Could there be a AAA game industry apocalypse?

What do I win?

https://www.allegorithmic.com/
https://www.sidefx.com/

 

People think all kinds of crazy things. Honestly I don't get why people would argue Indie vs. AAA. First because a vast majority of developers are neither. (by developers I mean professional developers of any level, not including hobbyists and amateurs). And second, the games compete in very different markets. If someone is a dedicated indie, chasing AAA is silly, and missing a opportunity. Games are art. You can be a art critic, art collector, or an artist.

 

They already have. Advanced tools exist and are developed every day. (and bug fixed for months after).

But that is an overly general question. Its like saying when will cars get better? So not sure what you are asking.

 

Because 'AAA' is an ineffable, ethereal, retroactive term that cannot be practically proven or disproven, it makes people feel good, and sounds strikingly similar to A+. Who wouldn't want that sticker?

 

+ http://www.speedtree.com/

 

Firstly, people will always try and sell a a shoddy product, the product is shoddy because you can clearly see how it was made and lacks a coherent vision or design. A.K.A Asset flipping. Another game that is better put together, more discerning use of assets and willing to add value to said assets would not appear or be so shoddy because the value added is easily discernable. I understand the fear that shoddy products devalue all products made with the same asset, but honestly the assets shouldnt be instantly recognizable so as the user makes the connection. If i purchased a prop pack that suited my visual design and clearly matched the rest of the art assets, no one is gonna care that the same asset was used in some asset flip knock off. Unless someone was explicitly looking for it, no one will even notice.

I agree wholeheartedly with the premise that unique art and assets are important, just don't remake a wheel every time you wanna new sports mag. By all means have your unique character art and the primary things that the player is going to take notice off, but don't be afraid to purchase assets off the shelf and modify, rather than build from scratch.

Wow...busy thread, to be clear i am in support of full hi-quality frameworks,"complete games" being available to buy.
If i was as fantastic writer and i wanted to make a cool rpg game i should have the option of buying a "generic" RPG framework, hire an art director and some artists and create a "gameplay" weak but "story and art" strong game. Why waste all that potential resources just to hire a programmer to make pretty much the same thing? Sure i will hire a programmer to do some stuff, not write the game engine from scratch though.

This is not a AAA vs Indie consideration, this is whats the most efficient use of available resources for either. Titan Quest is a Diablo 2 clone, If they could have bought the Diablo 2 Framework, made their own gameplay logic, skills, combat system would Titan Quest be any worse, it probably would have saved a fairly substantial amount time and resources though.

 

I know quite a lot of people with higher-end home theater setups who really wanted 3D TV. The studios didn't want to invest in it. There was never much content available, and nearly all of the new content being produced now is low-budget kid's animation (e.g. asset-mills). I'm not saying poor support is the only reason it never took off but it's a major one that shouldn't be overlooked.

This may also impact VR. As we all know, VR requires very different mechanics. It may be a bigger problem than the studios faced producing 3D versions of their movies (I was surprised to learn that a lot of 3D BluRays were somehow converted to 3D in post-production).

 

ROFLMAO

 

AAA is getting more expensive all the time. Wolfenstein got all its levels in one month. Doom required 6 months. Quake 18 months. Doom 3: 3 years. Doom 4 was in production up to 8 years, depending on how you count.

AAA schedules are getting longer and teams are getting larger. Costs are going up.

 

Well replace doom 4 with final fantasy 15 10 years since "announcement" and visual proof

 

Duke Nukem Forever took 15 years

 

I thought about mentioning it too but I haven't actually played it so I wasn't positive if it was even AAA by this point.

 

To be fair, they did put "Forever" right there in the name.

 

Took Nukem Forever more like ...yknow I never actually finished playing that game.

 

Though I'm not sure the budget was burn all along these years at the rate of a proper AAA game

 

The following article mentioned they spent at least $20 million of their own cash. Is that still considered AAA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever

 

We need to calculate the AAA budget inflation rate first to know
MGS5 was $80M relatively it might jus be AA

 

What about mighty number 9 the game that will make you cry like anime girls on promnight, with a budget of 4 million dollars.

