Thread 720368340

Does /v/ know the real reason

Diversity hires.

Diddy parties at the office

jews

>>720368340 (OP)
F

Because devs like me spend 80% of their time fapping while "working from home"

a group that hasnt even progressed to the toilet age is expected to make video games in accordance to businessmen in suits specifications. of course it will take longer.

>>720368340 (OP)
Bloated with unnecessary garbage
that includes the studio too

>>720368340 (OP)
Indie shit because of this >>720368481 and early access scams

AAA titles because they have like 10 studios accross all continents with diversity hires, constant emails, constant meetings, constant changes with the shareholders, nothing gets done, and this also applies to movies

>>720368340 (OP)
Muh gwaficks

>>720368340 (OP)
theres several reasons for it but many are too embarrassing for the industry to discuss. there isn't a willingness to discuss it because the devs themselves perpetuate many of the causes for longer dev cycles

indians outsourcing. People cant imagine how much time is lost in mails and meetings to explain the project needs to people who barely speak english

>>720368629
And then there's also marketing which is most of the budget in all titles now like in movies. Then there's games that get remade entirely because what was popular then it's not popular anymore so they try to copy whatever's popular now

>>720368340 (OP)
Feature creep

>>720368340 (OP)
small part of it is that there's just more stuff that goes into a game but i reckon one of the biggest reasons is agile workflow
it's a system that literally subsides on creating infinite managerial roles and meetings that could have been emails under the pretense of a "communal approach"
the amount of time wasted on agile reports & workflow reshuffling when you consider that games have thousands of people working on them easily has to go into the weeks by the time a game's finished but it's seen as absolutely necessary so that each of the four million layers of management has a spreadsheet to show their managers and so forth

>>720368340 (OP)
Tools to create great graphics have stalled below the demand which causes a lot of time and staff bloat to be spent making specific extremely high quality models for everything in the game rather than working on anything else, and investing money in 3rd party firms to make graphics for them.
This leads to a mess of the game becoming a huge technical endeavor to get everything working while ingame systems, story and other features can feel underdeveloped.

Corporate culture is also fucking awful for making games, and has led to pointless an incoherent and unreliable "gameplan" for getting games to release. Instead suits will just dump more money and more time on it and promise investors it'll be a success because of it, while not understanding AAA games that take so long to come out are because of serious potentially unfixable issues, not because it just requires extra time to tweak something to be perfect.

AAA games would see an incredible jump in overall quality and turn around time if they relied on timeless graphical options rather than "more hyper realistic than last years most hyper realistic game" and used a more focused direction for the game that was stuck to instead of reinventing the game over and over.

>>720368340 (OP)
Inflated budgets and a need to be “the next GTA/Skyrim/Red Dead etc.”. Any other answer is wrong.

If devs stopped blowing millions on open world games with cutting edge graphics and instead made tighter and more focused games, they would come out quicker.

>>720368340 (OP)
There is no economic incentive to release timely products anymore. That’s the core of the issue. DEI, women in the workforce, lazy devs, obsessions over graphics, all of these things would disappear if every dev had a gun to their head and the order to finish the game (and finish it well) in 2 years.

The real reason according to the article is that the bar for quality has risen dramatically and that LE EPIC GRAFIX take ages to maek

Jason Schreier blames it on mis management. Entire studios will spend two years "workshopping" ideas without concrete orders and vision. Nobody wants to pull the plug or start real development on anything because that means taking responsibility for that decision.

Scope bloat, every game needs to be every genre and have all its assets built from scratch even though old ones could serve fine
Team bloat, all the big studios fell for the meme of nine women making a baby in one month when big teams actually slow things down through coordination inefficiency
Brain drain, studios don't bother to retain their experienced employees since they don't feel like paying them what their experience is worth and replace them with new hires so they're eternally losing time training people

>>720368340 (OP)
Lower attention spans

the real reason is that you can finish an animated mario 64 model in a single day,

Meanwhile a modern AAA character can take 6 people working full time for 4-6 months.

So, the issue is the graphical autismo of realism.

Coding is not really an issue, neither music, because shit like starfield can be made with 5 programmers in 1-3 months using placeholders.

