Same with hollywood too.
When you’re trying to just make a predictable amount of money over a set amount of time, you have very precise formulas for what kind of product you can publish to get that number. You can publish a clone of Call of Duty every year and make a very predictable amount of profit on the license, but if you take the chance on an “experimental” game with unproven mechanics or other things that haven’t been market-tested, it has a much higher chance of deviating from that predictable profit curve, or flopping entirely.
When you have more than a hundred people working in a company, you absolutely have to secure regular profit levels to sustain the company, and this turns most creative works into slop-grinding and number-crunching.
With movies it’s the same, you can push out a hot video-game license movie with all the same standard jokes and action scenes and big-name stars or the same kind of action movie formula with the same explosions and same bad guys and so on, and you will make a predictable amount of money for your costs.
Even if the finished product is utterly mid and unoriginal, enough people can be pulled in with marketing and manufactured hype to guarantee a certain amount of return.
These studios also tend to gobble up rights for smaller licenses and either throws those licenses in the shredder despite being successful, or sits on them for decades to avoid having to compete with them, but also do not want to invest in those titles, because again, they simply have already done the math and know that such titles won’t hit those target profits the same way a new fifa or battlefield game will make.
Almost all the games that make up the golden era of gaming came from (at the time) indie garage devs. They only became AAA studios because of either their success with the games they made or because they sold themselves to companies like EA.
When nobody knew how much potential money was in the industry, there were far more passionate people making things because they liked doing it and not just chasing profits.
We made higher quality software too.
Private equity it’s a virus that kills everything it touches
Inbred CEO bros got involved. They’ve turned the entire market into vulture capitalism. It’s going to end poorly but they’ll get very rich along the way. We need to find a way to make money meaningless or we are all just going to keep going down this road of endlessly chasing more. More! MORE!!!
Almost like the profit incentive is bullshit …
Sure studio/publisher consolidation is trashing AAA development but I’d argue that the opposite is true of the indie scene - more and better games than ever.
Yeah this. I hardly touch AAA titles anymore besides some Nintendo and Rockstar. But I’ve put in hundreds of hours in indie games, AA simulators, and some big studios’ smaller projects like Square Enix’s HD2D titles.
Better games is subjective but I can’t imagine less games are released annually now than before
There are fewer studio-made games, which I imagine is what OP meant. Crazy how simpler games were easier to produce, right?
Easier to produce is also relative…
<Old man mode>Back in my days, to simply draw a 3d cube on the screen, you had to calculate the position of each corner, calculate normal for each cube face to find which faces should be visible, and fill the area between corners with pixels for each visible face. You did all of this in a memory buffer, so at the end you would swap buffers to show the complete cube on the screen… With current tools, you could make a simple FPS game with a similar amount of effort. The problem is, nobody would care about that FPS game, because it’s also easier to recognise low effort garbage nowadays</Old… Nach, I’m still a grumpy old man>
That’s just the coding part of the work, which for a modern AAA game (and pretty much all 3D indie games) is the smallest part of the work - modelling, texturing and level design easilly exceed that, and whilst those are the biggest ones, there’s quite a lot more non-coding work, from graphics design to audio engineering.
IMHO modern tools and frameworks have reduced the work that needs to be done in the coding space more than they did in other areas.
Also, in gamedev there’s the exact same problem you see in non-game-related software development: as the tools, libraries and frameworks get better and let devs do more in the same amount of time, the expectations on the capabilities of the software grow, eating up all those gains and more - nowadays you can’t get away with a bunch of lines defining walls on a flat grid space and a handful of sprites with just 2 animation frames each like in Pacman.
IMHO modern tools and frameworks have reduced the work that needs to be done in the coding space more than they did in other areas.
Expectations grew immensely (as they should!) and modern hardware and graphics increased some of the needs… I mean, texturing was not a big deal, when you could barely show 10 pixels.
But, while big studios are overwhelmed by huge projects, the indie games are better than ever and there’s plenty of them (I think so… They were great the last time I checked… But I am old, so it was a decade ago). You can still get away with a bunch of lines and a few sprites, as long as you have really good ideas supporting them.
EA saw no profit in CNC, so they trashed the whole franchise. there last chance of money grab was with cnc alliance.
Really? Who would have thought…
I wouldn’t say it’s quite as simple as that. It wasn’t always a linear downward trend. First couple of generations of video games were pretty terrible from a game development perspective. No disrespect to the developers or anything. Of course, they were amazing programs that took a lot of clever engineering to work, but still not very good games.
The really good games started coming out somewhere in the late '90s, I think? Then reached the peak in either 2000s or 2010s. From there, it’s been pretty much a downward trend. Most games in 2026 are so basic and shallow mechanically. AAA games are essentially semi-interactive tech demos.
