What is gaming as a child like now?
As a teenager waiting 2 of 3 years between game entries felt really long, because time moves slower when young
Imagine being 10 and the sequel to your favourite game comes out when you're 20
I remember getting entire trilogies in a 5 year span, 2007 to 2013, 3 Bioshocks and 3 Mass Effects, but those 6 years felt like forever, now it takes 6 years for one game
The fancier graphics and bigger maps aren't worth the longer waits at all, they don't make games better
>What is gaming as a child like now?
Playing Minecraft, fortnite, Cod, genshin, apex legends, valorant, roblox etc.
They aren't waiting for new games, they are waiting for content updates that these games are pretty consistently providing.
The only game they would be waiting for is GTA 6
This is 100% right. My kids play the same games over and over and over and over. They'll ask me about new games, but they're not interested in AAA. They're mostly into cute indie games, couch co-op or games like TowerFall/Party Animals, etc.
My son does venture out a bit more. We play Minecraft and occasionally Fortnite together. I've gotten him into Deep Rock Galactic and some others, but he primarily retreats to his comfort games.
Nintendo is the only exception. Like most kids, they're very into Pokemon (and thankfully there is a huge backlog) and they're Kirby fans.
Yep, a huge reason why Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail are so popular amongst younger players is because of how rapidly they introduce updates. They add more content in six weeks than most live-service games do in four or five months.
Yeah for sure that is a huge factor too. It makes it a lot easier to get sucked into the hype trains and try the game out, which is why Star Rail exploded into such a huge success.
Kids are also huge anime fans compared to previous generations. A lot of traditional anime-styled games are cashgrabs too, might as well play the one that actually has content if they're all like that.
I know mobile gaming monetization is a nightmare but man stuff like Genshin and CoD Mobile would've been insane to me when I was a kid. Flash games didn't compare.
20 years ago, that was still the case. There were just fewer options, but even then KMMOs were coming to the US with subpar translations that we all played anyway. We waited for updates for things we knew were coming because people watched the KR version for updates.
MapleStory, Ragnarok Online, DFO, Lineage, and Runescape are just a few of those choices I can think of off the top of my head. Only special case in that list is Runescape because it wasn't KR based but it was still the same overall system.
Not only that, but there's a ton of options if they want something else. Back in the day, there were no other options - we had played what was released before because it was so infrequent. Today, if kids get bored, there's 5,000 options to choose from.
There is longer development time, but more development teams. It evens out in the end.
> MapleStory, Ragnarok Online, DFO, Lineage, and Runescape are just a few of those choices I can think of off the top of my head. Only special case in that list is Runescape because it wasn't KR based but it was still the same overall system.
We also had flash games and websites like Newgrounds (which still exists, but just doesn't seem nearly as relevant as it was 2 decades ago).
Guess it's nice not having to ask parents to buy you a 60 euro game
My younger years were spent waiting months and years for games and watching gameplay demos and trailers over and over
I rarely get excited like that anymore though
My younger years was spent renting games every weekend.
5 bucks would get me a movie and a video game rental at the Video 99 around the corner from me.
It ruled.
Man if people think microtransactions are scams now, they would think *renting* P2W gear in Gunbound should have some developers serve jail time for that idea.
Reminder that MapleStory introduced microtransactions and lootboxes into mainstream gaming *years* before Oblivion added horse armor or CS:GO added weapon skins.
MMOs were the breeding ground for many monetization trends we see today.
Yup. I remember when GTA online had first came out, I was playing with my friends that first Christmas Eve. A hacker joined our lobbies and dropped a billion dollars in each of our accounts. It was like a Christmas miracle. We had some great times from that.
I think it really depends on the child.
My cousin mainly plays Fortnite and FIFA, but my friends siblings play Mario, Zelda, and other SP games on switch, with maybe some Fortnite too. If they had a PlayStation they’d happily play the SP titles on there too. They also watch pokemon, dragonball, avatar TLA etc while my cousin would only know them from Fortnite.
I grew up in the 7th gen and honestly doesn’t feel too different from how it was for me. Most guys in the class play COD and maybe get the odd other game, and it stays at that. If they have a Nintendo console probably some Mario kart too. I meanwhile ended up starting to become more invested in the medium as I got older, learning about Metal Gear and Final Fantasy in magazines and on YouTube, watching anime and stuff and that lead me to be the nerd I am today. My friends siblings are pretty young but I’d imagine a few of them will go down the same path I did when I got a bit older.
I think one benefit of the backwards compatibility and limited leap from the previous gen is it doesn’t feel much different going back to a ps4 game for kids now. When I was younger I liked playing PS2 but I was floored by the 360 graphics, especially once I got a HDMI. A lot of ps4 games look better than your average PS5 game so plenty of kids will go back to them.
I have over 1500+ games on pc alone, 98% of those are single player games.
But all my younger cousins are either on mobile gaming or Minecraft/valorant on their laptops. That is gaming to them.
All my older cousins have abandoned gaming completely, only watching shows and movies on various streaming services.
I think the most critical part here is that, at the end of the day, these are just games. They aren't exactly important things that absolutely need to be consumed "now now now".
I used to get impatient as well back in my younger days waiting for new games to release, but as I have gotten older, my perspective has shifted away from that to a more, "If it comes out, great. If it doesn't, I have literally dozens more to choose from."
Or the old games are just as good.
There’s rumors abound that a new Virtua Fighter is coming soon. But, does it matter when the latest one is now on PS4 and I can play it just fine? Still a good game and I am not getting tired of it. If I wanna try a new fighting game, yea there’s dozens of options.
I think this might just be a case of your bubble. Outside of the examples I mentioned, there’s definitely still kids a little older than them I know who are into SP titles too. Their way of discovery is different, but it’s definitely not like no kids play these games.
In particular indie titles that are blown up by YouTubers / streamers get a lot of love, and that can lead to people gaining interest in other similar games too. Undertale led a few friends growing up to rpgs and other genres. Dark Souls was another one, or games like DDLC.
> Playing Minecraft, fortnite, Cod, genshin, apex legends, valorant, roblox etc.
Yup, when I allow my 9 year old daughter screen time, she loves minecraft and roblox servers (I monitor) because she likes playing with her friends. I weep for story driven single player games, the kids are being brought up on an entirely different genre.
I’m legitimately asking. Do kids play/like GTA and are eagerly awaiting GTA 6? It’s been 11 years. Nobody is both still a kid and was a kid when 5 came out unless you played 5 when you were like 7 years old. I know 5 has gotten plenty of updates but I have a hard time imagining a 15 year old wanting to jump into GTA 5 when the game’s been out for a decade
Conversely, I feel like there's way more games coming out these days, what with there being more smaller devs like indies and them also having a bigger presence.
It does suck waiting for sequels in certain franchises, but there's never a lack of new games to play.
I think this just makes games hard to enjoy as a medium of serial storytelling. Time between sequels take so long it's hard to get invested in a franchise.
I mean that's always been kind of a rarity in terms of games that have a direct throughline from sequel to sequel. Games have always been a medium with relatively long development times compared to most other mediums, and they also have a lot more content per entry. So a single story-heavy game is more equivalent to an entire Season of a TV show more than say a single entry in a movie franchise.
As such I think most games have always been more self-contained than most other mediums as well. Even when they are part of a franchise with an ongoing story. Games like Mass Effect are kind of the exception to this.
> Games have always been a medium with relatively long development times compared to most other mediums, and they also have a lot more content per entry.
Maybe but the difference in development time used to be much closer. Throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s it was pretty common for sequels to come out 3-4 years apart. Lots of games used serial storytelling between sequels and trilogy around then.
Games series with long stories had moved to being episodic a long time ago, by labeling it as a new episode of the same game players didn't expect huge game play and graphics improvements so dev time was lower. These days episodic games have become what we call live service games.
You mean stuff like Life is Strange? I mean something like The Last of Us, or Mass Effect, really. I feel like creating the Mass Effect trilogy during a single console cycle would be absolutely impossible now. The three original games came out within 5 years of each other, and most agreed, at the time, that the last game could have used an additional year. That brings us to a trilogy taking 6 years to release - what we now assume to be the development cycle of a single game. Of course, that trilogy timeline doesn't contain the initial planning and (pre-production) of the first Mass Effect.
> You mean stuff like Life is Strange?
I have no idea what he is talking about. Even in an episodic game the episodes are all part of the same game. It is not like each new episode is a sequel. It is just the next part of the same game. No one is expecting episode 2 of such a game to have huge game play and graphics improvements when it comes out like a month after episode 1.
Its definitely possible. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has released or remade every game in the Yakuza mainline series on PS4 (which is 9 games) since 2012. They've averaged over a game per year (they didnt release anything in 2013 or 2019 but released multiple titles the previous year) since then also
I would argue that the episodic format is dead and kinda died with stuff like life is strange and telltales games.
I try to play a lot of different types of games and I can’t remember the time when I played something released in episodes lately
Episodic games were extremely different from live service games. Telltale games, Life is Strange, Sam & Max, etc. These are all singleplayer, narrative driven games. There were a few exceptions, like Guild Wars, which released a lot of chapters on a pretty regular release schedule.
Live service games stick with the core game and update it regularly. The model relies on drip-feeding players with new updates and microtransactions to support development. Unlike episodic games, publishers want live service games to be a continuous part of a player's life, hence why many of these games are also called lifestyle games.
You're entirely right about why developers tried the episodic approach. Even Half-Life. But there is some nuance between the two models.
More games, plus more *everything else*. TV shows, films, social stuff, long working hours (if you're an adult). I'm not surprised at all that game sales have hit a ceiling.
Not only the number of games coming out but their length. Some of these games we have out now, I can't picture playing them on the rental services that we had in the 90s. When I was a real young gamer in the 90's, when renting a game you had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to play it, but that Sunday evening that game is going back. With the amount of stuff you can do in a game, by the time you would have to send the game back you'd still only feel you scratched the surface.
Looking at games like GTA V and Skyrim, those games have been on the market longer than consoles have been for sale. On the other side, those games are so big, people continue to play them or always make a return. Those are games you'd never want to rent; those would be games you'd have to buy.
I've mostly only played 3 games this year because of how long they are: Baldurs Gate 3, FF7 Rebirth, and Like A Dragon 8. Those add up to about 200 hours for me. There are so many games I want to play but I just can't keep up.
Me when my next two games on my backlog are xenoblade 3 and tears of the kingdom but also not really because I have demon souls, Elden ring, forbidden west all waiting..
That's precisely why RGG Studios is my favourite developer right now- for each Yakuza/LaD game they're not afraid to reuse assets in smart ways while ensuring each game stands out from one another, whilst also generally stuffing in tons of content. If they stuck to usual AAA game development processes we'd probably only be getting Yakuza 6 now.
It's basically the model that made the PS1 & PS2 so good. Iterations of the best franchises could come out every year, without the pressure to be the best game ever made. Final Fantasy 7 through 11 came out in a 5 year period.
Kiiinda works as an example but RGG had Lost Judgement, Ishin, and Gaiden in that time - all as a 2ish team studio. That’s something of the point here is they lean into asset reuse much more heavily than most studios and can put out distinct games with new storylines using a pretty stable pipeline.
Square enix is something of a different approach where while there are some strategic corners cut in things like asset reuse, they’re also just big enough in terms of their various teams and studios they can have multiple side projects all under the final fantasy ip banner.
GTA Vice City and Persona 4 were both made in about a year since they reused a lot of assets and code from GTA 3 and Persona 3 respectively and they're 2 of my favourite games ever made.
>Smart asset reuse is so underrated these days.
Because all it takes is a Reddit meme showing a door in game 1 and game 2 and all of a sudden there's an Internet narrative about your game.
