Big budget games have all but killed the gaming industry.
People seem to be finally waking up to the reality of unsustainably large video game budgets, but sadly it's a decade too late.
In a new article for The New York Times, Rami Ismail explains how and why the focus on high-end graphics created an unsustainable budget arms race and severely damaged the gaming industry .
He's absolutely right, but this is what I've been writing about since 2015.
The widespread and ongoing layoffs in the gaming industry are also caused by runaway budget issues, but what's happening now started a decade ago.
The production cycle of modern games is 7-8 years, and many games are even longer. As a result, the decisions and investments in the games we see today were made nearly a decade ago.
This is a problem because as gaming hardware graphics performance increases, the requirements to meet this requirement increase logarithmically. Forbes also has an excellent analysis of this issue, provided by former Valve developer Stephen Theodore.
So the layoffs we're seeing now are a means for publishers to pay back their funding layers, and they're understandably angry about not getting a return on their previous investment.
Granted, firing developers to pay the investors who funded publishing is a bit like chopping off your legs while trying to escape a raging lion, but most publishing executives are pretty stupid.
The maddening thing is that this situation is entirely avoidable. There was never a need to spend huge amounts of money on game development; it was a choice made by people in the publishing industry in order to expand a business that was actually based on a hit.
This is the main reason why Silicon Valley's funding layers are still a little confused and confused about the game. They are used to funding technology startups of unlimited scale and beyond. Games simply use technology to facilitate creative and cultural output, which can be very hit or miss in a business sense.
Beyond that, the future of gaming is now in a precarious position. Mass layoffs resulted in the loss of significant institutional expertise and knowledge. While this loss won't be immediately noticeable, it will certainly cause problems for years to come.
Granted, if funding layers wisely start funding developers directly and letting them self-publish, this could bring back many of the recently lost technologists. Not to mention eliminating unnecessary middlemen in the publishing industry. However, I'm not too optimistic about this because of the layer of money that funded this big budget crap in the first place.
Ideally, we need to push for the return of successful mid-range games on the PlayStation 2.
Now, I guess I should take solace in the fact that the warnings I've been sounding for the past decade are finally starting to be heard.
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