The really good games started coming out somewhere in the late '90s, I think?
Many people have 1998 as the year when the most “best games of all time” came out, though 2001 and 2003 were also unbelievably stacked with all-time bangers.
Now that said, it heavily depends on the platform. For PC gaming, the peak might have been the early 90s, when we were seeing stuff like Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity 2000, Doom, Civilization, etc.
2003 was so stacked that even madden was good enough to win goty
It was a crazy year. Viewtiful Joe, Price of Persia: Sands of Time, SSX 3, Soul Calibur II, Star Wars: KoTOR? Damn, son.
Well lately I’ve been playing Hades 2 and it’s absolutely amazing. Just stay away from AAA unless the reviews are phenomenal. Focus on AA publishers like Devolver and Annapurna.
there are still plenty of people making decent (and sometimes amazing) games with almost no budget
Yeah I feel like this is the golden age of gaming. There are so many good games. A lot of them are just indie.
The problem is that there’s a sea of shit to wade through to find good indie games.
True. I guess I’m blessed enough to have friends who wade through the shit for me :D
How many NES games are actually good?
As a 2001 born, most of the ones that get brought up as good games, are. Really I think the NES is when console games got advanced enough to “age well.”
It’s always interesting to hear from younger people playing games much older than themselves and what their impressions of them are without the cultural context of the time or sometimes even an understanding of hardware limitations. In my case that’s usually just hearing from youtubers, but your opinion seems the prevalent one from what I can tell, which is nice to hear.
NES games were actually quite expensive. Games were at their cheapest around PS1-X360 and they didn’t make bank from whales yet. Which I would also argue were the best times for games.
I think you forgot how many absolutely trash games were being made.
I haven’t, there’s always trash being made. But the quality and amount of great faves was definitely higher then than it is now
Cartridge games yeah, I was alive and buying 60-80 dollar N64 games. I agree with your peak era opinion.
I think 360/PS3 middle of their lifespan was the beginning of the decline, but that was gradual.
A lot, especially compared to the Atari games which caused the US vg crash. So the seal of quality and limit on amount of games allowed to be published actually meant something.
I get what you’re saying but this question is the wrong one.
I don’t agree, but my tolerance for mediocrity is admittedly rather low compared to most people. Out of 1370 NES/Famicom games most are garbage, seal or not. Then a lot of mediocre games. Then a small portion of actually stand-out good games. This is true of every console and every era of PC gaming.
More games than ever are released now, OP only considers AAA which has both heavy quality decline combined with far less output thanks to bloated corporations that can’t imagine making cheaper games on shorter time scales with smaller and more focused teams.
Television has the same problem as the mega gaming corps who have bought each other up. Used to get 12-24 episodes a season per year. Now we get 8 episodes with 2+ years between seasons.
Which I’m fine with, indie can be far more creatively interesting (when not pumping out shovelware) than LCD multi million safe bet cater to everyone appeal to no one monetized whaling slop released broken and stuttering for 80 dollars for only the hacked up base game with no respect for art just the dollar.
OK, let’s settle with mediocre instead.
Compared to what? You don’t hear of nearly as many people trying to run PS1 roms…
Here’s a free one for you.
Discard pretty much anything learned from or after World of Warcraft. That game warped the genre for decades, largely for the worse.
Go back to MUDs. Iterate from there.
What modern MUDs are there I can play now?
People still play this one. http://mud.arctic.org/
Though I didn’t mean it has to necessarily be text-based. More that that ancestral path was more interesting than the WoW one. This is what EverQuest was born from.
One of the bigger differences is that not everything was questing. You just explored, and part of your motivation to level up was the ability to explore places that were previously inaccessible.
Aardwolf is still up and pretty good. Has a special client with some QoL features like mapping.
It’s not as good as Project Bob, but sadly that one shut down years ago.
One could write a paper about how profit motive and art are at odds, and as the portion of agents seeking profit goes up the quality of the art goes down. Probably many people have written quite a bit about that.
I think it’s also worse when the people keeping the profits are removed from making the art. Someone who sets out to make a game and make some money on it will probably make better art than a pack of accountants and shareholders calling the shots.
sota. RS3 became somewhat slop but still stable, because they TH, and various in-game boosting. now that they are getting rid of most of it, people are pissed, cant have both ways, all because osrs fans complained.
pokemon is another one, is basically slop now ever since swsh, they know people will just spend 60-100 each game so they arnt going to do anything to improve it, game freak said they will do this, apparently they have a stranglehold on IP, so another company cant make the mainline pokemon games.