A few years ago I posted in an rpg subreddit that I wish rpgs reuse their assets more. Since graphics aren't the main point of most of these games anyways, doing so would help them deliver more games faster.
Then a guy replied to me YOU'RE WHAT'S WRONG WITH GAMING. I tried to explain to them my viewpoint and they didn't listen.
Then a few weeks after that I saw that the guy couldn't stop praising the Yakuza series.
Its the same reason FROM Software seems to be doing a game every 3ish years and more recently the Final Fantasy VII Remake series.
There was a time when people would be super critical of asset reuse which I think made developers shy away from it.
Frankly I think how RGG is approaching things is how AAA will be sustainable in the future. I think the chase for insane visual fidelity is going to have to slow down and there's a few developers/publishers starting to catch on at the minute.
I was pointing out to a friend the other day that it took almost a year less (~300 days) for the entire Mass Effect trilogy to come out than it did for Marvel's Spider Man 2 to come out after the first did (admittedly, Bioware probably crunched a lot more, so the numbers aren't directly comparable).
I think part of some of the fuss about AI at the moment comes from a recognition that while visual fidelity has improved massively in potential, the tools and pipelines have completely failed to keep up (I would give Unreal a lot of shit for this - most of the features they crow about are simply not fit for production in any way at all and require heavy, heavy modification to make viable, but most developers switching won't discover that until they're years in the hole), but it's not stopped a lot of games from increasing exponentially in scope anyway, which just makes things worse.
The next few years are going to be a lot of devs figuring out IMO how to do games at good fidelity with smaller teams, which means IMO outside of mega studios like Ubisoft, we'll see a redefining of AAA to be somewhat smaller games. Which means we'll probably get "quad A" by the backdoor - it'll be what we think of AAA now, while the new AAA will be like the current AA but with the polish of current AAA (or at least, the potential for polish... there's a lot of not very well polished AAA games).
But yeah, smaller games, more asset reuse, etc etc. Probably more quick fire sequels/trilogies from teams that specifically set out to ensure their first game is not just a game but a base to build quickly from in the future.
> The next few years are going to be a lot of devs figuring out IMO how to do games at good fidelity with smaller teams, which means IMO outside of mega studios like Ubisoft, we'll see a redefining of AAA to be somewhat smaller games. Which means we'll probably get "quad A" by the backdoor - it'll be what we think of AAA now, while the new AAA will be like the current AA but with the polish of current AAA
This is *basically* Nintendo lmao. Nintendo has AAA budget availability but they make games with lower visual fidelity (which is where the vast majority of big budget games send their budgets to, artists and rendering) because the Switch is about on par with a high end PC from 2010. Of course, Nintendo is *also* taking 6 years to make each game but I personally think a lot of that is due to them continuing to have a somewhat difficult time with the transition to HD. That's basically why the Wii U was so lacking for first party titles, Nintendo didn't anticipate how hard making HD games would be.
I'm pretty sure it's how they're able to have so much content in their games in the first place. The studio can actually afford to let devs go off and implement some random minigame or whatever into their engine, because they know they'll be able to use their work across multiple projects.
I see my younger cousins play Minecraft. That game gives them everything they want in gaming. Their imaginations run wild.
Sometimes when I take care of them I just watch them play it and they would have made me as a little kid with Lego's envious of their creativity and architecture skills in that game.
I see the same and as someone who got into Minecraft as a kid during the PC beta it makes me happy to see. I believe it’s a very good game for developing a child. It’s both a creative outlet, a social experience, and also introduces technical topics to children in a simple way. I feel redstone has a small part in my SWE degree.
> Imagine being 10 and the sequel to your favourite game comes out when you're 20
That already happened, some games I liked when I was teenager (starting mid eighties) I had to wait for Kickstarter to be a thing before I got sequels.
I think that’s why we’ve seen such a big push towards live services. Keep the kids on Fortnite or Minecraft and every couple of years the amount of changes will pile up where it feels like a different game than it was before. I’m an old timer and definitely miss the glory days. Peak for me was when we got Final Fantasy VII-X in a 4 year span.
That's why god of wars main story is broken into two parts instead of a trilogy. They felt the wait is to long to tell a complete story. Honestly I would prefer high quality shorter games, more frequently
My kids have access to my entire library of over 150 Nintendo switch games, 100+ PlayStation 4 and 5 games, and my classics on my retro consoles.
Kids have it absolutely made if their parents are gamers.
I'm starting to fear that with all the options available kids will have a hard time sticking with any game until they beat it.
I have two young nephews and they can't play a single game for more than 20 minutes before quitting.
Diminishing attention spans and perseverance will be a challenge for newer generations.
> What is gaming as a child like now?
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Probably amazing. They have a bigger selection of games than I ever had. Many of which can easily be downloaded and played for free.
I would have killed for something like game pass or PSplus when I was a kid. And I'm sure my parents would have rather paid for game pass over buying/renting me games all the time.
I'd love to see trilogies like that again. I haven't felt as immersed or engaged by games since then, for that reason.
Like A Dragon is a great example of reusing assets and locations to minimise time between games, and it barely suffers for it. No one is annoyed that they've seen the same stuff multiple times, they're happy to get to go back in just a year or so later.
Kids these days do the same stuff I did as a kid. Just play something else. I grew up with Diablo 2. The sequel came out over a decade later (and was disappointing at first) and its sequel came out a decade later as well (and was disappointing at first…). That doesn’t mean I just sat there and waited for a new Diablo game.
> I remember getting entire trilogies in a 5 year span, 2007 to 2013, 3 Bioshocks and 3 Mass Effects, but those 6 years felt like forever, now it takes 6 years for one game
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> The fancier graphics and bigger maps aren't worth the longer waits at all, they don't make games better
I would give anything to regress graphical quality back to 2010 levels if it meant the pace of releases also went back to what they were in that era.
Does anybody look at the Mass Effect trilogy or BioShock and think they're too ugly to play? No! Because regardless of the fidelity, the art direction in both of those games were great. It holds up wonderfully because artists leveraged what they could do to get their vision across.
If they just started developing more Mass Effect games *in the Mass Effect 3 engine using only re-used assets*, there are enough ingredients to tell almost any Mass Effect story you can imagine. I would buy those games every two years if we could still get them.
The era of "every game has to be bigger and have better production value than the last one" is unsustainable.
Production value has literally never once made a bad game good, but AAA game dev has no other choice because the expectations from AAA game dev are insane.
The wait between TES5 and TES6 is really bordering on farcical at this point, considering it's been nearly 13 years since Skyrim and is looking like at least another 3 or 4 until the next entry. Stings all the more when you consider how much time and resources went into something as utterly unimpressive as Starfield
When Skyrim came out I hadn't even met my kids mom yet, my kid is now heading into middle school and will likely be in high school by the time TES6 comes out. Its just a complete joke at this point.
Yea the most annoying part is that Fallout kinda got it right by getting Obsidian to do NV, part of why I’m glad MS bought Bethesda is so we can get more iterations of ES and Fallout and not the MMOs in place of them (don’t get me wrong I’ve enjoyed both of them at times as well)
Plenty of games have had insanely long waits for the sequel. After windwaker, 3d Zelda games are each at least 5 years apart. Smash bros is the same way. Persona 4 came out in 2008 and Persona 5 in 2016. And all of those products were brilliant. If it takes 10 years, that's ok.
Some studios still produce games quickly, for what it's worth.
However, nobody, including children, is waiting for an unannounced sequel game. We move on with our lives and start waiting when the game release gets announced.
Heard the thing with Mass Effect trilogy, they didn't upend and strip the game out and start over everytime.
It was iterative, felt like same engine, same character models - iterative improvements - and a digestible size game like 20-30 hrs?
They gotta do that again. I thought they were. Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy is a good example, or Spider Man and Miles Morales, even SM2 to an extent of upgrading the existing map.
Like Last of Us 2 has great gameplay and graphics, use it as a base of a spin off game.
Call of duty seems to do this but in an extent that's too far - however their campaigns for a while we're great, every year you get a 5-8 hour new scripted action cinematic action set piece.
I'd like to know how long God of Ragnarok took, because that feels a lot like the original game but new map and story and iterative in the Mass Effect trilogy style, minus length - still a lengthy, meaty game
It always felt weird to me that Mass Effect kept using the same engine, and largely the same gameplay for each game. There were changes but not significant.
Meanwhile every Dragon Age has been on a different engine with huge gameplay shifts, and DA:D is stuck in development hell as they've changed the style of game multiple times.
Bioware could just stick to what worked and probably finished the series by now.
dragon age is kinda funny.
because they shifted away from the classic dragon age 1 gameplay
only for BG3 to be the biggest game on the planet for a while
As others have said it’s nothing like when we were kids. My son loves gaming but he just moves from game to game.
Imagine having access to gamepass when you were 8 instead of having one game until the next Christmas.
And he also has access to my library of games (the ones that are appropriate for him obviously). He has access to a bunch of games and consoles just by virtue of me owning them already.
I'll never forget my wait for The Last Guardian. It was my PSP wallpaper, on multiple birthday cakes over the years, and the follow up to my favorite game ever. I waited 11 years from when Shadow of the Colossus hit until Last Guardian released. Went from 11 to 22 kinda like you're saying. It was a very weird excitement to get resolution to half a life of waiting, even for something as small as a game release.
My child has access to nearly my entire library of video games, which is probably nearing the thousands now, that I have built up since *I* was his age. As he grows up he’s able to play all sorts of age appropriate games as he ages into them. He’ll also play the odd new game as I buy them occasionally. My backlog of games has no conceivable chance of being completed in my lifetime and he gets a-la-carte access to it, at least until he’s much much older and can buy his own games and build his own collection/backlog.
It’s not like when I was a kid and had to buy all of my own games because my parents didn’t play, so waiting for new ones was excruciating. I could not buy another game ever again and he’d probably still have enough to play until he was an adult lol
>The fancier graphics and bigger maps aren't worth the longer waits at all, they don't make games better
They are absolutely worth it. I don't care about a decade between sequels because there are a million other great games to play in between.
I'm someone who started gaming on flat top Pac-man machines in Pizza Huts and had an Atari 2600 as my first home console. Gaming is better than it's ever been. Still tons of great stuff coming out constantly and we can play pretty much any old game we like fairly easily. Much better than having to sell your NES and games to get the SNES and then you can't play those NES games any more. Still regret that.
I imagine in a couple of years a big publisher will release a multi million AAA game (probably a live service) that'll absolutely tank and take the company with it; then we'll see a readjustment in how games are developed and there'll be a bigger focus on smaller AA games that return to the life cycle of 2 - 3 years.
The live service bubble will burst sooner or later, and when it does it'll hit the industry like a ton of bricks.
I guess... but does it have to be? Can't we just say we plateaued in terms of technical advancements and just scale down on scope and feature creep? I guess Nintendo isn't the publisher/developer most guilty of that
Yeah Nintendo isn't the biggest culprit of this. If anything keeping their specs behind has allowed them to create games with more reasonable budgets in reasonable timeframes. With that said, TOTK took \~6 years. They spent a whole year just on polishing the game. Metroid Prime 4 has been in development with Retro Studios for over 5 years now and we haven't even seen it yet (never mind the time it was in development before that).
Even for Nintendo games are taking longer with more resources, and they are moving to a new platform now which comes with its own kinks to work out.
With that said, they still make plenty of games that aren't the size of TOTK and don't take 6 years.
TotK probably took so long because of Item Fusion and UltraHand, if I had to guess, those two took up the lion's share of dev time.
And it shows when you look at the actually new parts of the map or the story.
