So in television, at first animation was cheap and live action was expensive, so animation was for children’s shows and garbage. Eventually the costs flipped, and now there are “prestige animation” shows and movies like Arcane or whatever.
In video games, photorealistic has been the goal and hyper stylized the realm of mobile trash forever. Increasingly though, photogrammetry, gaussian splatting, and texture generation is getting so cheap/easy that even a solo dev can have borderline-perfectly-photorealistic static and background objects, and metahuman has trivialized the process of making photo-perfect characters.
I think within the next 1-3 years photorealism is finally going to stop being seen as the holy grail, and there are going to be award-winning AAAs with full on cartoon and watercolor aesthetics.

>>717194039 (OP)
no, there will be even more push towards extreme realism and vr everything because cattle will be forced indoors forever

>>717194690
Depressing

>>717194039 (OP)
>Yes, Balatro won Game of the Year at the 25th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA)
Cool fucking story bro. Let me tell you something, whatever threads you think are happening, you are at least 5 years too late, if not more.

>>717197735
Balatro is an indie. I’m talking about AAAs.