Chasing photorealism is a fools errand, it takes more and more time and resources to achieve smaller and smaller improvements, and it ages poorly because it becomes even more obvious that you failed to achieve the style you were trying for.
One* of the Big Problems with the games industry is a side effect of this. For years games basically got technological leaps “for free”, and a lot of the advertising of games was built on this: look how great this game looks! The game we made five years ago didn’t look this great.
Which was fine back when you were jumping from a PS1 to PS2, or a Nintendo to Super Nintendo. Your games just looked better “for free” because the resolution was higher and the hardware was so much faster and able to draw more polygons and run more shades, etc.
But as the above post shows, that only goes so far. We’re past the point where the tech gives you free upgrades.
Think of it like: Imagine you manage to double the resolution of your console for the next version. Sweet, right?
Well, how amazing that is is gonna depend real heavy on if your console looks like this:
Or this?
You double the resolution of the former, you go from an Atari 2600 to a NES. Big jump!
You double the latter, and… Well it’ll look a little better for the fraction of your audience that has really big expensive TVs. Not nearly as revolutionary.
But your industry is stuck in the mindset of “your game has to look better than last year’s game!”. So what do they do? They don’t go for tech improvements, they go for content improvements. More intricate worlds, character models, more game modes, more playable characters, more voiced lines, more textures, more everything.
And yeah some of that is good and fun, but this situation is underlying the budget crisis of modern games.
Games are requiring more and more work to make, because of the need to look better than last year. More work means more cost which means the budgets for AAA go higher and higher (there is a mobile boardgame tie-in with a budget of HALF A BILLION DOLLARS).
And the high budgets mean your publishers are being more conservative, less willing to take risks, and way more likely to go for “sure things” : sequels and reboots and mass appeal ideas.
Because if now costs 200 million dollars to make a game, you better be real sure your game is gonna be a massive hit. Way more sure than when you could release a game for 10 million, you know?
Anyways, tl;dr: the game industry relied on tech advances giving them a free visual quality upgrade that when that automatic upgrade treadmill slowed down, their budgets exploded and now it’s crushing the industry.