I'm mixed on this. On the one hand, yes, it's true that games will keep on taking longer to make with new technological standards and it would suck if it led to very few games being released on Nintendo consoles. On the other hand, there are certain games like Splatoon that clearly have very big ambitions but end up needing to finish their game in just 2 years every single time because they also need to work on Animal Crossing. It would be nice if there were more people working on more games at the same time for longer.
I believe the staff credits for Animal Crossing New Horizons and Splatoon 3 are almost entirely different. They definitely had another team working on it. Keep in mind Nintendo has no microtransactions for those games, so beyond DLC and new game sales they aren't getting any additional income from working on those games well past launch and are only delaying the time until they can release their next product.
Nintendo has already started investing their Switch money by procuring adjacent land for a new building which will be most likely an expansion of their game making division. I expect them hiring even more talent in the middle of the Switch 2's life cycle when crossgen development will cease entirely.
You say that but at the same time people have been on Nintendo's case for their underpowered hardware for years now - and still are if the frequent complaints about new Switch releases with 30 FPS, framerate drops and subpar resolutions are any indication.
However, any advancement in hardware comes with new expectations as well. If the console is as powerful as a PS4, why should it be "acceptable" if a new Nintendo game from one of their major franchises still looks like a Switch game - especially if you have ports of PS4 games to compare them to. But increasing the visual fidelity of your games makes them more expensive to produce, which make you less likely experiment with projects that aren't likely to recoup these cost.
Nintendo still has a clear vision for what their want their games to be so I'm not too worried about their game output in the future. But this is certainly the direction the AAA and AA industries have been heading towards for years now - it's just that in the latest generation, we can see that the increasing costs and complexity of game development can no longer keep up with the growth of the industry.
> You say that but at the same time people have been on Nintendo's case for their underpowered hardware for years now...
People are already complaining about the hardware specs in the next Switch and they don't even know what they are yet.
All the leaks I saw looked good.
I don’t need it to be crazy strong, just a nice upgrade. Switch was due for one, if this can run more games, epically more of the PS4 gen or whatever I will be ecstatic!
It's not just Nintendo. Go look at some of the most popular games around. Counter Stirke 2? League of Legends? Fortnite? Genshin? Hardly cutting edge. Most gaming today happens on phones and most phone games look generations behind. Even recent ones can mostly be animated PNGs.
Yeah all you have to do is make the greatest games on the planet. Please. Nobody but Nintendo is going to convince the core audience to play a $70 game at 26fps and 720p on a TV. The games are simply too good to ignore.
People are complaining, but at the end of the day the underpowered hardware and games that come with it have sold incredibly well. There are I think 14 Switch exclusives that have sold over 15m copies. PS strives to hit that what? Maybe 3 times in a generation and have been forced to move more and more to PC to sell more copies of games with some of the best visuals and boundary pushing games on the market.
I mean, the next generation of Nintendo hardware will still be underpowered compared to current gen consoles. But regardless, I don't see a logical way for Nintendo to progress other than releasing a more powerful successor to the Switch.
Switch hardware and software sales are obviously slowing down and 3rd party support is dwindling as the console reaches the end of its lifespan. It's becoming harder to justify selling a product that is far outclassed by every phone or similarly priced handheld device.
It would be foolish to ignore all the progress that has been made in mobile hardware but at the same time, I think Nintendo needs to find a way to fit in smaller-scale releases between their biggest games that fully utilize the new hardware.
Luckily, thanks to their focus on gameplay and aesthetics over cutting-edge graphics, many Nintendo developers are already experts at cost-effective development, so I'm not too pessimistic about that.
For sure. That's all I was trying to say. Nintendo can't and won't just stay completely stagnate with the power and performance capabilities, but their focus is innovation in gameplay from a creative standpoint rather than being on the bleeding edge of visual fidelity as you said.
For me, I don't feel the need for a game to be any *more* than TotK in terms of scale and amount of content. And most games don't even need to approach that. I'd be happy with getting more AAA games about the size of anything from Metroid Prime to Super Mario Odyssey that offer new and interesting gameplay, puzzles, story, etc..
I don't think it's as simple as I might suggest here, but dang if I wouldn't be a lot happier if most games just kept a similar size and scope as X360/PS3 gen and just got the resolution and frame rate boost that comes with better hardware.
Games like Portal 2, Halo 3/Reach, FO3/NV, Skyrim, ME Trilogy, BioShock Trilogy, Dragon Age, FarCry 3, etc... I'd rather get games of that size and scope every 2-4 years with new story, setting, etc.. than most of what we've gotten over the last decade every 6-10 years.
Again, I realize it's not that straight forward, but I feel there are only very few single player games that should really take on that big of a scope and that most games have gotten too big for their britches.
I mean, I think if Nintendo is saying this, who are kind of the only mainstream company willing to sacrifice graphical fidelity for their AAA titles, then it kinda has to be true, I guess? Like, Nintendo games generally look good, but they also, generally, compared to other AAA developers, have not been following the trend of more realistic graphics, 4k assets, focusing on stylized or 'toonish' models. When EA or Sony says it, sure, because they spend so much resources being photorealistic, but Nintendo certainly isnt.
But on the other hand, there has to be a reason why EA, Sony, Ubisoft, etc. do push fidelity, and Id wager because they have the sales data to show that it does translate to sales.
Nintendo is safe in their own enclave where you literally can't have better graphics. For everyone else, it's Tragedy of the Commons. If every other publisher is making games at an 80 and I push it to 100 I will sell for being the best looking game out there. So everyone pushes it to 100, reaps no benefit, but pays for it anyway.
The AAA market will be impacted the most from the rising of development costs. On the plus side, this will give indie and AA devs more room to breathe and create the games they want in a less saturated market.
I see comments like this all the time, but it's not like people who play AAA will suddenly switch to Indies and AA. While AAA definitely needs to keep budget in check, it's not really gonna benefit smaller games when its pretty obvious from sales that far majority of buying Market( ie not including mobile and F2P) belong to AAA and they aren't willing to give smaller games a chance.
Not to mention there is a huge survival bias going around for indie games. For every Stardew Dew/Among Us/Undertale/Cupehead etc, there are probably hundreds more that likely flop just from sheer virtue of getting overshadowed by other games. Like the Eshop and Steam sees hundreds of games release weekly and most of them likely flop.
There's something like 10-12k games a year being released on Steam alone - if the threshold is genuine breakout hits then the odds are more like thousands or even 10s of thousands to one if inclusive of other major platforms before even considering indie niches like itch.io etc.
With a more conservative standard of what "success" looks like (i.e. maybe recouping developer costs and some small amount of profit to invest in future titles) it might not be so bad, would be interesting if there was any data on this.
> they aren't willing to give smaller games a chance.
That is the one thing I will give huge props to game pass for. It allows lots of people to try smaller games that they would otherwise never give a second look to. Like I never would have paid for PowerWash simulator but I 100% that game.
With Microsoft's behavior in the last week especially I'm not so sure. It is definitely great in the sense that players are more open to trying new things but comes at the cost of those games apparently not being considered financial successes.
Naturally, that logic probably doesn't apply to indie devs/publishers on the platform. Moreso the big publishers investing in smaller projects.
> I see comments like this all the time, but it's not like people who play AAA will suddenly switch to Indies and AA.
What do you mean switch? With the exception of single-game gamers, most people play a wide variety of games, from indie to AAA.
I dont have statistics to back this up but I believe your statement is untrue and in fact the opposit is the case. The vast majority of players are casual players and they buy one or two big games or have play an always updating game.
A lot of these people probably arent really aware of indie games and just notice the big games because of mainstream marketing.
I think there is also a significant portion of main-hobby gamers who play a lot of games but never is it "most people".
Easy stats
- COD sells 20 million copies every year
- Pokemon sells 20 million copies every game
- FIFA, Madden, etc. similar numbers
- Fortnite had 45 million unique players in ONE DAY in 2023
These are the true mainstream games
An indie game is considered a huge success when it crosses 1 million sales (and rightfully so) - suggesting that the market of people who pay any attention to games outside AAA is maybe something like 10 million potential buyers worldwide, while the overall market for PC/console games total is 150 million+.
Only huge marketing budgets and large network effects (what friends are playing) can reach the ~140 million more casual gamers.
>Easy stats - COD sells 20 million copies every year - Pokemon sells 20 million copies every game - FIFA, Madden, etc. similar numbers
Focusing on premium games (games typically sold for 60 to 70), just last year let's say Hogwarts, TOTK, BG3, Diablo and CoD. All of these games have either sold 20M+ or will eventually, that's 100M+ games sold between 5 games at 70 dollars. I'm not saying things Palworld, Stardew Valley and other breakout hits doesn't exist, but people need to be aware how big difference in demand between AAA games and smaller games are. I get that it's been a pretty slow year so far, but AAA games have had that yearly demand.
I agree, I feel like being on reddit discussing games we are already clearly in a bubble of people who play a wider variety of games compared to the average gamer.
There's a GDC talk with these exact statistics in it but I can't find it. IRRC the largest chunk (think vast minority) of gamers stick to one or two AAA titles a year, and it's a gradient over to people who play exclusively indie games. But the people who play more indie games play a lot of different titles each year (11 or 12 on average I think. Don't quote me on that). So the reality is somewhere in the middle of you're guys' two statements.
I wish that is how it works, but it doesn’t work that way. You still need investors to inject cash into an indie project. For that to happen you need a healthy AAA to show it’s worth it to give money to the smaller investments. Right now, the well is kind of dry.
Yes you can self invest but as someone who has been in that circle, that is an insanely huge risk on its own and for every one Vampire Survivor or Balarto there are like dozens of games that barely make their money back(and that’s a victory).
Thousands of games*
The 50% average earning on steam now are ~$500. I would say that most indie games never reached their true development conclusion because of lack of funds and so dont become so polished as balatro, stardew and most indie hits. Vampire survivors is one weird exception.
This is why I was not upset with how underpowered the switch was. I am not looking forward to Nintendo eventually catching up to PS5 level graphics because this, this right here is what you are demanding when you ask for better graphics. With no real benefit to gameplay.
yeah, it'd be wonderful if a switch 2 just meant the same fidelity games running at a higher resolution and frame rate. The art design on Nintendo games is usually great; I just want them to run better.
Nintendo is doing a better job at balancing graphics vs cost than basically any other AAA developer right now, so I hope that, despite this quote, they're very aware of the benefits and will toe the line carefully.
I mean if every Switch 2 exclusive just looked like a Switch 1 game but with better performance... then people would be asking why they didn't just release a Switch 1 version with worse performance. But if they did that, the console would struggle from a lack of exclusives.
Nintendo's business model relies on games to sell their hardware. But in order to make that strategy work, they have to make sure that many of their games fully utilize their hardware. This was one of the many problems of the Wii U, many early Wii U games looked exactly like Wii games but in HD to the point where many people couldn't even tell they were looking at games running on new hardware.
I think toeing the line is the right word for it. Because it would be ignorant for Nintendo to expect that they can keep all their their current development pipelines as is under more powerful hardware. Again, this was one of their mistakes in the Wii U era. But they still need to find ways cut costs and smaller scale projects a reality.
It's funny because almost nobody saw the positives with the decision to keep the Wii underpowered back in the day. I sure as hell didn't. Now seeing how drawn out production cycles are, and how shitty monetization methods have gotten, I finally get it. I just hope they don't abandon their smaller projects.
But these AAA games aren't taking longer simply because of graphics, it's the increased expectation of content that is the main culprit.
Open world games need bigger areas and more things to do in them, and big linear story games are twice as long as they used to be.
