Japan there were "overworked and underpaid" and they were "exploited" by "capitalism" with slave driver whips and such.