But it can still happen. The new Robocop game is a AA game, made by people that love the franchise, looks really good, and it was a decent seller along with being a great game.
I think the Switch 2 being basically a PS4 is gonna help since a majority of people will be fine with graphics either looking a generation behind/heavy stylized. Hell the next "retro" wave is probably going to look like a PS1/early PS2 game with modern controls and features.
The short answer is no. You can't remedy it, not in a way that would satisfy anyone at least.
You can see what happens when someone (in this case the publishers) tries to push for the absolute minimum price tag (~20 bucks per game) with devolver/playism games. Instead of just curtailing the budget slightly, you end up with games that obviously received nothing from the publishing arm, an endless pile of minimalist roguelite deck builders.
Everything needs a hard reset and all costs forcefully recalculated for the game industry to change course.
AAA(A) game development budgets are ballooning because you have a bunch of industry midwits trying to justify their salary. Dumping everything into writing, visuals, music, consultancy, monetization, office politics, ect...
You just know the playtester asking where's the gameplay gets told smugly "what's a gameplay???".
You forgot the tourism on company dime. Capcom send entire teams across the southern US to 3d scan objects to put in RE7. It's not difficult to model a vase and put on some basic texture but they go and scan them for some reason instead. Almost every AAA dev does it now and it's not even historic objects they want, it's every day garbage you can easily find pictures of online and recreate in Blender.
I can see that working though. Supposedly, the guy who did the music for Streets of Rage 2 toured Europe visiting trendy clubs to get the style of music down. Metropolis Street Racer took photos of major cities (before google street view was a thing) to get an accurate recreation of those cities. Though I can also see it being bloat.
that's not how the industry works tho, you'll always get our undertales and stardew valleys. all that's imploding is AAAA goyslop for being unsustainable and a corporate product without a customer base.
The way I took it to mean is that there's no floor for indies to bridge that gap. We'll never have another Doom where an indie team was making cutting edge graphics, or a situation where someone goes from indie game to AA to AAA without a Palworld level hit, because the gap between indie and AA is too large.
Smash Bros if I can remember correctly was literally a tech demo of them messing around with a bunch of characters before they fully flushed the game out they never thought it'd be as big as it was going to be.
I mean, tell me when he's telling lies. There is more browns, LGBTQoids and histrionic women everywhere now and everywhere they go they bring the whole medium down with them. Which of these are you?
Smash Bros if I can remember correctly was literally a tech demo of them messing around with a bunch of characters before they fully flushed the game out they never thought it'd be as big as it was going to be.
Super Smash Bros. was backed by a large company on a system that had literally nothing else going for it. Remember, after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time there wasn't much for the system, and the other games that were planned for the system (the 64DD, Mother 3, Twelve Tales: Conker 64) were all delayed.
I can see that working though. Supposedly, the guy who did the music for Streets of Rage 2 toured Europe visiting trendy clubs to get the style of music down. Metropolis Street Racer took photos of major cities (before google street view was a thing) to get an accurate recreation of those cities. Though I can also see it being bloat.
The biggest issue would be if it meaningfully enhances the game. The ultimate example of that would be Shenmue. Researching meteorological records of 1986 Yokosuka to create weather and day-and-night cycles (for instance) is neat but has diminishing returns. There was a lot that went into Shenmue but none of it really worked in its favor, because fiddling with autistic detail eats up the budget.
Besides, I find it unlikely that in the case of Grand Theft Auto VI that sending a few people down to Miami-Ft. Lauderdale to do some research is a tiny part of the budget. Pretty sure that the licensed radio station music is enormously expensive in comparison.
Swery, who did Deadly Premonition, visited some small American towns to get the feel down right if I recall. I think supposedly it's where the Sinner's Sandwich came from?
Indie tools are getting better and better all the time. There will always be a gap between indie and Max-A games, but I don’t think any style or level of quality is doomed to be stuck in that gap. It moves over time.
no one knows how to run a small indy studio as an investment vehicle, and
no one knows how to get around the CRA bullshit that mandates hiring infinity niggers, fags, dykes, troons, libtards, single moms, etc or else big daddy govt will sue you into oblivion.
For the cost of one AAA game, a studio can make several hundred other games that for example use 2D tilesets & sprite sheets, or which occur in a foggy, dark, or underwater environment which doesn't need 8k textures rendered beyond at most 50 feet. Tilesets and spritesheets are at most a few weeks worth of effort for an artist, you don't need a huge budget and thousands of staff.
If all of your staff have multiple skills in coding, bug testing, 2D art, 3D art, sound effects, music, and so on then you can radically reduce the budget needed. All it would take is one game to be a hit every few years and you can pay a staff of a dozen people indefinitely. If the job is 100% work from home, then you don't need to pay for an office and all the maintenance and personnel costs that entails. And if you have less than 15 people, then the only parts of the Civil Rights Act that apply to you are equal pay between men and women; don't pay women less because they are women, essentially - no one cares if men are paid less.