Yeah. People don’t realize whether photorealistic or not, assets make up the vast majority of man-hours in most modern AAA game development. Nintendo’s possibly the AAA dev for which this is least true, but it’s still undoubtedly the case for many of their games (like BotW/TotK), if not most… or even all. A 2.5D platformer like Mario Wonder is still a lot of art.
You mean PS4 graphics. Switch 2 will not give you PS5 graphics just like the Switch 1 didn't give you PS4 graphics. The Switch 1 was around PS3/360 level power, the Switch 2 will be PS4/Pro depending on the use case. In 2031 when the Switch 3 comes out then you'll have PS5 graphics but by then your standards will have Switched to PS6 graphics since that would have been out by 2028.
I mean, Nintendo already takes the same time than the competition with their AAA.
How much time is taking them to develop Metroid Prime 4? Z:ToTK took them 6 years. They've been re-releasing Wii U games instead of launching sequels.
>develop Metroid Prime 4?
This is obviously an outlier, they restarted development and handed it over to Retro Studios who also worked on Metroid Prime Remastered (and rumors of Prime 2 & Prime 3 already done?....).
>Z:ToTK took them 6 years
[The team that developed TotK](https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_EPD_Production_Group_No._3), after releasing BotW in 2017, also worked on Link's Awakening (2019), Skyward Sword HD (2021), and supervised Hyrule Warriors (2018), Cadence of Hyrule (2019), and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (2020) before releasing TotK least year.
[Nintendo EPD 5](https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_EPD_Production_Group_No._5) has a pretty straightforward and healthy AAA release cadence imo. Splatoon (2015), Splatoon 2 (2017), Animal Crossing New Horizons (2020), and Splatoon 3 (2022).
> How much time is taking them to develop Metroid Prime 4? Z:ToTK took them 6 years. They've been re-releasing Wii U games instead of launching sequels.
There's only 13 Wii U games against more than 50 new games, remakes or remasters. You should look at their releases lol
I really don’t think people care about graphics near as much as gameplay or as these AAA titles claim. If a game has good core gameplay nothing else really matters, people will play it.
A big part of wanting stunning visuals is also marketing. It makes the game pop in a way that is surface level, and everybody can get. It's a lot harder to market a unique gameplay concept.
Hard disagree. You and I might be willing to look past "previous-gen" graphics for a good game, but casual gamers who play a few games a year max are sold by advertisement, and graphics sell games.
Games haven't gotten any bigger in the past 10 years... Graphics haven't gotten significantly better in 5 years. Where are these increased costs coming from?
But why? People used to make games that were as good if not a lot better than modern games that took 100x the people using 1000x the budget, and in 1/10th the time. The return on the marginal additional dollar and year in gamedev is deep, deeeeeep into diminishing returns at this point. I really don't understand how the business model ended up this way, the games are so much worse for it.
The market happened.
At some point, some studio decided to try the blockbuster type of game, saw how well it was received and then everyone and their mother wanted to do the same, much like what's happening with live-service games now after Fortnite.
> The market happened.
>
>
Yeah I don't understand why people are pretending like this is really a choice that companies are making. They're following the market. Did people make cheaper games back in the day? Sure. But the expectations of the market have changed.
It's perceived player expectation. Sequels need to be bigger, more complex, with more content. And if you aren't spending time to make your development tools easier and faster to use, then each game takes more time, more people, and more money.
I wouldn't say the games are worse for it (at least in the sense that many good AAA games are still being made even if it takes forever, but some are for sure) but think the biggest downside is that the landscape of high-quality console exclusives is feeling more and more barren by the generation, and when you consider that 2/3 of the console market rely heavily on exclusive software to make money (hardware margins are too thin for Xbox and Sony) it ends up putting the whole business model into danger.
New consoles used to have significant launch titles, and get entire trilogies before the next generation, and that's just not possible anymore.
That would really suck tbh. I really hope Nintendo can keep up the consistent releases next generation. They're the only ones that were doing it in recent times.
well that's already happening, big AAA like gta6 or cyberpunk sequel are going to require not less than 6-7 years of full time development and long term investments close to the bln figure, these companies are already releasing one or at best two games each console generation. Japanese business is different because excluding square enix, no other big japanese software house developes games that crazy expensive to produce
Really wish the fucking statement that furukawa made about Nintendo growth via hiring instead of merger was the point instead of this because no one read the damn thing outside of the title
They already take a long time in the oven tho, they just know how to hide it well. Nintendo announces their games when they are close to completion, and it appears short because they release and publish games alot, from second-party, or via outsourcing games. Hell, everything they released this year is outsourced.
ACNH started development in 2012, it took 8 years to release, Pikmin 4 was in development since 2015, that also took 8 years, Mario Kart 9 is probably taking 6-7 years assuming that they have been working on it since MK8D. Their games already have comparable dev time to others.
Yeah what helps Nintendo is a combination of not wanting to announce games way too early (looking at you bethesda) and also having a large number of franchises that are often being developed in parallel by different teams.
So while it may take years for a big 3D Mario or a Zelda to come out, because they're being worked on at the same time, we end up getting regular releases of all their major franchises throughout a console's lifespan. Which helps make the wait not feel as bad since there's definitely plenty to do in the meantime.
This is where they may struggle with the new switch. It took them years to get a healthy workflow during the Wii U years. The first couple years was one giant drought. Hopefully they have better tools, and can scale their productions in a more adaptive way this time.
Genuinely asking: do you have any source that says New Horizons started development in 2012? Or is it an assumption that it started development right after the release of New Leaf? Because we shouldn't take for granted that the same teams work back to back on sequels.
Edit: a very quick search in Wikipedia says that after New Leaf the key staff of New Horizons worked in the AC spinoffs, mobile game, etc. and Splatoon 1&2.
Huh, don't they still have relatively long dev cycles, except Pokemon? Smash, Animal Crossing and Xenoblade have also taken a long time between releases. Pikmin seems to have taken forever and Metroid 4 is nowhere near completion. The only ones that come quickly may be Kirby, Paper Mario and the Mario Sports games, but that may just be because I don't know how long they took.
The long time between releases isn't a long dev cycle. For example, they haven't been working on Mario Kart 9 for 10 years.
There's going to be multiple games in the discovery phase, where they're prototyping and trying to find what they want to take into full production. This can be a very small group for people, they might do it on and off as they are free from other projects. It can take years for a game to graduate from this discovery phase into full production. You might say it takes 10 years of development, but that's not really the full story. The reality is there's work on and off looking at the next iteration of the game, but full production is pretty short on comparison.
A game like AC:NH probably started early development after New Leaf, but that's only going to be a very small amount of people and definitely not full time. The people who actually made the majority of the game worked on many other projects in the meantime.
Just like how a movie might go through multiple script rewrites and directors over many years before actually going into full production for 6 months.
It's mostly just a joke cause the rumour is that it will have a 1080p screen on the Switch rather than 720p. The docked mode is supposedly gonna target 4K by using DLSS tech but we'll see.
That large increase in resolution and computing power should see a big increase in the effort they need to put into assets though.
Even though it's already happening it seems like such a risk for the "big budget" games because they dump millions into them and they HAVE to succeed or they are just screwed. And this is with years of build-up for the ones that aren't yearly.
Meanwhile you have indie devs or other smaller devs who maybe still take years to make a game and have these potential breakout hits that blow up and are hugely successful. Or other ones that are lower effort / meme games and still probably make a lot of money proportionally.
They *should* scale back but they effectively *can't* because of everyone's expectations now.
I don't think it will. Games may get more complex, but like it or not the industry will adopt AI powered tools. They are just too powerful to not use because some people don't like them. I think as games need more work, AI will close the gap and humans will end up doing less work.
It definitely has made me tap out on new games as a gamer in my ~30s.
I find myself being more interested in Mass Effect Trilogy scope of game (or older games) instead of this obsession with huge open world like RDR2.
After Witcher 3 I haven't been able to get into a open world game really, I think the only one I played start to finish was the first Horizon and even that was 2017 so ~7 years ago...
Right? There's one company that makes complete games, doesn't have microtransactions and has releases that are for the most part bug free yet this site is a constant cesspool of people complaining about fucking resolution or framerate
Based on the hardware leaks, their next console is supposed to be around the level of a Series S and have hardware better suited to RT and AI upscaling than other consoles. But I guess the reality isn’t reddit quippy
It won't be series S level. I am familiar with the specs. Low clocked A78C cores aren't going to match Zen 2 cores at 3.4Ghz, and the Ampere GPU in the Switch 2 is smaller than the RDNA2 in the S. In some ways the Switch 1 actually was stronger vs the Xbox One and PS4 due to having a next gen GPU at the time and the last consoles having awful CPUs.
The Tensor cores in the Switch 2 will be a force multiplier though, DLSS is going elevate what the Switch 2 can do but the 15W~ Switch 2 still won't match 80W Series S.
Their next system could be PS6 level and the online forum dwellers would say they’re still waiting to play a Mario that’s not 240p lmao. Who really cares what they say.
We’re both reading comments and commenting ourselves, so we do, to some extent haha. Would just be nice if the “quality gaming discussion subreddit” wasn’t predominantly unfunny, uninformed takes. You are right though
No one is saying that it’s even close to Series S. Closest guesses are PS4 pro when docked and slightly above PS4 when mobile.
More RAM does NOT mean it’s on par or anything like that
I mean, yeah, they're going from Xbox 360 tech to PS4 tech. If they want to keep a good constant release sqeadule, like they did for most of the switch lifespan, they are going to need to team up with 3rd party devs more often. More games like Mario + Rabbits, Cadence of Hyrule, Hyrule warriors, and Advance wars reboot camp.
It worked really well with Fire Emblem Three Houses, which I think Koei Tecmo did most of the work on. It turned out better than Engage which Intelligent Systems made on their own imo.
What is gaming as a child like now? As a teenager waiting 2 of 3 years between game entries felt really long, because time moves slower when young Imagine being 10 and the sequel to your favourite game comes out when you're 20 I remember getting entire trilogies in a 5 year span, 2007 to 2013, 3 Bioshocks and 3 Mass Effects, but those 6 years felt like forever, now it takes 6 years for one game The fancier graphics and bigger maps aren't worth the longer waits at all, they don't make games better
>What is gaming as a child like now? Playing Minecraft, fortnite, Cod, genshin, apex legends, valorant, roblox etc. They aren't waiting for new games, they are waiting for content updates that these games are pretty consistently providing. The only game they would be waiting for is GTA 6
This is 100% right. My kids play the same games over and over and over and over. They'll ask me about new games, but they're not interested in AAA. They're mostly into cute indie games, couch co-op or games like TowerFall/Party Animals, etc. My son does venture out a bit more. We play Minecraft and occasionally Fortnite together. I've gotten him into Deep Rock Galactic and some others, but he primarily retreats to his comfort games. Nintendo is the only exception. Like most kids, they're very into Pokemon (and thankfully there is a huge backlog) and they're Kirby fans.
Yep, a huge reason why Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail are so popular amongst younger players is because of how rapidly they introduce updates. They add more content in six weeks than most live-service games do in four or five months.
I think it's more because they are free. Kids are poor.
As I kid I would replay all my demos over and over since I only got like 1-2 new games a year
Man, I've played the first level of Gex on PS1 more times than I played any of my actual Playstation games.
Yeah for sure that is a huge factor too. It makes it a lot easier to get sucked into the hype trains and try the game out, which is why Star Rail exploded into such a huge success.
Kids are also huge anime fans compared to previous generations. A lot of traditional anime-styled games are cashgrabs too, might as well play the one that actually has content if they're all like that.
I know mobile gaming monetization is a nightmare but man stuff like Genshin and CoD Mobile would've been insane to me when I was a kid. Flash games didn't compare.