>>720368764
it's honestly fucking tragic that if you're looking for like the equivalent of an "A" gaming experience you're entirely limited to whatever gamemill shits out and like maybe a once in a blue moon indie title
this shit is why snoys will never, ever get stuff like a new ape escape or whatever, it's not something that'll make the news for making it feel like aloy is really sucking you off in real life so it's seen as a waste of money and time
which is funny because the actual wastes of hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man hours are written off as necessary
it's rotten from the top down

>>720368340 (OP)
The bloat phase of capitalism.

It's corporate bloat and dogshit management. Everything needs to pass through a million different hands and get the green light before any work can be done because it's all a giant inefficent business machine that nobody really understands. When there's like 20 guys who all know eachother and everyone knows what other people do, productivity skyrockets, not because they have to work harder, but because everyone knows what their role is and what needs to be done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFHKEATnmB4

>>720368951
>Meanwhile a modern AAA character can take 6 people working full time for 4-6 months.
no way that is true

>>720368340 (OP)
DEI policies and lazy incompetent devs

>>720368340 (OP)

Most of the time its publishing holding everything back by speculating and demanding "how can we make this make THEM spend more money?"

Everyone likes to blame management for problems in every field but when you leave people to manage themselves they can't focus and actually produce anything. Look at what happens when creative visionaries are cut loose from their handlers. Their new games are either garbage or never come out.

>>720368340 (OP)
> Does /v/ know the real reason

Have you seen any of those fucking videos where they show off what these devs do in a entire day in their AAA gaming company? They work for like 1 hour and the rest of the day is them just eatting or relaxing.

If those fuckers work 1 hour everyday in their 8 hour workshift... it's no fucking wonder they need thousands of coders for one game a billion dollar budget.

>>720368951
>Meanwhile a modern AAA character can take 6 people working full time for 4-6 months.
that's not true at all
>So, the issue is the graphical autismo of realism.
yet games like totk still take 7 years to make despite having none of that and using 99% already existing assets

so much investment on retarded graphics and technology at the detriment of gameplay mechanics and length of the game. Most of the budget is going to graphics that dont contribute to more gameplay

It doesnt matter which genre you look at. Just look at the recent releases. Compare Dread, a shallow ass 8 hour game, and Silksong with its piles of content, runtime, secrets, bosses at higher quality. Dread is comically short and shallow.
Fromsoft dominates 3d action adventures in large part because they kept their sheer graphics relatively simpler and put the big budget towards things that translate into gameplay (notable example: AC6 animations)
Zoom the slop ages is retardly shallow and short, Ultratroon on the other hand is a much bigger game with far more levels and features than 99% of the character action genre before its even finished

Ive seen how talks are in the average big-graphics studio. They end up spending such an autistic ammount of time talking about fancy effects, their shitty optimization, superfluous garbage, pointless physics as opposed to gameplay affecting physics. Eventually the whole game is a convoluted PITA to work with and they get stuck worrying far more about producing sheer assets and testing individual garbage instead of caring about the game as a whole. You have animators working on shit at complete random often without thinking of how it actually fits the gameplay, three billion bits of things being made at once, and so much stupid shit
Fromsoft doesnt do that. Theyre always in a much more straightforward "lets make these fights" "lets focus on this area" "lets just make these assets specifically for what we are working with" "make these models for the future but lets keep the expensive part until we are making the gameplay related to it"

>>720368340 (OP)
>shitty tools - maya max and blender are still 20 something year old crap with same bugs
>shitty engines - unreal and unity don't scale well for large projects and nobody bothers to make better engines
>working with college grads and not cultivating talent - game development is brute forced by amateurs
>no planning whatsoever - no prototypes or any sort of preliminary research

>>720368340 (OP)
>Chasing higher graphical fidelity despite ever greater diminishing returns and hits to performance
>Trying to craft epic stories for the sake of it
>Trying to find ways to force monetization into everything

>>720369089
You don't need management, you need restrictions
The best restriction is "you will starve if you don't release something". All the creative visionaries cut loose you're thinking of have unlimited money

>>720368781
there are still studios that know how to put out games at a certain pace. raven software has been very good at putting out games at a certain pace since the early 2000s, and they apparently do it without too much horrible abuse or crunch (they have been noted to be one of the better places to work in games)

really i think it's largely the approach and company culture. tim cain summed it up with the game development caution video

>>720369031
An AAA model just sculpting can take a single week of work.

Retopo can take likely 3 days.

Texturing can take up like 5 days.

