Replying to @petrikas@mastodon.art
I appreciate a good AAA game with excellent graphics made by a small army of talented devs and artists. When well-executed with great gameplay and story, it's a wonder to behold. I'm deep into another playthrough of Witcher 3 and I appreciate all of the well-orchestrated resources that were poured into it.
But I don't think whether a game is good and enjoyable hinges much on photo-realistic graphics or deep pockets of game studios. I've had just as much fun playing Owlboy, an indie game lovingly built by a small team that came out around the same time as Witcher 3 but with only a small fraction of the resources.
There's a weird uncanny valley effect where indie games with low poly or retro pixel art graphics from low budget indie shops can be great, and AAA games with teams and budgets approaching major Hollywood films can be great, but nothing in-between. Given a choice between improving gameplay and story versus improving graphics, the smart investment is almost always going to be the former.
Game studios are already hurting. The GenAI-driven GPU/memory/storage shortage is only going to make that worse. Smart game studios are going to find a way to make great games and tell compelling stories without the big blockbuster budgets or requiring their customers buy gaming rigs made from unobtanium.