 

Fifteen years is only about a million and some change per year. That's more indie than AAA if you ask me.

 

It wasn't exclusively $20,000,000 of their own cash, you know :v

 

I'm just directly quoting Wikipedia because I don't feel like researching. It does state they asked for additional funding beyond the $20 million though and I knew about Take-Two investing a sum of money only for them to eventually have to resort to a lawsuit in order to actually see anything from it.

 

I would never say never, but I think we are 10 years away. The motion sickness and fatigue from eye strain needs to be eliminated before it goes main-stream.

 

Im not sure you can fix that problem though. I almost suspect we'll be plugging directly into our brains before wearing stupid headgear is the way its done.

 

I don't know how procedural tools are going to help, have you played with substance designer? It is an amazing tool, you surely could make AAA quality textures with it, and it still is extremely hard and time consuming. I don't believe there will ever just be an easy button that reads your mind and outputs the texture you were dreaming about.

 

Quality work is rarely easy or fast. Procedural tools allow you to get more out of your work than traditional destructive workflows.

Procedural tools are also very new to the majority of artists, they work in a way that runs against established convention, this to skew the perception of procedural tools workflows in a negative direction.

 

Well here is the gist, procedural texture are basically parametric template. Imagine we have a semantic layer above that control the parameter. Ie ask directly in plain language (think siri) to do a particular texture set. Then add AI that either work through example target (mood board or concept art) or make up a target of its own.

That's not even science fiction, it starting to be possible.

 

Might as well make a computer you can talk to and say.. "Holo deck, level 9... Entertain me".

There, you now have a goal... go make it real.

(We are now discussing Star trek now right?)

 

How dare you suggest magic buttons aren't the future of gamedev. Have you no vision? Pffttt.

 

I believe limited magic button is the future of gamedev, but also the present, we will make it even more complex so it will move to the next tier of handcraft ... But mass plant placement is already magic button. I mean with shader we don't have to paint light and shadow anymore, it use to be days to have a level hand painted .... and we still find a way to make shader both easier that it use to be and massively more complex.

But limited version of make a game button will arrive very soon, I promise you!

 

You don't need to promise anything, it has a existed for a long time, I have even built a few. But don't confuse gamedev for Game Development. Magic buttons are toys for those playing around, and ugc. While there is a thriving and growing market that has arisen in continuum between Spore and Game Development, tools and processes continue to advance. Magic buttons are derivatives (or dilutions) of advanced techniques pioneered through extensive r&d, and usually for a specific use case (though usually with broader usage in the back of our minds).

There seems to be a mistaken idea that advanced tools will close the gap between small projects and and pioneering ones. But is actually just a trailing goal post. While they do make things easier for those don't have the ability or resources themselves, they are typically built as time saver on large projects. Meaning that saved time gets reinvested in advancing other areas. So as these type of things make their way to the hobbyist/consumer level, the tier that developed them has already move forward with them or in other areas. It is the same way that as you grow older your age gets closer to an older sibling, but you won't pass them. There isn't an end target, just various moving points on a continuum.

 

You said it better

 

This. Magic buttons are not only the future of game dev. They are the present. The creator of Pong didn't have a 'Add collider' button. The creators of Doom didn't have an 'Import sprite' button. And so on. There are more and more magic buttons added to Unity with every release.

But as has been pointed out by every poster in this thread with an ounce of sense, 100 well paid professionals with years of experience will be able to push whatever magic button exists more times then a solo developer.

 

Except these aren't magic buttons. These are foul machinations created by legions that dwell below in the darkness where they toil day by day, month by month, year by year, every single year.

 

Magic, got it.

 

Magic wand, they has to be created too

 

That said, I think there's something to the idea that there are 'innovations' in game development that simply are not useful to AAA studios - you can see for example how much effort went into Nathan Drake's character model, now is some largely procedural character creator going to be useful for those guys? Probably not.