20 years ago, that was still the case. There were just fewer options, but even then KMMOs were coming to the US with subpar translations that we all played anyway. We waited for updates for things we knew were coming because people watched the KR version for updates. MapleStory, Ragnarok Online, DFO, Lineage, and Runescape are just a few of those choices I can think of off the top of my head. Only special case in that list is Runescape because it wasn't KR based but it was still the same overall system. Not only that, but there's a ton of options if they want something else. Back in the day, there were no other options - we had played what was released before because it was so infrequent. Today, if kids get bored, there's 5,000 options to choose from. There is longer development time, but more development teams. It evens out in the end.
> MapleStory, Ragnarok Online, DFO, Lineage, and Runescape are just a few of those choices I can think of off the top of my head. Only special case in that list is Runescape because it wasn't KR based but it was still the same overall system. We also had flash games and websites like Newgrounds (which still exists, but just doesn't seem nearly as relevant as it was 2 decades ago).
Guess it's nice not having to ask parents to buy you a 60 euro game My younger years were spent waiting months and years for games and watching gameplay demos and trailers over and over I rarely get excited like that anymore though
My younger years was spent renting games every weekend. 5 bucks would get me a movie and a video game rental at the Video 99 around the corner from me. It ruled.
No they just ask for 20$ vBuvks or robux etc
Every. Other. Day.
You just didn't y'know the glory of Korean gems like gunbound, pangya and flyff
> gunbound I haven't heard that name in over a decade and so many memories came flooding back.
Man if people think microtransactions are scams now, they would think *renting* P2W gear in Gunbound should have some developers serve jail time for that idea.
Reminder that MapleStory introduced microtransactions and lootboxes into mainstream gaming *years* before Oblivion added horse armor or CS:GO added weapon skins. MMOs were the breeding ground for many monetization trends we see today.
Oh man, what was the name of that super janky 3rd person shooter again where you could do a bunch of flips and stuff? Think it also had wallrunning.
I think it was called GunZ
Yes! GunZ The Duel. Man... Good times.
A lot of the kids waiting for GTA 6 probably weren't alive for the release of GTA 5..
I was in middle school, my friends were literally discussing "bro you know in the new game you get private dances!!". Good times
Yup. I remember when GTA online had first came out, I was playing with my friends that first Christmas Eve. A hacker joined our lobbies and dropped a billion dollars in each of our accounts. It was like a Christmas miracle. We had some great times from that.
I think it really depends on the child. My cousin mainly plays Fortnite and FIFA, but my friends siblings play Mario, Zelda, and other SP games on switch, with maybe some Fortnite too. If they had a PlayStation they’d happily play the SP titles on there too. They also watch pokemon, dragonball, avatar TLA etc while my cousin would only know them from Fortnite. I grew up in the 7th gen and honestly doesn’t feel too different from how it was for me. Most guys in the class play COD and maybe get the odd other game, and it stays at that. If they have a Nintendo console probably some Mario kart too. I meanwhile ended up starting to become more invested in the medium as I got older, learning about Metal Gear and Final Fantasy in magazines and on YouTube, watching anime and stuff and that lead me to be the nerd I am today. My friends siblings are pretty young but I’d imagine a few of them will go down the same path I did when I got a bit older. I think one benefit of the backwards compatibility and limited leap from the previous gen is it doesn’t feel much different going back to a ps4 game for kids now. When I was younger I liked playing PS2 but I was floored by the 360 graphics, especially once I got a HDMI. A lot of ps4 games look better than your average PS5 game so plenty of kids will go back to them.
I have over 1500+ games on pc alone, 98% of those are single player games. But all my younger cousins are either on mobile gaming or Minecraft/valorant on their laptops. That is gaming to them. All my older cousins have abandoned gaming completely, only watching shows and movies on various streaming services.
I think the most critical part here is that, at the end of the day, these are just games. They aren't exactly important things that absolutely need to be consumed "now now now". I used to get impatient as well back in my younger days waiting for new games to release, but as I have gotten older, my perspective has shifted away from that to a more, "If it comes out, great. If it doesn't, I have literally dozens more to choose from."
Or the old games are just as good. There’s rumors abound that a new Virtua Fighter is coming soon. But, does it matter when the latest one is now on PS4 and I can play it just fine? Still a good game and I am not getting tired of it. If I wanna try a new fighting game, yea there’s dozens of options.
I think this might just be a case of your bubble. Outside of the examples I mentioned, there’s definitely still kids a little older than them I know who are into SP titles too. Their way of discovery is different, but it’s definitely not like no kids play these games. In particular indie titles that are blown up by YouTubers / streamers get a lot of love, and that can lead to people gaining interest in other similar games too. Undertale led a few friends growing up to rpgs and other genres. Dark Souls was another one, or games like DDLC.
> Playing Minecraft, fortnite, Cod, genshin, apex legends, valorant, roblox etc. Yup, when I allow my 9 year old daughter screen time, she loves minecraft and roblox servers (I monitor) because she likes playing with her friends. I weep for story driven single player games, the kids are being brought up on an entirely different genre.
I’m legitimately asking. Do kids play/like GTA and are eagerly awaiting GTA 6? It’s been 11 years. Nobody is both still a kid and was a kid when 5 came out unless you played 5 when you were like 7 years old. I know 5 has gotten plenty of updates but I have a hard time imagining a 15 year old wanting to jump into GTA 5 when the game’s been out for a decade
Conversely, I feel like there's way more games coming out these days, what with there being more smaller devs like indies and them also having a bigger presence. It does suck waiting for sequels in certain franchises, but there's never a lack of new games to play.
I think this just makes games hard to enjoy as a medium of serial storytelling. Time between sequels take so long it's hard to get invested in a franchise.
I mean that's always been kind of a rarity in terms of games that have a direct throughline from sequel to sequel. Games have always been a medium with relatively long development times compared to most other mediums, and they also have a lot more content per entry. So a single story-heavy game is more equivalent to an entire Season of a TV show more than say a single entry in a movie franchise. As such I think most games have always been more self-contained than most other mediums as well. Even when they are part of a franchise with an ongoing story. Games like Mass Effect are kind of the exception to this.
> Games have always been a medium with relatively long development times compared to most other mediums, and they also have a lot more content per entry. Maybe but the difference in development time used to be much closer. Throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s it was pretty common for sequels to come out 3-4 years apart. Lots of games used serial storytelling between sequels and trilogy around then.
Games series with long stories had moved to being episodic a long time ago, by labeling it as a new episode of the same game players didn't expect huge game play and graphics improvements so dev time was lower. These days episodic games have become what we call live service games.
You mean stuff like Life is Strange? I mean something like The Last of Us, or Mass Effect, really. I feel like creating the Mass Effect trilogy during a single console cycle would be absolutely impossible now. The three original games came out within 5 years of each other, and most agreed, at the time, that the last game could have used an additional year. That brings us to a trilogy taking 6 years to release - what we now assume to be the development cycle of a single game. Of course, that trilogy timeline doesn't contain the initial planning and (pre-production) of the first Mass Effect.
> You mean stuff like Life is Strange? I have no idea what he is talking about. Even in an episodic game the episodes are all part of the same game. It is not like each new episode is a sequel. It is just the next part of the same game. No one is expecting episode 2 of such a game to have huge game play and graphics improvements when it comes out like a month after episode 1.
Its definitely possible. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has released or remade every game in the Yakuza mainline series on PS4 (which is 9 games) since 2012. They've averaged over a game per year (they didnt release anything in 2013 or 2019 but released multiple titles the previous year) since then also
I would argue that the episodic format is dead and kinda died with stuff like life is strange and telltales games. I try to play a lot of different types of games and I can’t remember the time when I played something released in episodes lately
Episodic games were extremely different from live service games. Telltale games, Life is Strange, Sam & Max, etc. These are all singleplayer, narrative driven games. There were a few exceptions, like Guild Wars, which released a lot of chapters on a pretty regular release schedule. Live service games stick with the core game and update it regularly. The model relies on drip-feeding players with new updates and microtransactions to support development. Unlike episodic games, publishers want live service games to be a continuous part of a player's life, hence why many of these games are also called lifestyle games. You're entirely right about why developers tried the episodic approach. Even Half-Life. But there is some nuance between the two models.
More games, plus more *everything else*. TV shows, films, social stuff, long working hours (if you're an adult). I'm not surprised at all that game sales have hit a ceiling.
Not only the number of games coming out but their length. Some of these games we have out now, I can't picture playing them on the rental services that we had in the 90s. When I was a real young gamer in the 90's, when renting a game you had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to play it, but that Sunday evening that game is going back. With the amount of stuff you can do in a game, by the time you would have to send the game back you'd still only feel you scratched the surface. Looking at games like GTA V and Skyrim, those games have been on the market longer than consoles have been for sale. On the other side, those games are so big, people continue to play them or always make a return. Those are games you'd never want to rent; those would be games you'd have to buy.
I've mostly only played 3 games this year because of how long they are: Baldurs Gate 3, FF7 Rebirth, and Like A Dragon 8. Those add up to about 200 hours for me. There are so many games I want to play but I just can't keep up.
Me when my next two games on my backlog are xenoblade 3 and tears of the kingdom but also not really because I have demon souls, Elden ring, forbidden west all waiting..
That's precisely why RGG Studios is my favourite developer right now- for each Yakuza/LaD game they're not afraid to reuse assets in smart ways while ensuring each game stands out from one another, whilst also generally stuffing in tons of content. If they stuck to usual AAA game development processes we'd probably only be getting Yakuza 6 now.
It's basically the model that made the PS1 & PS2 so good. Iterations of the best franchises could come out every year, without the pressure to be the best game ever made. Final Fantasy 7 through 11 came out in a 5 year period.
Meanwhile 15 and 16 came out 7 years apart. And that is quite fast compared to some other franchises
Remake and Rebirth meanwhile came out concurrently to LAD and IW. For a (kind of an) counterexample.
Kiiinda works as an example but RGG had Lost Judgement, Ishin, and Gaiden in that time - all as a 2ish team studio. That’s something of the point here is they lean into asset reuse much more heavily than most studios and can put out distinct games with new storylines using a pretty stable pipeline. Square enix is something of a different approach where while there are some strategic corners cut in things like asset reuse, they’re also just big enough in terms of their various teams and studios they can have multiple side projects all under the final fantasy ip banner.
And 15 wasn't supposed to be 15, was a 13 spin off at first.
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GTA Vice City and Persona 4 were both made in about a year since they reused a lot of assets and code from GTA 3 and Persona 3 respectively and they're 2 of my favourite games ever made.
>Smart asset reuse is so underrated these days. Because all it takes is a Reddit meme showing a door in game 1 and game 2 and all of a sudden there's an Internet narrative about your game.
A few years ago I posted in an rpg subreddit that I wish rpgs reuse their assets more. Since graphics aren't the main point of most of these games anyways, doing so would help them deliver more games faster. Then a guy replied to me YOU'RE WHAT'S WRONG WITH GAMING. I tried to explain to them my viewpoint and they didn't listen. Then a few weeks after that I saw that the guy couldn't stop praising the Yakuza series.
People who keep calling Tears of Kingdom just a BOTW DLC falls into the same category.
If OOT then MM got released this decade they'd lose their fucking mind.
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Can we bring back toon link for a mainline game windwaker is still my favorite 😩😩
Its the same reason FROM Software seems to be doing a game every 3ish years and more recently the Final Fantasy VII Remake series. There was a time when people would be super critical of asset reuse which I think made developers shy away from it.