The issue is that AAA games will take multiple team revisions, so the model will be scrapped and remade from scratch around 3-4 times.

Also, you need now to photoscan an actor, and send the files to a diferent continent for a diferent artist to work on a single step.
And also another actor mocap shit.

>>720369125
totk is an open world game.

So yes, still an issue of having "VISUALS" as in thousands of assets to be remade.

non-White employees

>>720368340 (OP)
the fire in the belly

>>720368340 (OP)
Bloated staff size and multiple "support studioes" means less time making and more time wasted in meetings, consultations and checking in with other studios.

The shit that makes normies buy games (photorealism, high profile actors, motion capture) is hard to fund and make

>>720368340 (OP)
Bloated Dev teams I reckon. You go from a handful of guys in a garage with a clear enough vision, to hundreds of people all across the globe doing God knows what, wasting all sorts of dev hours.

>>720369137
People like you are the problem and haven't realized it yet.

>>720368879
>the jew actually makes a valid point
Well I guess he can be right twice a day.

>>720368340 (OP)
Passionate people have been driven off the industry.

>>720368978
>if you're looking for like the equivalent of an "A" gaming experience you're entirely limited to whatever gamemill shits out and like maybe a once in a blue moon indie title
"A" budgets are things like Yakuza up until 7 and even then you could argue they're still in some interim between A and AA just because of how much they still reuse. You will constantly find A-budget games from Japan and even lower end indies. Metal Slug Tactics, Dave the Diver, Mad Rat Dead, and the Crayon Shin-chan games that play like Boku no Natsuyasumi are very simple examples I can point to that are clearly not indie and have way less of a budget than AA.

Western studios tend to err to the side of Indie and AA with little A games while Japanese studios tend to float around A and AA games with less Indies and AAAs.

>>720369276
biggest normie games have been like roblox, minecraft and fortnite

the only people who obsess over graphics are mid 30s sony moviegame enjoyers who are a pretty small group all things considered. companies just like courting them because they have a lot of money and it supports the idea that games could be a cultural phenomenon and not just bing bing wahoo stuff

>>720368340 (OP)
diversity hires and third world outsourcing, coupled with corporate administrative bloat, shareholder pandering, and cash grabs e.g. "revenue streams", rather than video games being made entirely locally by competent, passionate gamers making the games they want to play.

>>720368340 (OP)
They're inserting wokeness in the process

>>720369439
>who are a pretty small group all things considered.
anon those sony moviegames are the largest and most successful franchises in gaming. there's a reason corporations chase them instead of continuing to fund smaller studios with passion projects.

>>720369089
source? You sound like you either made it up or are just repeating something everyone says without proof because somebody else said it

>>720368689
>have a call with a poo explaining what is needed
>"yes, yes, yes saar, I understand, I'll do the needfull, thank you saar"
>2 weeks later absolutely NOTHING happened
>can't contact them again
>2 more weeks later something suddenly happens and the "job is done"
>test it
>it's so incredibly wrong that it might just as well be some completely different work package he did
>call and explain again
>repeat this whole process at least for times
>finally the function does what it actually should do
Working with the street shitters makes everything take at least 10 times longer.
I know the job could've been done in about 2 weeks, but this shitter took 6 months. And I say "this" shitter, but in reality I was talking to a different jeet every time, worth no explanation what happened to the previous one (probably got eaten by a train).
And after 10 times the length it was finished and did what it should do, but holy fuck I'm actually glad I wasn't allowed to see the code they frankenstein'd together.

I could only stomache that for half a year, then I seitched to a different company. Just yesterday a colleague informed me that my old company now wants to outsource repetitive business tasks as well. I can only imagine what those retards will do once they start outsourcing the accounting.

over 9000 consultants

>>720368394
fpbp
/thread

>>720368340 (OP)
modern games requires more staff because graphix and mandatory 20 hour play time, and more staff means slow communication

because they hire indians instead of white men

>>720369673
>anon those sony moviegames are the largest and most successful franchises in gaming
didn't know pokemon, call of duty and candy crush were sony movie games

>>720368978
become a solo gamedev if you like games of that scale

Why do studios spend millions on these massive AAA projects that take 5+ years to make rather than smaller budget titles that can be released quickly?

You can recover if a smaller game flops, but it only takes one AAA title to flop to kill a studio.

