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I would also like to add that 30 years ago devs had to write the engine and devtools from scratch. Player hardware and optimizations were also massive pain points that needed attention.
I would argue that cost of development has gotten CHEAPER than it was 30 years ago, even when taking the scope of today's games into account. Not to mention the market is also orders of magnitude bigger.
Any schmuk today can take Unity/UE5/Godot and make something playable in a matter of days. Barrier to entry is practically non existent. Look at Palworld, Vampire Survivors, Among Us, Balatro, Terraria. For studios with AAA-level scope look at Larian studios, Warhorse studios, Eleventh hour games, Hello games.
Large studio execs with 0 substance who don't know what they're doing are spouting this inflation drivel as justification to raise prices of their already failing games as AA and indie teams run CIRCLES around them.
Maybe development in the sense that it is easier for programmers to put together the logic of the game, but game budgets are in the hundreds of millions now they have not gotten cheaper. You're forgetting that artists are needed to create all the high quality textures and objects needed to populate the gameworld. As gamers have called for more and more unrealistic standards of graphical fidelity, more and more budgets have gone to the legions of graphical artists necessary.
They're still underpaying them, but indies can get away with having maybe one guy as their whole art team. Check the credits for how many studios helped the art for the next AAA game you play.
Been around long enough to remember it wasn't the gamers doing that, it was the game makers. Specifically the c-suites
There's 0 justification for games going up in cost other than the c-suites, end of story
Honestly looking at the most popular games, I dont think graphics matter to even 1% of gamers. Minecraft, Terraria, lethal company, baltro, among us, all have the graphical quality of a 2 year old drawing.
Publishers are just spending a million to underpay artists solely because 'graphics' worked back in the ps2-ps3 era, so theyre still hitting that slot machine hoping for the same returns.
Edit to add: tunic, factorio (technically) Tetris, temple run, hill climb racing, Wii sports (arguably nindendos entire style until recently), human fall flat all have incredibly cheap graphics
Stylized graphics can look great for cheap, but they aren't a shortcut to instant success. For every successful indie, there are a thousand more that never sell more than a handful of copies.
So?
Doesnt mean expensive ones are an instant success either, if anything I'm agreeing with you that graphics are irrelevant to sales
I didn't say this.
Yes, the point was that having real-time raytracing and realistic ultra-resolution rendering is not worth the cost either, when games with cheaper graphics are doing better (and also require less expensive hardware)
This is one of the things I personally like the least about modern games. I don't want ultra-high detail textures for 4K resolution that will be completely wasted on my not-so-new hardware. Instead, I'd rather have optimized games that don't intoduce 100+ GB of bloat and require me to set all the graphic options to minimum quality in order to run with a decent fps.
While I agree that 1 person can make a game easier than ever before, game development cost has ballooned for bigger studios.
People love to point to Indie mega hits and say "why doesn't EA/Activision just make games with creativity like Balatro? This is what the people want.", but I challenge anyone to actually predict what that hit game is going to be before it takes off.
It's a big gamble to put games out there and most indie studios don't make more than 1. It's not a reliable business model to put these thousand person studios to work on a thousand different solo pet projects.
What has gotten much more expensive is the 3D modelling and level/gamespace making side of things, rather than development, which is why you see so many indies doing 2D games or simple 3D visuals and procedural generation of the gamespace.
This is partly why indie studios are far more successful at producing games with great gameplay than AAA studios - since they avoid going for hyper-realistic looks and massive hand-crafted levels they can focus on the actual gaming much more, plus its way easier to pivot main aspects of a game if it turns out they're not actually fun if there isn't a massive amount of time sunk into visuals and level design linked to them.