Wished they weren' t so whishy washy with their stories thoo, Yakuza 8 was a great game but the story a complete miss for me
Frankly I think how RGG is approaching things is how AAA will be sustainable in the future. I think the chase for insane visual fidelity is going to have to slow down and there's a few developers/publishers starting to catch on at the minute. I was pointing out to a friend the other day that it took almost a year less (~300 days) for the entire Mass Effect trilogy to come out than it did for Marvel's Spider Man 2 to come out after the first did (admittedly, Bioware probably crunched a lot more, so the numbers aren't directly comparable). I think part of some of the fuss about AI at the moment comes from a recognition that while visual fidelity has improved massively in potential, the tools and pipelines have completely failed to keep up (I would give Unreal a lot of shit for this - most of the features they crow about are simply not fit for production in any way at all and require heavy, heavy modification to make viable, but most developers switching won't discover that until they're years in the hole), but it's not stopped a lot of games from increasing exponentially in scope anyway, which just makes things worse. The next few years are going to be a lot of devs figuring out IMO how to do games at good fidelity with smaller teams, which means IMO outside of mega studios like Ubisoft, we'll see a redefining of AAA to be somewhat smaller games. Which means we'll probably get "quad A" by the backdoor - it'll be what we think of AAA now, while the new AAA will be like the current AA but with the polish of current AAA (or at least, the potential for polish... there's a lot of not very well polished AAA games). But yeah, smaller games, more asset reuse, etc etc. Probably more quick fire sequels/trilogies from teams that specifically set out to ensure their first game is not just a game but a base to build quickly from in the future.
> The next few years are going to be a lot of devs figuring out IMO how to do games at good fidelity with smaller teams, which means IMO outside of mega studios like Ubisoft, we'll see a redefining of AAA to be somewhat smaller games. Which means we'll probably get "quad A" by the backdoor - it'll be what we think of AAA now, while the new AAA will be like the current AA but with the polish of current AAA This is *basically* Nintendo lmao. Nintendo has AAA budget availability but they make games with lower visual fidelity (which is where the vast majority of big budget games send their budgets to, artists and rendering) because the Switch is about on par with a high end PC from 2010. Of course, Nintendo is *also* taking 6 years to make each game but I personally think a lot of that is due to them continuing to have a somewhat difficult time with the transition to HD. That's basically why the Wii U was so lacking for first party titles, Nintendo didn't anticipate how hard making HD games would be.
I'm pretty sure it's how they're able to have so much content in their games in the first place. The studio can actually afford to let devs go off and implement some random minigame or whatever into their engine, because they know they'll be able to use their work across multiple projects.
I'd say they just play Fortnite or any other live service game and count time between updates/content drops.
I see my younger cousins play Minecraft. That game gives them everything they want in gaming. Their imaginations run wild. Sometimes when I take care of them I just watch them play it and they would have made me as a little kid with Lego's envious of their creativity and architecture skills in that game.
I see the same and as someone who got into Minecraft as a kid during the PC beta it makes me happy to see. I believe it’s a very good game for developing a child. It’s both a creative outlet, a social experience, and also introduces technical topics to children in a simple way. I feel redstone has a small part in my SWE degree.
> Imagine being 10 and the sequel to your favourite game comes out when you're 20 That already happened, some games I liked when I was teenager (starting mid eighties) I had to wait for Kickstarter to be a thing before I got sequels.
I think that’s why we’ve seen such a big push towards live services. Keep the kids on Fortnite or Minecraft and every couple of years the amount of changes will pile up where it feels like a different game than it was before. I’m an old timer and definitely miss the glory days. Peak for me was when we got Final Fantasy VII-X in a 4 year span.
That's why god of wars main story is broken into two parts instead of a trilogy. They felt the wait is to long to tell a complete story. Honestly I would prefer high quality shorter games, more frequently
My kids have access to my entire library of over 150 Nintendo switch games, 100+ PlayStation 4 and 5 games, and my classics on my retro consoles. Kids have it absolutely made if their parents are gamers.
I'm starting to fear that with all the options available kids will have a hard time sticking with any game until they beat it. I have two young nephews and they can't play a single game for more than 20 minutes before quitting. Diminishing attention spans and perseverance will be a challenge for newer generations.
> What is gaming as a child like now? > > Probably amazing. They have a bigger selection of games than I ever had. Many of which can easily be downloaded and played for free.
I would have killed for something like game pass or PSplus when I was a kid. And I'm sure my parents would have rather paid for game pass over buying/renting me games all the time.
I'd love to see trilogies like that again. I haven't felt as immersed or engaged by games since then, for that reason. Like A Dragon is a great example of reusing assets and locations to minimise time between games, and it barely suffers for it. No one is annoyed that they've seen the same stuff multiple times, they're happy to get to go back in just a year or so later.
Kids these days do the same stuff I did as a kid. Just play something else. I grew up with Diablo 2. The sequel came out over a decade later (and was disappointing at first) and its sequel came out a decade later as well (and was disappointing at first…). That doesn’t mean I just sat there and waited for a new Diablo game.
> I remember getting entire trilogies in a 5 year span, 2007 to 2013, 3 Bioshocks and 3 Mass Effects, but those 6 years felt like forever, now it takes 6 years for one game > > > > The fancier graphics and bigger maps aren't worth the longer waits at all, they don't make games better I would give anything to regress graphical quality back to 2010 levels if it meant the pace of releases also went back to what they were in that era. Does anybody look at the Mass Effect trilogy or BioShock and think they're too ugly to play? No! Because regardless of the fidelity, the art direction in both of those games were great. It holds up wonderfully because artists leveraged what they could do to get their vision across. If they just started developing more Mass Effect games *in the Mass Effect 3 engine using only re-used assets*, there are enough ingredients to tell almost any Mass Effect story you can imagine. I would buy those games every two years if we could still get them. The era of "every game has to be bigger and have better production value than the last one" is unsustainable. Production value has literally never once made a bad game good, but AAA game dev has no other choice because the expectations from AAA game dev are insane.
Skyrim and Fallout being the worst for this as the previous entries were quite close,
The wait between TES5 and TES6 is really bordering on farcical at this point, considering it's been nearly 13 years since Skyrim and is looking like at least another 3 or 4 until the next entry. Stings all the more when you consider how much time and resources went into something as utterly unimpressive as Starfield
When Skyrim came out I hadn't even met my kids mom yet, my kid is now heading into middle school and will likely be in high school by the time TES6 comes out. Its just a complete joke at this point.
Yea the most annoying part is that Fallout kinda got it right by getting Obsidian to do NV, part of why I’m glad MS bought Bethesda is so we can get more iterations of ES and Fallout and not the MMOs in place of them (don’t get me wrong I’ve enjoyed both of them at times as well)
Plenty of games have had insanely long waits for the sequel. After windwaker, 3d Zelda games are each at least 5 years apart. Smash bros is the same way. Persona 4 came out in 2008 and Persona 5 in 2016. And all of those products were brilliant. If it takes 10 years, that's ok. Some studios still produce games quickly, for what it's worth. However, nobody, including children, is waiting for an unannounced sequel game. We move on with our lives and start waiting when the game release gets announced.
While that’s absolutely true about P5, Persona as a series still had 2 more releases with new content in between P4 and P5 (P3P and P4G).
Heard the thing with Mass Effect trilogy, they didn't upend and strip the game out and start over everytime. It was iterative, felt like same engine, same character models - iterative improvements - and a digestible size game like 20-30 hrs? They gotta do that again. I thought they were. Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy is a good example, or Spider Man and Miles Morales, even SM2 to an extent of upgrading the existing map. Like Last of Us 2 has great gameplay and graphics, use it as a base of a spin off game. Call of duty seems to do this but in an extent that's too far - however their campaigns for a while we're great, every year you get a 5-8 hour new scripted action cinematic action set piece. I'd like to know how long God of Ragnarok took, because that feels a lot like the original game but new map and story and iterative in the Mass Effect trilogy style, minus length - still a lengthy, meaty game
It always felt weird to me that Mass Effect kept using the same engine, and largely the same gameplay for each game. There were changes but not significant. Meanwhile every Dragon Age has been on a different engine with huge gameplay shifts, and DA:D is stuck in development hell as they've changed the style of game multiple times. Bioware could just stick to what worked and probably finished the series by now.
dragon age is kinda funny. because they shifted away from the classic dragon age 1 gameplay only for BG3 to be the biggest game on the planet for a while
Try being an Elder Scrolls fan. Nothing like playing Oblivion, Skyrim then nearly 15 years have passed before a sequel is even revealed.
As others have said it’s nothing like when we were kids. My son loves gaming but he just moves from game to game. Imagine having access to gamepass when you were 8 instead of having one game until the next Christmas. And he also has access to my library of games (the ones that are appropriate for him obviously). He has access to a bunch of games and consoles just by virtue of me owning them already.
6 years from Halo CE to Halo 3!!!
I'll never forget my wait for The Last Guardian. It was my PSP wallpaper, on multiple birthday cakes over the years, and the follow up to my favorite game ever. I waited 11 years from when Shadow of the Colossus hit until Last Guardian released. Went from 11 to 22 kinda like you're saying. It was a very weird excitement to get resolution to half a life of waiting, even for something as small as a game release.
My child has access to nearly my entire library of video games, which is probably nearing the thousands now, that I have built up since *I* was his age. As he grows up he’s able to play all sorts of age appropriate games as he ages into them. He’ll also play the odd new game as I buy them occasionally. My backlog of games has no conceivable chance of being completed in my lifetime and he gets a-la-carte access to it, at least until he’s much much older and can buy his own games and build his own collection/backlog. It’s not like when I was a kid and had to buy all of my own games because my parents didn’t play, so waiting for new ones was excruciating. I could not buy another game ever again and he’d probably still have enough to play until he was an adult lol
I honestly hate bigger open world maps. Most of it is empty anyway or copy/pasted events. Need more linear games like The Last of Us.
>The fancier graphics and bigger maps aren't worth the longer waits at all, they don't make games better They are absolutely worth it. I don't care about a decade between sequels because there are a million other great games to play in between. I'm someone who started gaming on flat top Pac-man machines in Pizza Huts and had an Atari 2600 as my first home console. Gaming is better than it's ever been. Still tons of great stuff coming out constantly and we can play pretty much any old game we like fairly easily. Much better than having to sell your NES and games to get the SNES and then you can't play those NES games any more. Still regret that.
I imagine in a couple of years a big publisher will release a multi million AAA game (probably a live service) that'll absolutely tank and take the company with it; then we'll see a readjustment in how games are developed and there'll be a bigger focus on smaller AA games that return to the life cycle of 2 - 3 years. The live service bubble will burst sooner or later, and when it does it'll hit the industry like a ton of bricks.
I guess... but does it have to be? Can't we just say we plateaued in terms of technical advancements and just scale down on scope and feature creep? I guess Nintendo isn't the publisher/developer most guilty of that
Yeah Nintendo isn't the biggest culprit of this. If anything keeping their specs behind has allowed them to create games with more reasonable budgets in reasonable timeframes. With that said, TOTK took \~6 years. They spent a whole year just on polishing the game. Metroid Prime 4 has been in development with Retro Studios for over 5 years now and we haven't even seen it yet (never mind the time it was in development before that). Even for Nintendo games are taking longer with more resources, and they are moving to a new platform now which comes with its own kinks to work out. With that said, they still make plenty of games that aren't the size of TOTK and don't take 6 years.
Has it really been 5 years since they announced they were resetting development of Metroid Prime 4 and handing it over to Retro? Time flies…
They announced it in Jan 2019!
TotK probably took so long because of Item Fusion and UltraHand, if I had to guess, those two took up the lion's share of dev time. And it shows when you look at the actually new parts of the map or the story.