Bear in mind these 'innovations' don't actually close the gap in terms of quality - they may appear to because by putting a ceiling on the quality that the developer can achieve, they get more done faster. No Mans Sky looks really good because by leveraging procedural tech that simply cannot reach the quality levels of the environments in say Destiny, they can get a lot done very fast - but this tech (or more rightly, this tech used to this extent) is not useful to Bungie.

So I would say that the use of a lot of these procedural tools is like a bell curve - use them too much and you lose quality (but obviously get more done faster for less money) and use them too little and you waste time. My guess is that AAA studios are interested in the sweet spot of quality whereas indies could afford to slide down the other side of the curve a bit, and by anyone's perception, their game would be seen as setting a new bar in indie quality simply due to being able to increase the quality relative to the scope.

 

I really want to challenge that, I can't now because it would be a distraction from my project. Also procedural generation is another way to say "tools", though I know here it mean Real time progen where you can't fix thing after generation. There is nothing in destiny I saw where I said "I can't do that procedurally", in term of visual. Its' too bad that nms and destiny has style so striking that people confuse the comparison (nms is more saturated but has the same type of scifi exaggeration and composition than destiny, destiny is everything but realist).

Also the gameplay are different and so is the level design goal, it muddy the comparison. Then add to that different level designer anyway, which can make the difference.

 

@neoshaman bear in mind that I'm definitely NOT saying that procedural tech cannot ever make Destiny environments. When I say that the user of this procedural tech puts a ceiling on quality, this ceiling is determined by the current state of the tools and not by the potential state.

What I'm trying to say is that at any point in time, a technology has property of utility that varies depending on what your goals are. For example, let's say there were two cities, 'indie city' and 'AAA city' and both wanted to implement self-driving cars. But the AAA city has higher standards of safety than the indie city. So 5-10 years ago, indie city could have simply allowed self-driving cars, and borne the costs of a lot more accidents than AAA city was willing to bear. However to the casual observer it might seem as if they are in some ways 'ahead' of the competition (AAA city).

In a way I see procedural tech like this, indies can use it more than AAA studios do because they can afford to risk some quality in order to appear to be 'ahead' - in some ways at least.

I hope you understand the analogy

 

You can apply that to everything in software dev. Despite having experience with smalltalk and similar languages, when OOP got big I railed against it for awhile. "They're just functions and structs!"

But in reality it's abstracting away tedium...

 

I think I understand

However I think it's more limitations from artists, they don't like change and control taken away in perception. Early 3d art from the psx era was god awful (early pixel art too, revisionist nostalgia forget pre NES era), artist didn't fully understood the new material, now look at what people do with the same constrain (ie DSi games), it's night and day, because artist are used to think with 3D now.

But there is many thing that are procedural, I think we are talking about procedural lay out and art direction of level design. That isn't AAA yet, I think it's not a problem of quality but one of perception (warframe use procedural lay out, is it AAA?) and mastery. Procedural tool has already invaded AAA pipeline a long time ago in various form.

 

A tool such as "import sprite" is entirely unrelated to procedural generation, though. And since you mention it, personally, having lived through it, I think all pixel "art" is a god-awful eye-strain mess. I watch people running this blocky garbage on a beautiful huge IPS display and just shake my head. No offense intended if there are any pixel game devs here, just my take.

Based on what I'm reading about the current (not-so-impressive) state of these software novel-writers, it occurs to me they don't sound much advanced beyond the old Infocom text adventures... which could also be viewed as procedural content generation to a certain degree.

 

Its a difference of degree, not a difference in kind. Tasks that take up a lot of game dev time are constantly being automated. Once a dev had to draw out an image on graph paper, then convert each pixel into a colour value. Then type each colour into the computer. That took a lot of time, so someone built a computer program to do the work for them, they could just paint the colours directly onto the screen. This freed the artist up to work on more intricate art work, say adding variation to make each enemy unique. Then someone built a tool to deal with that. So now the artist can spend more work on some other task.

The cycle continues, much as it has been since video games were invented. Time consuming tasks are automated, leaving the devs free to pursue other time consuming tasks. Then those tasks get automated, and so on.

