This post comes to you out of a conversation I had with a coworker today, the day after my employer Iron Galaxy laid off 66 people, or about a quarter of the company. I believe leadership when they say this was a "last resort" and I think the layoffs themselves were handled about as not-horribly as possible. But I don't think they were inevitable -- I don't think any of the game industry layoffs over the past two years were inevitable.
At a minimum, executives of various massive publishers could've given up a fraction of a percent of their wealth to prevent most of the layoffs. They didn't. More broadly, and what I've been processing today, is that the industry at large could have slowed or reversed its course toward ever more expensive (and exploitative) games. AAA gaming is overrun with live-service time sinks, military propaganda shooters, and gambling simulators aimed at children. Adding one more ring to whatever layer of hell we're in, recent weeks have seen reports about the rise of app-based sports betting among teens, particularly teen boys. These apps are not unrelated to the mainstream games industry, where gacha and loot-box mechanics are now practically standard practice.
But focusing back in on the scale and expense of AAA game production itself. The omnipresent culture of secrecy and hyper-competitiveness in gamedev continues to bloat development costs through the absence of shared tools, standards, and practices. The graphics race is over for all practical purposes, but tech companies continue to desperately market new "features" that expend tremendous amounts of energy to either do nothing in particular, or actively make graphics look worse. We've reached the top of the graphics race escalator and instead of stepping off we're being dragged down into the crack at the top.
Anyway, I was messaging my coworker and eventually reached this thought:
(I changed the post title to say Xbox 360 because, of course, no one actually wants to develop for the PS3.)
Swap in some PS4 graphics if you want, but the point is still clear. This is my version of the "I want shorter games with worse graphics..." post advocating for cheaper, shorter projects that (in theory) result in no crunch. But beyond improved labor conditions I'm interested in seeing companies return to embracing the immense amount of iteration and ideation that happened in the 2000s, most notably on the wildly pouplar and relatively straightforward PS2 and Xbox 360 platforms. With general purpose engines these days we could replicate those conditions outside the indie space if we wanted to! Contrary to current publisher wisdom, I believe 3 small, iterative projects is artistically (and maybe even commercially) more viable than one ultrapolished behemoth. In terms of cost and scale we can't all make the next Elden Ring, but I think there's room (and player desire) for productions like Earth Defense Force.
All this is pretty obvious to anyone who's looked from the outside into the game industry in the last ten years or so. Obviously something was going to give; obviously we need to pump the brakes and figure out what a sustainable industry looks like in pure terms of costs and production practices. But I also believe, and am interested in putting to the test, that people can sense authenticity in a piece of art and that there are a lot of people who want to buy AA-scaled games that are unabashedly sincere.
Authenticity can look a lot of different ways in games. A sense of unrestrained silliness, an extensive, uncompromising point of view, a distinct artistic choice, or an instance of unique experimentation. Signs of life, as it were. Being able to, in dozens of ways identifiable or not, pick up the controller and feel the pulse of the developer. Most "game feel" conventional wisdom is misguided, not least because it preaches a formula rather than an ethos of creativity. The absolute best moments playing even the dullest games is finding those little interactions that some dev somewhere clearly thought through and spent time on. Who knew that humans connect on an intuitive level with displays of passion for a craft?
The soft power of authenticity is something you can't enter into a spreadsheet, but what are we even doing if peopple can't tell we had a blast making something? What are we doing if our games are so massive you can no longer find the pulse?