Work from home as a perk is worth anywhere from $5,000 a year to $300,000, depending on where you live. If you're a software engineering in San Francisco or New York, then the maximum is what you pay just to live in those cities, avoid the diversity, accident risk, and the minimum to get your kids into a school where a tranny won't molest them. If you live in Nebraska, then the minimum is the cost of wear and tear on your car, insurance, accident risk, getting lunch, time spent driving, and so on.
If you have a small team where it's easy to keep track of who is being productive just by looking at git commits, art drawn, 3D models made, words of text written, and goals met, then 100% remote is a win for the business and for the workers. At this scale it's easy to do all of that with off-the-shelf open source software. So you don't need management, which is a cost center. I should restate that for emphasis.
Management is a cost center.
Managers are completely fucking worthless, they exist only to restructure a business so they can extract money and job security from the businesses they run. Do not every hire someone with an MBA, as it is a certificate proving that they are nigger cattle subhumans who belong in cattle cars.
And you don't have to be politically correct at all since you can hire all your cronies from modding/romhacking sites, who learned how to do all that shit on existing games for fun. So you don't need to do the interviewing and hiring bullshit: just find a modder who you get along with, and who won't rat you out for being a Trump chud shitlord. That removes another cost center: HR, hiring, and retention.
The point of all this is to make games that have the broadest possible appeal, similar to how indy film studios and auteurs who learned the trade in the 1970s did it.
You want to make middlebrow fare: stuff that is a bit low brow, and a bit high brow. A film like Alien is middlebrow, because it had violence, sex, and horror film monsters as you'd expect in a low brow film at the time, but it also had a compelling and alien art style, it dealt with mature themes like anxiety about big business, dealing with hostile or misbehaving computer systems, lots of weird sexual anxiety stuff you rarely see outside of obscure German industrial goth sex clubs, and boring space logistics shit. Furthermore the film conveys all of this in a fractal manner, every detail is considered no matter how small.
You want films that have a bit of something for everyone. Along with that, you don't want to exhaustively explain everything to everyone. Dumb people zone out when this happens, smart people are insulted by it. Only gay soy creatures like having this shit explained to them, because it makes them feel smarter for having saw it. Yeah, everyone's not going to get everything, but that's the point of watching the film again.
To be fair, a lot of indy studios couldn't afford huge special effects budgets, so they used what they could to get around those limitations (matte paintings, miniatures, perspective trickery, camera wizardry) and when that didn't work they wrote around the limitations. That is, they wrote the story such that you'd get the point they were trying to make, without them actually having to show some Marvel capeshit style slop. Is it necessary to have a five billion dollar budget to CGI a 10,000 spaceship battle? Could you just shoot it in a series of rooms you built on springs, with windows to matte paintings, and you shake the rooms to simulate strikes? Can you avoid the issue altogether by filming entirely inside, with computer screens displaying aviation or naval style dials? Can you shoot a film after the battle, where a pilot was shot down and crash landed in a desert (a place where the weather is pretty much the same every day, so no continuity issues)?
Writing around your limits is probably the most important skill as a filmmaker that you can have.
So you don't need a huge fucking budget to make a space opera video game. You can prerender the space battles as a FMV, then run your 3D models in front of it. If you're doing 2D, this is even easier as you can do parallax scrolling with multiple foreground and background layers (each with transparency), as well as a background that can be an animated image of stars blinking or a battle taking place.
Since you won't be laying everyone off after you sell a game that makes a profit, you can actually have your employees maintain and improve your game engines. Programmers get better the more they program; weird, I know!
Since your employees aren't retarded niggers, you can give them lots of autonomy with how they work. You could for example give a coder who maintains a 3D Tactical RPG engine ownership within the company of that engine, and any artists/writers who has "ownership" of a certain franchise you've made can work with him to get a spinoff game for their franchise made with his 3D Tactical RPG engine. By allowing free association with skilled professionals within the walled garden of your company, you can exploit their passions for their creations to make more games in different genres. As your coders improve, they will inevitably streamline the process of creating event scripts for their engines, which would allow the artists and writers to make their own events without much coder oversight (or more likely you'll hire someone to just write events).
Film studios are a specialized form of bank, in that they invest in projects that they hope to profit from (this also explains why Hollywood is full of jews). The investment strategy that most AAA companies follow is fragile, because they invest all of their resources into mammoth projects that must make more than a very large amount of money or the company fails. They then abuse their employees because this is baked into the high cost, low risk, high reward payout method that they use where employees are cost centers, despite them actually making the products and services that the company sells.