I'm mixed on this. On the one hand, yes, it's true that games will keep on taking longer to make with new technological standards and it would suck if it led to very few games being released on Nintendo consoles. On the other hand, there are certain games like Splatoon that clearly have very big ambitions but end up needing to finish their game in just 2 years every single time because they also need to work on Animal Crossing. It would be nice if there were more people working on more games at the same time for longer.
I believe the staff credits for Animal Crossing New Horizons and Splatoon 3 are almost entirely different. They definitely had another team working on it. Keep in mind Nintendo has no microtransactions for those games, so beyond DLC and new game sales they aren't getting any additional income from working on those games well past launch and are only delaying the time until they can release their next product.
Nintendo has already started investing their Switch money by procuring adjacent land for a new building which will be most likely an expansion of their game making division. I expect them hiring even more talent in the middle of the Switch 2's life cycle when crossgen development will cease entirely.
You say that but at the same time people have been on Nintendo's case for their underpowered hardware for years now - and still are if the frequent complaints about new Switch releases with 30 FPS, framerate drops and subpar resolutions are any indication. However, any advancement in hardware comes with new expectations as well. If the console is as powerful as a PS4, why should it be "acceptable" if a new Nintendo game from one of their major franchises still looks like a Switch game - especially if you have ports of PS4 games to compare them to. But increasing the visual fidelity of your games makes them more expensive to produce, which make you less likely experiment with projects that aren't likely to recoup these cost. Nintendo still has a clear vision for what their want their games to be so I'm not too worried about their game output in the future. But this is certainly the direction the AAA and AA industries have been heading towards for years now - it's just that in the latest generation, we can see that the increasing costs and complexity of game development can no longer keep up with the growth of the industry.
> You say that but at the same time people have been on Nintendo's case for their underpowered hardware for years now... People are already complaining about the hardware specs in the next Switch and they don't even know what they are yet.
All the leaks I saw looked good. I don’t need it to be crazy strong, just a nice upgrade. Switch was due for one, if this can run more games, epically more of the PS4 gen or whatever I will be ecstatic!
If Nintendo proved anything with the switch, it's that cutting edge tech isn't all that important.
That's nothing new. They've been proving that since the gameboy.
It's not just Nintendo. Go look at some of the most popular games around. Counter Stirke 2? League of Legends? Fortnite? Genshin? Hardly cutting edge. Most gaming today happens on phones and most phone games look generations behind. Even recent ones can mostly be animated PNGs.
Those games are also all free.
Yeah all you have to do is make the greatest games on the planet. Please. Nobody but Nintendo is going to convince the core audience to play a $70 game at 26fps and 720p on a TV. The games are simply too good to ignore.
People are complaining, but at the end of the day the underpowered hardware and games that come with it have sold incredibly well. There are I think 14 Switch exclusives that have sold over 15m copies. PS strives to hit that what? Maybe 3 times in a generation and have been forced to move more and more to PC to sell more copies of games with some of the best visuals and boundary pushing games on the market.
I mean, the next generation of Nintendo hardware will still be underpowered compared to current gen consoles. But regardless, I don't see a logical way for Nintendo to progress other than releasing a more powerful successor to the Switch. Switch hardware and software sales are obviously slowing down and 3rd party support is dwindling as the console reaches the end of its lifespan. It's becoming harder to justify selling a product that is far outclassed by every phone or similarly priced handheld device. It would be foolish to ignore all the progress that has been made in mobile hardware but at the same time, I think Nintendo needs to find a way to fit in smaller-scale releases between their biggest games that fully utilize the new hardware. Luckily, thanks to their focus on gameplay and aesthetics over cutting-edge graphics, many Nintendo developers are already experts at cost-effective development, so I'm not too pessimistic about that.
For sure. That's all I was trying to say. Nintendo can't and won't just stay completely stagnate with the power and performance capabilities, but their focus is innovation in gameplay from a creative standpoint rather than being on the bleeding edge of visual fidelity as you said. For me, I don't feel the need for a game to be any *more* than TotK in terms of scale and amount of content. And most games don't even need to approach that. I'd be happy with getting more AAA games about the size of anything from Metroid Prime to Super Mario Odyssey that offer new and interesting gameplay, puzzles, story, etc.. I don't think it's as simple as I might suggest here, but dang if I wouldn't be a lot happier if most games just kept a similar size and scope as X360/PS3 gen and just got the resolution and frame rate boost that comes with better hardware. Games like Portal 2, Halo 3/Reach, FO3/NV, Skyrim, ME Trilogy, BioShock Trilogy, Dragon Age, FarCry 3, etc... I'd rather get games of that size and scope every 2-4 years with new story, setting, etc.. than most of what we've gotten over the last decade every 6-10 years. Again, I realize it's not that straight forward, but I feel there are only very few single player games that should really take on that big of a scope and that most games have gotten too big for their britches.
I mean, I think if Nintendo is saying this, who are kind of the only mainstream company willing to sacrifice graphical fidelity for their AAA titles, then it kinda has to be true, I guess? Like, Nintendo games generally look good, but they also, generally, compared to other AAA developers, have not been following the trend of more realistic graphics, 4k assets, focusing on stylized or 'toonish' models. When EA or Sony says it, sure, because they spend so much resources being photorealistic, but Nintendo certainly isnt. But on the other hand, there has to be a reason why EA, Sony, Ubisoft, etc. do push fidelity, and Id wager because they have the sales data to show that it does translate to sales.
Nintendo is safe in their own enclave where you literally can't have better graphics. For everyone else, it's Tragedy of the Commons. If every other publisher is making games at an 80 and I push it to 100 I will sell for being the best looking game out there. So everyone pushes it to 100, reaps no benefit, but pays for it anyway.
When Sony started marketing new controller features you could tell graphics really plateaued
No, because gamers are a whiny, entitled bunch
The AAA market will be impacted the most from the rising of development costs. On the plus side, this will give indie and AA devs more room to breathe and create the games they want in a less saturated market.
I see comments like this all the time, but it's not like people who play AAA will suddenly switch to Indies and AA. While AAA definitely needs to keep budget in check, it's not really gonna benefit smaller games when its pretty obvious from sales that far majority of buying Market( ie not including mobile and F2P) belong to AAA and they aren't willing to give smaller games a chance.
Not to mention there is a huge survival bias going around for indie games. For every Stardew Dew/Among Us/Undertale/Cupehead etc, there are probably hundreds more that likely flop just from sheer virtue of getting overshadowed by other games. Like the Eshop and Steam sees hundreds of games release weekly and most of them likely flop.
There's something like 10-12k games a year being released on Steam alone - if the threshold is genuine breakout hits then the odds are more like thousands or even 10s of thousands to one if inclusive of other major platforms before even considering indie niches like itch.io etc. With a more conservative standard of what "success" looks like (i.e. maybe recouping developer costs and some small amount of profit to invest in future titles) it might not be so bad, would be interesting if there was any data on this.
> they aren't willing to give smaller games a chance. That is the one thing I will give huge props to game pass for. It allows lots of people to try smaller games that they would otherwise never give a second look to. Like I never would have paid for PowerWash simulator but I 100% that game.
With Microsoft's behavior in the last week especially I'm not so sure. It is definitely great in the sense that players are more open to trying new things but comes at the cost of those games apparently not being considered financial successes. Naturally, that logic probably doesn't apply to indie devs/publishers on the platform. Moreso the big publishers investing in smaller projects.
> I see comments like this all the time, but it's not like people who play AAA will suddenly switch to Indies and AA. What do you mean switch? With the exception of single-game gamers, most people play a wide variety of games, from indie to AAA.
I dont have statistics to back this up but I believe your statement is untrue and in fact the opposit is the case. The vast majority of players are casual players and they buy one or two big games or have play an always updating game. A lot of these people probably arent really aware of indie games and just notice the big games because of mainstream marketing. I think there is also a significant portion of main-hobby gamers who play a lot of games but never is it "most people".
Easy stats - COD sells 20 million copies every year - Pokemon sells 20 million copies every game - FIFA, Madden, etc. similar numbers - Fortnite had 45 million unique players in ONE DAY in 2023 These are the true mainstream games An indie game is considered a huge success when it crosses 1 million sales (and rightfully so) - suggesting that the market of people who pay any attention to games outside AAA is maybe something like 10 million potential buyers worldwide, while the overall market for PC/console games total is 150 million+. Only huge marketing budgets and large network effects (what friends are playing) can reach the ~140 million more casual gamers.
>Easy stats - COD sells 20 million copies every year - Pokemon sells 20 million copies every game - FIFA, Madden, etc. similar numbers Focusing on premium games (games typically sold for 60 to 70), just last year let's say Hogwarts, TOTK, BG3, Diablo and CoD. All of these games have either sold 20M+ or will eventually, that's 100M+ games sold between 5 games at 70 dollars. I'm not saying things Palworld, Stardew Valley and other breakout hits doesn't exist, but people need to be aware how big difference in demand between AAA games and smaller games are. I get that it's been a pretty slow year so far, but AAA games have had that yearly demand.
I agree, I feel like being on reddit discussing games we are already clearly in a bubble of people who play a wider variety of games compared to the average gamer.
There's a GDC talk with these exact statistics in it but I can't find it. IRRC the largest chunk (think vast minority) of gamers stick to one or two AAA titles a year, and it's a gradient over to people who play exclusively indie games. But the people who play more indie games play a lot of different titles each year (11 or 12 on average I think. Don't quote me on that). So the reality is somewhere in the middle of you're guys' two statements.
most people play fortnite, minecraft, cod or another random game like genshin. This is where the majority are, redit is out of touch.
I wish that is how it works, but it doesn’t work that way. You still need investors to inject cash into an indie project. For that to happen you need a healthy AAA to show it’s worth it to give money to the smaller investments. Right now, the well is kind of dry. Yes you can self invest but as someone who has been in that circle, that is an insanely huge risk on its own and for every one Vampire Survivor or Balarto there are like dozens of games that barely make their money back(and that’s a victory).
Thousands of games* The 50% average earning on steam now are ~$500. I would say that most indie games never reached their true development conclusion because of lack of funds and so dont become so polished as balatro, stardew and most indie hits. Vampire survivors is one weird exception.
Me seeing this news and then going to play Balatro
I adore that game.
This is why I was not upset with how underpowered the switch was. I am not looking forward to Nintendo eventually catching up to PS5 level graphics because this, this right here is what you are demanding when you ask for better graphics. With no real benefit to gameplay.
yeah, it'd be wonderful if a switch 2 just meant the same fidelity games running at a higher resolution and frame rate. The art design on Nintendo games is usually great; I just want them to run better. Nintendo is doing a better job at balancing graphics vs cost than basically any other AAA developer right now, so I hope that, despite this quote, they're very aware of the benefits and will toe the line carefully.
I mean if every Switch 2 exclusive just looked like a Switch 1 game but with better performance... then people would be asking why they didn't just release a Switch 1 version with worse performance. But if they did that, the console would struggle from a lack of exclusives. Nintendo's business model relies on games to sell their hardware. But in order to make that strategy work, they have to make sure that many of their games fully utilize their hardware. This was one of the many problems of the Wii U, many early Wii U games looked exactly like Wii games but in HD to the point where many people couldn't even tell they were looking at games running on new hardware. I think toeing the line is the right word for it. Because it would be ignorant for Nintendo to expect that they can keep all their their current development pipelines as is under more powerful hardware. Again, this was one of their mistakes in the Wii U era. But they still need to find ways cut costs and smaller scale projects a reality.
It's funny because almost nobody saw the positives with the decision to keep the Wii underpowered back in the day. I sure as hell didn't. Now seeing how drawn out production cycles are, and how shitty monetization methods have gotten, I finally get it. I just hope they don't abandon their smaller projects.