>>720368340 (OP)
Office culture. The company I worked for got bought by some conglomerate, as such, my day was immediately filled with time wasting. My normal day of scheduling tours, signing contracts, and enforcing policy suddenly turned into 3 1-hour zoom calls a day and the people in said zoom calls asking why I'm not giving as many tours, getting as many contracts signed, or enforcing policy as effectively. Like gee, why am I getting less work done now that half of my workday is occupied by faggots saying "teamwork makes the dream work"

>>720369673
To put it into perspective, the most successful non-AAA games of the year so far are E33 and Silksong. These were MASSIVE releases with huge hype, but they only sold 3-4 million copies each, meanwhile Ass Creed: Negro In Japan was widely panned and widely considered the worst game they've ever released, but despite being a massive flop it still earned them $200 million in revenue which is more than E44 and Silksong earned combined. Actual successful Asscreeds make over a billy apiece.

So as a corporation you can fund a hundred smalldevs for a hundred million dollars cost and hope one of them has the vision, passion, and competency makes it big and you get 80-120 mil out of it, or you can fund one AAA movieslop for 100-200 million and if it flops you recoup most of your costs, but if it makes it big you get 800 million in profit

>>720370031
because theyre retards who think its worth risking millions to make a billion, even when the chances of that happening are less than a tenth of a percent

>>720369673
>AAA retards pretend that 5-7 million copies at best is the biggest franchises
Nigga, the worst nintendogs sells 20 millions and the worst mario sells easily 40-50 million copies.

The two most sold videogames of all time are tetris and minecraft.

>>720369031
Back when Super Street Fighter IV came out, I remember it being said that each new character cost $1000000 to make. So if all of that is just paying your sculptors, animators, programmers, and VAs hourly, I can imagine it's taking that long.

>>720368340 (OP)
a combination of many factors as usual:
>management overreaching into creative decisions has lead to games spending to much time developing it's graphical fidelity (rather then let artists develop a manageable artstyle)
>management constantly tries to solve development issues by throwing money and hiring more workers to deal with it leading to studios becoming bloated messes of bureaucracy
>work culture has become so toxic that industry veterans are constantly leaving, leaving nobody to train the new hires
>work places are such miserable places to work that office politics and drama become inevitable, further slowing things down
>every studio is trying to make the next big thing, smaller projects which could fill the space between releases just don't get made
>they're constantly blaming poor financial performance of products on customers, meaning incompetence is left to fester rather then removed
>the ppl who are supposed to address these issues are to tied up in pointless meetings to appease investors to address any of it, assuming they haven't given up and left

probably a few more issue but you get the gist

>>720369846
god of war, uncharted, spider man, and the last of us are, among others. and call of duty is just an AAA goliath moviegame franchise from a different corporation.

>>720370701
nobody gives a fuck beyond /v/ about those games being 2 year old daily spammed memes.

haven't seen a single youtuber talk about uncharted in 5-6 years.

>Muh outsourcing
White people blame everyone but themselves, you want cheap labour and maximum profit so you got what you deserve

>>720369089
Middle and upper management have no idea what they're doing in most industries and they are mostly paid to warm a seat.
The amount of bullshit nothing projects I've seen come from them in the interest of "improving efficiency/morale/productivity" hardly ever make a dent but they need to find something to show to justify being paid 6+ figures instead of making working conditions better, providing better training, or paying staff more.

>>720370395
you literally have it backwards. AAA games don't just appear out of nowhere, they're all built on the backs of longstanding franchises and very likely to make huge profits. it's undie games that have a fraction of a percent chance to make it big, and that "big" in indie game terms is still nothing to a corporation with operating costs higher than the earnings of even the most successful indie games.

>>720370272
While it’s true that really huge companies like Ubisoft can weather a few massive flops before they wind up in trouble, this isn’t true of any company that isn’t part of the Ubisoft-Rockstar-Bethesda big boys club of wildly successful vidya companies.

A lot of studios that aren’t quite as big still try and chase that AAA standard, and it’s been the death of many a studio. E33 and Silksong were smaller games, and the result is that they made more profit relative to what they spent on the game, which is much healthier for a company long term than existing in a stagnant state of barely breaking even, which is where Ubisoft has wound up now.

>>720370759
they're multi-billion dollar franchises. facts don't care about your feelings, sweetie.

