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Mickael Godard's avatar

Very interesting to read.

Here are a few things that came to my mind while reading:

"In a word: bytes. The relentless expansion of game file sizes correlates directly with budget inflation. Every additional gigabyte demands thousands of artist-hours creating higher-resolution textures, more elaborate environments, and increasingly photorealistic character models. Yet the efficiency gains from development tools have plateaued since the widespread adoption of engines like Unreal and Unity, leaving studios manually crafting ever-larger experiences without corresponding productivity improvements."

I do agree that AAA with no live strategy and related monetization have probably maxed out their audience and the revenue per user. The arms race of being bigger/shinier can't result in a victory for anyone.

But I am a bit doubtful here at making it the first argument parameter to explain the situation.

First, Unreal and Unity are rarely used for projects with budgets of that size. It's mainly engines developed internally. But it's true they are more used for large projects than before. Also, because when you invest 200M on a project, you don't want to leave 15% royalty to Epic or Unity. I would actually say that many of the internal engines have mainly evolved from a pipeline point of view (toolset) rather than a runtime point of view. Houdini becoming a core skill for many technical artists on this kind of pipeline would be an example. Same for Allegorithmic tools in the last decade.

But anyway, I don't think that's where the money goes. The complexity of the feature set (opposed to the content) has been growing exponentially for AAA and live service games. Finding the right direction and coordinating the efforts for its execution, being able to entangle the complexity of the dependencies, keeping the build stable and usable despite having hundreds of people working on it, has skyrocketed way more than the asset creation problem. It created a lot of waste that are insanely hard to get rid of.

The other complexity is that there are more projects of 200M USD ongoing than teams able to handle this kind of challenge. Also, the size of the investment causes other problems: they became a high focus point that the corporate exec layer will keep under high scrutiny, messing with it everytime a new trend emerges (or seems to emerge to be forgotten 3 months later depending on whatever got successful) which will create even more wastes overall.

I may be wrong though, I don't have data to prove what I say, just experience of what i am seeing and hearing. That doesn't make it a very reliable truth.

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James Francis's avatar

"AAA game development has entered a danger zone where content bloat, not innovation, drives costs to unprecedented heights."

Great point, especially the view on game sizes. Personally, I blame 4K assets. But that's just me.

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