 

Rereading the OP, there is no danger of an AAA apocalypse as described. AAA studios are always going to have the edge on budgets, time and people. They will always be able to make bigger, shinnier games then the indie.

There is always the danger of a regular market collapse. Basic bread and butter economics stuff. A combination of poor business decisions, an economic down turn, loss of consumer confidence and changing government policy could see major AAA studios downsize or close their doors. It does happen.

This sort of thing happened in the states with the Atari collapse in 83. It happened here in Australia around 2011-12, mainly driven by unfavorable tax conditions, a high dollar and high wages. The Australian game industry has shifted mostly into smaller studios producing mobile games.

 

At this point it's pretty much a philosophical argument about putting names to a blurred line.

For me, it's a difference in kind when a process is generating new content with little or no human input. (And then I'm sure someone who is feeling argumentative would insist the code itself is human input -- hence "little" or no input.)

The primary task of a tool-level process is to automate grunt-work. There is nothing especially creative in automating pixel output so an artist or programmer doesn't have to transfer creative paper-drawn artwork into some machine representation pixel by pixel. ZBrush is an amazing tool but it still requires a human to drive it (the grunt-work would be less capable modeling tools all the way down to raw data), but No Man's Sky is taking a cache of tinkertoy parts and applying a random seed to a list of rules and spitting out things nobody has ever seen before. There is human input lurking behind the scenes, but it's clearly procedural generation versus mere tooling.

While one could continue to argue that procedural generation is tool-automation of the time-consuming task of content-generation, there is a difference in kind because procedural generation can potentially generate unlimited amounts of content. That is a significant difference in comparison to simply automating what a person can or wants to do otherwise by hand.

 

Ever since I got my first job, I've seen management worry about competition.

In 1989, distribution was pretty limited, as was the market. It only took one or two competitors to totally overshadow you - my boss was constantly courting Game magazines (and he was/is incredibly gifted at it). And still it was worry and rush to beat the opposition, the panic of trying to stand out in a "crowded" market.

Fast forward 27 years, the story isn't any different, just the size of the backdrop. Thousands of competitors, but an audience of millions, and in pace of magazines we have the YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, forums, and so on. Even 'niche' review sites have orders of magnitude higher readership (not just readership but active daily participation).

Sure it's more daunting because it's a mountain, but it's also a lot more organic, and truly driven developer/publishers have opportunities to change their fortunes on a daily basis that didn't exist even ten years ago.

So I don't think there's an apocalypse coming. Everything evolves, including players. The skill of game making has never been about one thing or another, it's all about the end product, and the definition of AAA will always evolve to cover the highest budgets and most exotic technical advantages of the day.

 

I'd argue that it's possible to make more money today than back in the old days, with same volume as the old days, because the market is so huge. Yeah it's spread thin, but it's huge. A modest living can be had by someone gently putting out decent quality fun, no need for all this AAA stuff. It's a totally unattainable goal, and shouldn't be a goal because even if you did manage AAA, by then AAA has moved even further along, dancing with the pixels, and laughing with the lords.

 

I'm still waiting for the AAA NMS because it will blows everyone mind due to the difference in scope and details. I guarantee you that brute force approach of hand made content (number of templates, rules for exceptional case, etc ...) on top of current understanding of procedural generation will do some BIG big wave.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/07/22/future-of-procedural-generation-1/

 

So most of the naysayers on AAA becoming ubiquitous seem to be basing the argument on the cost of artwork.

What about 3D scanning, making games with content scanned in from the real world.

What happens when this become so cheap and easy that a 3D scanner can be built into a mobile phone?*

* Note did not google to check so may already be happening.

 

Hint it's already happening, for while

But it's a "photo", it give you diffuse map model, it does not make albedo, normal, roughness, specular, etc ... (though that might be coming, and deep learning can always help). Also there is no definite simplified pipeline nor best practice yet.

 

Most of the naysayers are basing their arguments on the cost of EVERYTHING that makes AAA what it is. Or to phrase it more accurately, the availability of piles of cash to AAA studios.

Come to think of it, I got the impression most of your argument was "artwork" (ie. AAA quality assets become widely available).