>>720370272
>ass creed shadows
i would not trust many of ubisoft numbers since they pretty blatantly cook the books however they can, and treat even their shareholders with total contempt. best i can find is that they sold 2 million copies in total (despite advertising 3 million players, go figure). revenue was 140 to 180 million, total budget with marketing costs was 150 to 250 million. so it was not really profitable afaik

e33 sold 3 million copies with a budget that was apparently 1/5th of that. but obviously that game came with a lot of risk because it was a literal who company and you'd have to be really interested in the industry to really even find them to invest in. i think a lot of contemporary video game investors subscribe to what i call the "video games are gay and uninteresting" theory where the vast majority of them could not give less of a fuck which kind of bing bing wahoo they park their money in, so they just pick out the most biggest, most obvious and most "safe" bet like ubisoft. and ubisoft, in turn, thrives on fleecing these kinds of investors for all they have. i don't think anyone in the upper echelons of ubisoft even cares about making profitable games anymore, it's all about cooking the books and maximizing the money they can get from investors

>>720370701
>god of war, uncharted, spider man, and the last of us
those franchises are literal flops compared to your average nintenslop bing bing wahoo and mobile garbage
CoD isn't a movie game at all either, it's the go-to multiplayer arcade fps for normalfags, or was, i don't know how it's faring nowadays
shit like wow, angry birds, fortnite, madden/fifa, minecraft and genshin are gigantic and none of them are movie games, i don't understand where the delusion about movie games come from
only ones i can think of that are actually genuinely are rockstar games (RDR and GTA), maybe asscreed back in the day

>>720370852
I've started climbing the ladder a bit more in my office job and what i've found is that upper management is literally just a rat race of climbing up to a high enough position where you're too "above" the actual process to be expected to know of the issues, and if issues are reported to you, you just make an action plan for everyone below you to follow while you do nothing.

Meanwhile team leaders and the first rung of management get raped nonstop at every angle since all the responsibility is on you but you have close to no power and close to no benefits. I'm just gonna quit and go back to a basic bitch grunt role because this fucking sucks.

>>720370876
>this isn’t true of any company that isn’t part of the Ubisoft-Rockstar-Bethesda big boys club of wildly successful vidya companies.
no shit. AAA games are a large corporate dev phenomenon, not the regular ebb and flow of the industry.

Man I want to work in the game industry but I don't qualify for any jobs because I don't have years of experience programming in Unity or Unreal. I have to assume the only people able to break in are people who game the system, which must lead to some pretty abysmal hires.

>>720371104
if you cant get in at a good time like peak covid years, your options are severely limited. currently it's mostly nepo hires and people with specific experience getting hired

>>720368340 (OP)
N

>>720370876
you can't scale indie development to fund a huge corporation. even a hundred "made more profit relative to their cost" indie games aren't going to earn as much on average (almost all of them are going to fail, in fact) as a successful AAA title or viral mobileshart or live service revenue stream etc. whether or not massive video game conglomerates should exist is another argument entirely.

>>720371104
>>720371228
Isn’t the best way to get into the industry for a newcomer just to become an indie and become noteworthy that way?

Corpos aren’t going to give a literally who a chance without serious nepotism, but independent channels might.

>>720370013
anon i'm poor as shit lmao its a non-starter for me
>inb4 someone else says "so "A" games aren't profitable!"
moreso the resources and manpower that exists in larger companies would be better used to create a variety of smaller-scale projects and then one or two AA experiences, rather than gambling half a billion dollars on a game that'll be dead on arrival because of shifting trends
the difference is that i'm not one of these companies and the amount of indie shit out there means that solodeving is straight up untenable unless you're one of the luckiest people alive
for every undertale or shovel knight there's eleventy million high quality projects like crossniq+ that nobody will ever give a fuck about

>>720371030
do someone that isn't paid advertising money to be a shill give a fuck about onions of war?

All I see are memes making fun of your wife issues before we met aren't mine.

>>720368340 (OP)
the bureaucracy of the corporate structure
hard to get anything done when every decision requires a meeting to set up a meeting to make a choice, then that meeting has to be rescheduled because Dave from anal fisting should really be at the meeting as well

>>720371104
how much of a cuck do you have to be to want to work as an underpaid overworked crunchcog in the industry rather than making your own indie game that you actually care about.

>>720371458
literally what the fuck is this ESL schizo rambling post. is this a bot?

