<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.
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.
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.