What I propose is that your investment strategy for making games should instead be low cost, high risk, and variable reward; and that your project development strategies should iterate and experiment with themselves to make the most of the investments you put in your employees.
Your investment strategy should be:
Low cost - so you can finish as many games as possible to maintain your studio indefinitely without catering to subhuman nigger cattle investors.
High risk - so you can iterate quickly and experiment with many different types of projects.
Variable reward - so you have a chance to win the lottery so to speak.
If you shit out many middlebrow games of many different genres, then the periodic hits will sustain you during droughts, and it costs you little to maintain a game so you don't have to cater to investors.
Literally the only reason that video games, movies, books, and every other collaborative art form sucks these days is because the US Federal government mandates hiring of nigger faggots. You can get around this by following the exact strategy that indy film studios used, and by keeping your employee count below 15 people. Since indy games aren't gatekept from distribution the same way indy films are, this is probably easier than making films.
One small wrinkle. You forget that many of those, unless they come from a site like baddesthacks, are heavily trooned out. The odds of finding one who won't rat you out for clout are low.
One small wrinkle. You forget that many of those, unless they come from a site like baddesthacks, are heavily trooned out. The odds of finding one who won't rat you out for clout are low.
My dream if my current startup company goes successful (which isn't completely unlikely) is to make a game development tool that integrates AI work to bridge notorious time/money sink tasks (game assets, music, voicework) so that programmers can once again be the ones to make games rather than shitty artists.
Until then just having decent assets already puts you months in dev time and makes you dependent on trannies.
My dream if my current startup company goes successful (which isn't completely unlikely) is to make a game development tool that integrates AI work to bridge notorious time/money sink tasks (game assets, music, voicework) so that programmers can once again be the ones to make games rather than shitty artists.
Until then just having decent assets already puts you months in dev time and makes you dependent on trannies.
Just use fiverr, or hire a gooner artist like baalbuddy or mossacannibalis. They are used to delivering a certain quality of work quickly and in high volume. The tranny ones all shit out Cal Arts beanheads or furry abominations, filtering for skill filters out trannies.
I already have a couple artists in mind who are based/redpilled/etc so I'm set, seriously just look around on twitter or ask in the art board here.
It will happen, but not by choice. There will be a market crash - no, likely not like the 80s (which America only anyway), the market is too diverse now - but we will see a lot of big players closing their doors (Bungie, for example) and it will domino across the industry. It will be rough, and it could see the end of the Xbox brand (sort of - I could see them doing something like "Xbox on Microsoft Surface"). Nintendo and Sony will probably make it through if the console market hasn't died by then.
It will be rough for the industry, but consumers will eventually benefit. Until the next zeitgeist takes over and ruins the industry.
Hopefully during the lull, we will see legal action taken about allowing digital skinner boxes for kids.
My dream if my current startup company goes successful (which isn't completely unlikely) is to make a game development tool that integrates AI work to bridge notorious time/money sink tasks (game assets, music, voicework) so that programmers can once again be the ones to make games rather than shitty artists.
Until then just having decent assets already puts you months in dev time and makes you dependent on trannies.
So you're gonna produce the most legally controversial things you can with generative AI and hopefully weather the copyright storm if you get a hit? Seems risky.
It will happen, but not by choice. There will be a market crash - no, likely not like the 80s (which America only anyway), the market is too diverse now - but we will see a lot of big players closing their doors (Bungie, for example) and it will domino across the industry. It will be rough, and it could see the end of the Xbox brand (sort of - I could see them doing something like "Xbox on Microsoft Surface"). Nintendo and Sony will probably make it through if the console market hasn't died by then.
At least from the 1990s, there's been a big 3 game hardware companies. Looks like it will be Sony for the cool/urban gamer crowd, nintendo for the kid/gimmick crowd, and Valve for the "it just works" market.
Note that previously Sony and Microsoft were trying to fill the same niche. It seems like it's the degree to which you can specialize that makes your company competitive. Microsoft had the PC market locked down, all they had to do was maintain Windows and curate improvements to the platform, but they shit that up so bad that we can run Windows games better on Linux now.
IIRC Valve approached Microsoft years ago about the issues it had supporting Windows games. If true, then their loss is entirely self-inflicted.
At least from the 1990s, there's been a big 3 game hardware companies. Looks like it will be Sony for the cool/urban gamer crowd, nintendo for the kid/gimmick crowd, and Valve for the "it just works" market.
Note that previously Sony and Microsoft were trying to fill the same niche. It seems like it's the degree to which you can specialize that makes your company competitive.
Yeah but the consumers don't even get good exclusives out of it anymore, or exclusives at all, and PCs are so much more common now. It'll be a long time until Nintendo falls, and Sony has their entire tech giant machine behind it so they won't be quick to exit either, but they're going to lose more and more of their market dominance. Nintendo will likely fare better than Sony, at least for a while.
