NYT: Videogames can’t afford to look this good.
NYT: Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good
Some “erm, I hate to break it to you” stuff in this “reigniting the fidelity arms race discourse” article on the NYT and a whole load of well meaning but infuriatingly ass backwards gamer-thunk. I’ll admit, I have a particular bee in my bonnet over this stuff at the mo as a bunch of people, encouraged by folks partly responsible for the mess we’re in ex-videogame names doing their tour of the press recently, have settled on “we just need less graphics” as the obvious solution to working in videogames - trying to make a living from videogames - being precarious as fuck.
I mean, I get it. The stuff is a complex mess of stuff happening in videogames, stuff that’s a woeful part of existing in 2024 and a load of external bullshit that a small handful of people could begin to remedy, collectively, did they not make bank on money and power that way so have no inclination of letting up without, well, “some pressure” that no-one in power seems interested in exerting, not when there’s more austerity we could be doing instead. We’ll just off a few more vulnerable people, that’ll sort it.
Reducing the amount of photorealistic graphics in games, reducing the fidelity of them, seems like a straightforward and easy fix to a complex problem. Especially when the videogame industry, the absolutely booming multi yachted at the upper echelons videogame industry, is claiming costs to be THE problem. Claiming costs to be responsible for mass layoffs across the industry, rather than shareholder growth and sheer greed having an all too human cost.
I can see how people get here. Like, not only is making the discussed graphics stuff at that scale actually costly, it’s perfectly aligned with the idea of what an expensive videogame should look like. That’s more a triumph of marketing over fact, every piece of a videogame costs money to make and a lot of videogames are made by underpaying for chunks of the work. But you can’t see that with your eyes. Graphics? They’re right there so easy fix!
Except. If only, right.
The article falls into an all too usual trap or twenty. There’s the strange assumption that graphical progress is on a scale from “a chonky single pixel” to “photorealism”, frequently assuming that very expensive work is older, lesser, because it’s not photorealistic. That’s awkward. Photorealism is a stylistic choice, not an endpoint. At one point the piece uses Genshin Impact as an example of a game forgoing the latest graphics in exchange for a live service model. Two Family Fortunes buzzers out of two there.
Genshin is a massively expensive game to make and operating a live service for a game like that is also massively expensive. It’s absolutely not an example of the industry cutting costs. Blimey, it’s the other one. An ostentatious bet that gamers will go all in on a certain aesthetic combined with a free to play model from hell. Spend big to win big. Yeah, let’s not use that one.
(I’ll quickly skip over the weird aside about Animal Well’s file size because I’m not too sure what that’s got to do with anything, especially with a game that dense that took ages to make. That’s just strange. But it’s in there, so shrugs. People have weird ideas about making videogames, news at ten)
So, it’s all a bit silly. The assumption that costs increasing is the real and most urgent problem is, well, it’s not entirely aligned with the profits a small handful of people are sitting on and sharing amongst themselves. It looks only to the immediately visible in an all too literal sense (hiring an orchestra and all those many, many hours involved in just that one aspect of videogames is also expensive but you don’t see people call for a ZX Beeper soundtrack in every game), it completely ignores that videogames are often built on the underpaid and overworked labours of people across so many disciplines. Cost cutting some art and related work isn’t going to improve QA, isn’t going to make the jobs of moderators who have to wade through who knows how much racism, sexism, creepiness, bullshit and nastiness any better. It isn’t entirely the route to making better, more sustainable, videogames.
Across the board videogame workers need to be more respected for their work, paid better for their work. Yet, the talk here is only that videogames can’t afford to look hyper pretty and no consideration for the coders, artists, tool makers, making the rest of it work, the designers, writers, QA, moderation staff and the many, many other underpaid folk in games. The concern, is ultimately, only with shareholder growth numbers looking nicer, though entirely unintentionally.
That’s all without me going into the symbiotic relationship between the software and tech hardware that enables these behemothic videogames and smaller games. A huge part of the boom in people making videogames is a result of it being possible for them to make videogames thanks to the overheads and considerations provided to make room for these enormous games. It’s really messy structural stuff and I could write another gazillion words here on just that but I’m testing people’s patience enough already.
Videogames seems pretty fixated on this whole graphics thing right now and is in full “something must be done” mode over it, happily providing cover and apologia for folks overworking people, doing really fucking comfortably in life and making things needlessly difficult or worse for everyone else.
Nah. No thanks. If we’re not looking at this stuff without the thought of how it can materially improve the lives of the people making the stuff, what the fuck are we even doing?