>>720371382
well technically even if you can't scale individual indie games or studios, you could scale the number of them you invest in. if you were a very diligent investor, you could find a bunch of promising indie games, give all of them a small bit of money and potentially gain a huge return on your investment. but as i outlined in my earlier post, most people who are invested in games are too busy sailing their yachts and will not put forth this kind of effort. instead what they do is ask "ok whats the biggest game i can invest in? concord? holy shit put a 50 mil on that"

>>720371534
nobody gives a shit about snoy exclusives, snoy.

>>720371437
>>720371478
I am working on my indie game in the meantime but I'd have liked the opportunity to learn from people with experience and work with people in other roles. My shitty solo project wouldn't be a tenth as good as something where I'm working alongside a passionate artist.

>>720371437
>Isn’t the best way to get into the industry for a newcomer just to become an indie and become noteworthy that way?
maybe if you're looking to get into an indie team, but AAA hiring may actually find it icky if you demonstrate too much auteurship

>>720371441
I’m convinced that the only way to really “make it” as a dev without stupid amounts of luck is to have enough money to fund a game that at least looks professional and modern. A 3D game with an okay budget is going to stand out way more than yet another indie retro platformer.

I’m seriously considering just saving money and throwing thousands at development. I imagine people would probably notice a lot more if I’m throwing cash around and actually giving the game decent presentation and marketing.

>>720371691
In the AAA cuck world, nobody will give a shit about your feelins or ideas.

You'll be 1 year just coding the shirts of random npcs or the wheels of cars in certain parts of the map, or testing geometry in only a single level or making the rock textures for the rivers in a single level.

>>720371691
you're not going to network the way you think you are as a code monkey for a soulless corporation. your coworkers are either miserable or retarded, and your boss certainly isn't going to give a shit about you or give you a leg up in the industry. they probably don't have a clue about game dev in the first place, they're just there due to administrative bloat.

>>720368340 (OP)
crunch is dead. crunch worked, so not doing it anymore means videogames aren't getting made

demographics also play a role. videogames used to be made by people in their early 20s. the median age at these companies has gone up, and older people are less energetic and less productive

there's also a too many cooks situation. managing massive development teams of hundreds of people is beyond the abilities of the managers at these companies and you're going to get awy more people slipping through the cracks and not being productive. management in general is mostly cancerous, a little bit is good but you hit diminishing returns very quickly and additional management actually just chokes off production and makes everything go 100x slower, and most big companies are way way way way past the point where this is the case

AAA companies also choose to dump resources into the least time-effective and cost-effective ways of producing assets possible. they could be going much faster by making stylized games that they can produce assets very quickly and with minimal labour, but instead they go for creating graphical assets in hugely wasteful and time-consuming ways that nevertheless still look like shit

there's like a hundred more things to point out desu, the specific issues really depend on the company and game in question

>>720369226
non-Japanese employees you mean

>>720368340 (OP)
Ancient Greek proverb says: "what one programmer achieves in a week, four programmers can do in a month".

>>720368340 (OP)
an industry that can't accommodate the scale, for a whole host of reasons, of what it erroneously believes its products should be.

>>720368340 (OP)
nobody's working for a vision anymore, instead it's just a horde of faceless jeets who pretend they're working all day, take shit and crawl back to their hole for the night, rinse repeat

>>720369697
Do you source faggots just not live in the real world? Source is Star Citizen and a million other projects like it. And don't you dare respond to me without a peer reviewed study proving that you aren't a gay retard.

>>720368340 (OP)
>Does /v/ know the real reason
It's really simple, they're hiring incompetent and lazy workers who will take a whole week to do a 4 hours change by someone who's not spending 3 whole days looking at reddit.
And the most important part of this, they pushed the muh rilistic grafix shit so much, they find themselves spending 3 weeks to make every single asset, so they find themselves having spent 5 whole years to even know how the game even looks like.
Add to this the fact that they're offshoring huge amounts of development to third world countries, specially india, where people are either incompetent or have a massive language barrier, so they take a lot more time to make the same thing and need endless revisions.

>>720368340 (OP)
Too much management and lukewarn low trust environments. If you cannot push directly to develop you are not free, you will not feel true ownership and your product will suck.

>>720369089
It's both. Just because people like Tim Schafer are lazy and arrogant faggots doesn't mean the Koticks aren't just as bad in different ways.