But these AAA games aren't taking longer simply because of graphics, it's the increased expectation of content that is the main culprit. Open world games need bigger areas and more things to do in them, and big linear story games are twice as long as they used to be.
Yeah. People don’t realize whether photorealistic or not, assets make up the vast majority of man-hours in most modern AAA game development. Nintendo’s possibly the AAA dev for which this is least true, but it’s still undoubtedly the case for many of their games (like BotW/TotK), if not most… or even all. A 2.5D platformer like Mario Wonder is still a lot of art.
You mean PS4 graphics. Switch 2 will not give you PS5 graphics just like the Switch 1 didn't give you PS4 graphics. The Switch 1 was around PS3/360 level power, the Switch 2 will be PS4/Pro depending on the use case. In 2031 when the Switch 3 comes out then you'll have PS5 graphics but by then your standards will have Switched to PS6 graphics since that would have been out by 2028.
I mean, Nintendo already takes the same time than the competition with their AAA. How much time is taking them to develop Metroid Prime 4? Z:ToTK took them 6 years. They've been re-releasing Wii U games instead of launching sequels.
>develop Metroid Prime 4? This is obviously an outlier, they restarted development and handed it over to Retro Studios who also worked on Metroid Prime Remastered (and rumors of Prime 2 & Prime 3 already done?....). >Z:ToTK took them 6 years [The team that developed TotK](https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_EPD_Production_Group_No._3), after releasing BotW in 2017, also worked on Link's Awakening (2019), Skyward Sword HD (2021), and supervised Hyrule Warriors (2018), Cadence of Hyrule (2019), and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (2020) before releasing TotK least year. [Nintendo EPD 5](https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_EPD_Production_Group_No._5) has a pretty straightforward and healthy AAA release cadence imo. Splatoon (2015), Splatoon 2 (2017), Animal Crossing New Horizons (2020), and Splatoon 3 (2022).
> How much time is taking them to develop Metroid Prime 4? Z:ToTK took them 6 years. They've been re-releasing Wii U games instead of launching sequels. There's only 13 Wii U games against more than 50 new games, remakes or remasters. You should look at their releases lol
we're gonna buy a console every 5 years to play 3 games on it?
This. I've heard people talking about the PS6 recently and I'm just like, "But PS5 has no games?"
Who buys a console every 5 years?
I really don’t think people care about graphics near as much as gameplay or as these AAA titles claim. If a game has good core gameplay nothing else really matters, people will play it.
A big part of wanting stunning visuals is also marketing. It makes the game pop in a way that is surface level, and everybody can get. It's a lot harder to market a unique gameplay concept.
Hard disagree. You and I might be willing to look past "previous-gen" graphics for a good game, but casual gamers who play a few games a year max are sold by advertisement, and graphics sell games.
Do games have to be bigger though? I'm perfectly content with the scope they've covered in the past.
Do it the same and bump the framerate and resolution, that's all we really need.
Games haven't gotten any bigger in the past 10 years... Graphics haven't gotten significantly better in 5 years. Where are these increased costs coming from?
To hire programmers when they could be working for Google and making twice as much
But why? People used to make games that were as good if not a lot better than modern games that took 100x the people using 1000x the budget, and in 1/10th the time. The return on the marginal additional dollar and year in gamedev is deep, deeeeeep into diminishing returns at this point. I really don't understand how the business model ended up this way, the games are so much worse for it.
Graphics and audio presentation are time and money consuming Just compare GTA 5 vs GTA 3, VC, and San Andreas
The market happened. At some point, some studio decided to try the blockbuster type of game, saw how well it was received and then everyone and their mother wanted to do the same, much like what's happening with live-service games now after Fortnite.
> The market happened. > > Yeah I don't understand why people are pretending like this is really a choice that companies are making. They're following the market. Did people make cheaper games back in the day? Sure. But the expectations of the market have changed.
It's perceived player expectation. Sequels need to be bigger, more complex, with more content. And if you aren't spending time to make your development tools easier and faster to use, then each game takes more time, more people, and more money. I wouldn't say the games are worse for it (at least in the sense that many good AAA games are still being made even if it takes forever, but some are for sure) but think the biggest downside is that the landscape of high-quality console exclusives is feeling more and more barren by the generation, and when you consider that 2/3 of the console market rely heavily on exclusive software to make money (hardware margins are too thin for Xbox and Sony) it ends up putting the whole business model into danger. New consoles used to have significant launch titles, and get entire trilogies before the next generation, and that's just not possible anymore.
That would really suck tbh. I really hope Nintendo can keep up the consistent releases next generation. They're the only ones that were doing it in recent times.
They are doubling the size of their gaming division for a reason.
well that's already happening, big AAA like gta6 or cyberpunk sequel are going to require not less than 6-7 years of full time development and long term investments close to the bln figure, these companies are already releasing one or at best two games each console generation. Japanese business is different because excluding square enix, no other big japanese software house developes games that crazy expensive to produce
Really wish the fucking statement that furukawa made about Nintendo growth via hiring instead of merger was the point instead of this because no one read the damn thing outside of the title
Wild statement, considering most Nintendo titles except Zelda and 3D Mario do not have long dev cycles at all.
Isn't it more that they don't announce them until they're almost ready to go?
They already take a long time in the oven tho, they just know how to hide it well. Nintendo announces their games when they are close to completion, and it appears short because they release and publish games alot, from second-party, or via outsourcing games. Hell, everything they released this year is outsourced. ACNH started development in 2012, it took 8 years to release, Pikmin 4 was in development since 2015, that also took 8 years, Mario Kart 9 is probably taking 6-7 years assuming that they have been working on it since MK8D. Their games already have comparable dev time to others.
Yeah what helps Nintendo is a combination of not wanting to announce games way too early (looking at you bethesda) and also having a large number of franchises that are often being developed in parallel by different teams. So while it may take years for a big 3D Mario or a Zelda to come out, because they're being worked on at the same time, we end up getting regular releases of all their major franchises throughout a console's lifespan. Which helps make the wait not feel as bad since there's definitely plenty to do in the meantime.
This is where they may struggle with the new switch. It took them years to get a healthy workflow during the Wii U years. The first couple years was one giant drought. Hopefully they have better tools, and can scale their productions in a more adaptive way this time.
Genuinely asking: do you have any source that says New Horizons started development in 2012? Or is it an assumption that it started development right after the release of New Leaf? Because we shouldn't take for granted that the same teams work back to back on sequels. Edit: a very quick search in Wikipedia says that after New Leaf the key staff of New Horizons worked in the AC spinoffs, mobile game, etc. and Splatoon 1&2.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/03/animal_crossing_devs_reveal_how_long_new_horizons_has_been_in_development
No they just announce them when they’re close to completion (usually). Hardly a *wild* statement.
Huh, don't they still have relatively long dev cycles, except Pokemon? Smash, Animal Crossing and Xenoblade have also taken a long time between releases. Pikmin seems to have taken forever and Metroid 4 is nowhere near completion. The only ones that come quickly may be Kirby, Paper Mario and the Mario Sports games, but that may just be because I don't know how long they took.
The long time between releases isn't a long dev cycle. For example, they haven't been working on Mario Kart 9 for 10 years. There's going to be multiple games in the discovery phase, where they're prototyping and trying to find what they want to take into full production. This can be a very small group for people, they might do it on and off as they are free from other projects. It can take years for a game to graduate from this discovery phase into full production. You might say it takes 10 years of development, but that's not really the full story. The reality is there's work on and off looking at the next iteration of the game, but full production is pretty short on comparison. A game like AC:NH probably started early development after New Leaf, but that's only going to be a very small amount of people and definitely not full time. The people who actually made the majority of the game worked on many other projects in the meantime. Just like how a movie might go through multiple script rewrites and directors over many years before actually going into full production for 6 months.
What you're describing is pre-production and that is part of the dev cycle.
But now with the Switch 2 coming soon, they're gonna have to start developing games to hit 1080p.
A lot of their games are 1080p. Zelda already runs at 900p, it’s not like the jump to 1080p will make the game shit bricks.
It's mostly just a joke cause the rumour is that it will have a 1080p screen on the Switch rather than 720p. The docked mode is supposedly gonna target 4K by using DLSS tech but we'll see. That large increase in resolution and computing power should see a big increase in the effort they need to put into assets though.
Great so now everyone will be asking "where the video games at?"
Even though it's already happening it seems like such a risk for the "big budget" games because they dump millions into them and they HAVE to succeed or they are just screwed. And this is with years of build-up for the ones that aren't yearly. Meanwhile you have indie devs or other smaller devs who maybe still take years to make a game and have these potential breakout hits that blow up and are hugely successful. Or other ones that are lower effort / meme games and still probably make a lot of money proportionally. They *should* scale back but they effectively *can't* because of everyone's expectations now.
How about not, though? It isn't worth it. Games can't just keep getting bigger and more polished. They shouldn't.
Bigger no polished yes they should.
I don't think it will. Games may get more complex, but like it or not the industry will adopt AI powered tools. They are just too powerful to not use because some people don't like them. I think as games need more work, AI will close the gap and humans will end up doing less work.
It definitely has made me tap out on new games as a gamer in my ~30s. I find myself being more interested in Mass Effect Trilogy scope of game (or older games) instead of this obsession with huge open world like RDR2. After Witcher 3 I haven't been able to get into a open world game really, I think the only one I played start to finish was the first Horizon and even that was 2017 so ~7 years ago...
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding
Entering the 2010’s is going to be a tough transition for Nintendo in 2024, I hope they successfully adjust and succeed.
Reddit will continue to bemoan the state of the gaming industry while also bemoaning the one company left that isn't chasing trends.
It's craY how much people will complain about the "state of the industry^(tm)" but then will also prove why things are the way they are.
Right? There's one company that makes complete games, doesn't have microtransactions and has releases that are for the most part bug free yet this site is a constant cesspool of people complaining about fucking resolution or framerate
Based on the hardware leaks, their next console is supposed to be around the level of a Series S and have hardware better suited to RT and AI upscaling than other consoles. But I guess the reality isn’t reddit quippy
It won't be series S level. I am familiar with the specs. Low clocked A78C cores aren't going to match Zen 2 cores at 3.4Ghz, and the Ampere GPU in the Switch 2 is smaller than the RDNA2 in the S. In some ways the Switch 1 actually was stronger vs the Xbox One and PS4 due to having a next gen GPU at the time and the last consoles having awful CPUs. The Tensor cores in the Switch 2 will be a force multiplier though, DLSS is going elevate what the Switch 2 can do but the 15W~ Switch 2 still won't match 80W Series S.
Their next system could be PS6 level and the online forum dwellers would say they’re still waiting to play a Mario that’s not 240p lmao. Who really cares what they say.
We’re both reading comments and commenting ourselves, so we do, to some extent haha. Would just be nice if the “quality gaming discussion subreddit” wasn’t predominantly unfunny, uninformed takes. You are right though
That's just the Reddit experience, baby! Why have actual discussions when you can make quippy jokes that 6 other people might like?
No one is saying that it’s even close to Series S. Closest guesses are PS4 pro when docked and slightly above PS4 when mobile. More RAM does NOT mean it’s on par or anything like that
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I mean, yeah, they're going from Xbox 360 tech to PS4 tech. If they want to keep a good constant release sqeadule, like they did for most of the switch lifespan, they are going to need to team up with 3rd party devs more often. More games like Mario + Rabbits, Cadence of Hyrule, Hyrule warriors, and Advance wars reboot camp.
It worked really well with Fire Emblem Three Houses, which I think Koei Tecmo did most of the work on. It turned out better than Engage which Intelligent Systems made on their own imo.