Last week, my favoured gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video games industry. His answer was not what I expected.
“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before … It’s time for a real hard reset on the business model, on what it is to be a video game,” he said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference’. We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling.”
This surprised me because it seems very obvious, but it’s still not often said by games industry executives, who rely on the enticing promise of technological advancement to drum up investment and hype. If we’re now freely admitting that we’ve gone as far we sensibly can with console power, that does represent a major step-change in how the games industry does business.
So where should the industry go now?
Where should the industry go?
Maybe focus more on developing good games that are more than just good graphics. A shit game will still be a shit game at 4k and 120fps. A good game doesn’t necessarily need all that to be good. Game developers seem to have lost sight of doing more with less.
The industry has corrupted the mindset of their consumer base with this capitalist driven myth that you need to buy more stuff to be happy. The kids out there trolling about shit graphics and the PCMRs complaining about the lower console specs are gobbling it up. Now that one company is seeing diminishing returns, they’re considering pulling back on that growth mantra. Maybe they’ll start encouraging game development that doesn’t waste so many computing resources for schlocky derivative lazy content. I’m sure they’ll find some other way to convince us that in order to keep gaming, we’ll need to keep buying.
I think game asset quality is prioritized for big studio games since asset creation can easily scale across many artists and pretty assets look great in trailers to sell the game.
Right, but games studios have a massive budget problem. The cost of developing the games is making every one a must-succeed title. Developing the assets scales, but so does the cost and I expect that’s a major driver of the budget.
Budgets need to come down and assets are probably the area that will get hit hardest if they want to preserve gameplay.