>>720372132
i thank socrates ever day for inventing computers

Because everything is bloated.
Games can't just take a few dozen hours to complete. No, they must take hundreds. A growing amount of games can never fully be completed due to their nature as a live service.
Maps can't just be sizeable, no they must be massive sprawling open worlds.
Every little region/section of the game must be fleshed out due to the nature of most games being fully 3D
With Live Service models becoming the norm, development of the game does not end with launch.
Due to the above, companies hire a fuck ton of people to make these games. Many of them are in studios on the other side of the globe. They end up with teams in the hundreds. Half of the team does not speak English and is based outta India/Asia. The other half are a bunch of DEI/new hires/contractors that have little to no idea what the fuck they are doing(and likely are more interested in pushing politics), a handful of old timers that "bent the knee", and corpo suits. You ever hear the phrase "Too many cooks in the kitchen"?

>>720372025
https://www.eurogamer.net/lionhead-the-inside-story
pretty good read

>>720369089
AI should be replacing managers, imagine how much more efficient things would be.

>>720368481
Pretty much. Devs need a taskmaster

>>720370031
because it's shareholder's money, not their own.

>>720368340 (OP)
The west doesn't employ/educate people passionate about games, to endure the old grind cycle.

The system is now too expensive to get people in thru the traditional method. Education across the board is not worth it.
The only way you're getting in, is if you know someone, are related, or somehow get a scholarship. Which is not happening if you're a random white/asian male, even with good grades. That there eliminates a significant portion of the population of those who would be passionate to endure the grind typically.

And the ones who do get in, are now dealing with floundering AAA companies operating off a broken system, chasing trends with false expectations for a product that is too bloated, too expensive to make, and doesn't pay people a liveable wage for the areas they are made in.

Anyone with a passion for it is just going to take it up as a hobby, and go the indie route. Either they have the money all ready to do it full time, or part-time while being time-succ'd by everything else in life sucking their soul away.

>>720371090
I'm just glad I work at a small enough company that there aren't too many degrees of separation between executives and line workers. Consequences and thus responsibility for decisions resonate immediately to them.
There is still separation between departments but things have been getting bridged.

Kill all devs

>>720369832
What stopping you to make a hit indie game white man?

>>720368340 (OP)
Asset bloat. That's what the 20 indian subcontractors are for. Gameplay systems don't take that long to conceptualise or develop.

>>720368394
Multiple levels of correct here. Hires definitely fucked shit up. Mankind was never meant to view vidya at resolutions higher than 800x600.

>>720372727
Nah, task and project management bloat is probably one of the biggest sources of frustration that occurs in my day to day work life. I've never had more impediments and useless meetings than when I worked on a scrum team.

I was going to say its the price of hyper realism but that doesnt really explain BotW to TotK

>>720373964
You lost and got raped eric

>>720374021
Tim?

>>720373363
Nothing I am making one rn

>>720368340 (OP)
Embezzlement

>>720373964
It's unchecked excess, which often manifests as hyperfocusing on grafix realism as you noted but will impact any project whose directors lack a sense of restraint.

>>720368340 (OP)
Time Kompression?

>Brain drain
>Rampant Nepotism/Cronyism
>Bloated marketing and HR departments
>Projects meant solely to embezzle money
>Hiring contractors en masse
>Diversity Hires
>Indians
AAA has been worse than Hollywood for years.
They got too big too fast back in 7th Gen.

>>720368340 (OP)
a competency crisis

>>720377831
Forgot to add
>All the employees working from home post Covid which already terrible nepobaby managers can't manage for shit.
And at the end of the day it doesn't matter if these upper management cunts get fired because they always fail upwards.

>>720368340 (OP)
Insane level of bureaucracy + demand for higher fidelity graphics requiring hours upon hours of performance capture and extra work on assets. Also general bloat and bullshit jobs that do nothing but stall development. It used to be that studios were made of 30 (mostly white guys) people and everyone knew eachother and communicated with eachother, sometimes management were niggers but for the most part the team was left to their own devices to develop the game. In the 2020s even a simple request for a model change for a tree has to get approved by 10 useless parasites making sure the new tree is not sexist and can take an entire week, then 2 more weeks for the jeet asset farm to deliver the model based on the concept art, then another 2 weeks because they fucked it up the first time.