The video game industry in the West has been a primarily ego driven enterprise (much like Hollywood). It has had explosive growth especially over the last 20 years and fed those "rock star" egos, but with economic contraction comes corporate reality of the bottom line and the realization that egos tend to get in-the-way. Corporations love you... until they don't.

So with that said, IMO the video game industry is going through what Hollywood went through in the mid 60's to the mid 70's -- a re-orientation away from huge games that demand a huge number of customers to even break even... to more smaller releases where each needs fewer sales to break even and cumulatively they can make more profit (with less risk) than one huge game. But if this does follow Hollywood's lead, that era of smaller movies from large studios only really lasted until the mid to late 70's when Jaws and Star Wars created another race to make big spectacle "tent pole" movies. So will the video game industry re-orientation last long? Probably not.

But AA studios' games always come along -- en mass -- toward the end of a generation's lifecycle, so we should see a lot of AA games in the market before long. But again, these are from smaller studios that aren't making AAA games.

Since I saw mention of LA Noire...

... LA Noire sold a fair number of copies, but it wasn't as big a hit as Rockstar was used to having. Also, Brendan McNamara (who headed Team Bondi) was / is notorious for spending and spending and spending without delivering (look at his years at Sony's Team Soho). He was in constant "hot water" with RockStar so they eventually took over the project to get it out the door. Again, a lot of money and a lot of egos.

My biggest issue as it pertains to a re-orientation of the industry is the indie and single-A space pricing rising. While I certainly understand the rising demands and that it's difficult to make something and effectively "give it away," that's how most people enter creative fields... by making things and releasing them "on spec." The hope is to gain an audience / customer base who will then follow your future work and want to purchase it. You build an audience (or a portfolio for a larger entity to invest with you or employ you). But what I see more-and-more are indies released at higher-and-higher price points emulating the larger industry. *sigh*

I agree triple A productions are getting out of hand, the moment a single game could potentially bring down a company if it fails... yeah, that's bad, even if videogames are massive money makers a good game *will* sell regardless of the millions of polygons it moves

But of course investors want to be a part of generational flagships like GTA, and companies take their money, so it's just a vicious circle

This is well-said and I totally agree. The thing is, it seems clear that we are now well into the territory of diminishing returns with video game graphics. Over the past 5 years, development costs have ballooned by 2-4x (game storage requirements, more), but by comparison, the level of graphical fidelity has improved only very marginally.

AAA publishers are going to have to accept that the graphical 'arms race' has now pretty much run its course. We hit near-photorealism probably almost 10 years ago now, and there really isn't anywhere else to go with it. I predict this is ultimately going to force big publishers to have to stop relying on pretty graphics to sell their games. There isn't anywhere else to go with graphics, and we're also seeing that high-fidelity graphics is within reach of relatively small indie and AA studios. So, the AAAs are going to be faced with a choice: either start competing on gameplay, content, creativity, quality; or shut up shop and leave the market.

And, of course, photorealism is not anywhere near necessary for a good game in the first place. I agree that PS2-era graphics would be absolutely fine as an average baseline. No-one needs better than Witcher 2/Skyrim level graphics to enjoy a game. Photorealistic graphics should be a novelty, not the expected norm.

Frankly graphics have not really made a huge leap since the PS3/Xbox 360 era, and that is almost 20 years ago. It was a huge leap from PS2 to PS3 and Xbox to Xbox 360. After that, I really have NOT seen another big leap in gaming graphics that made me go, "WOW!"

Ok yeah, PS3/Xbox 360. Witcher 2, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City all released in the same year (2011) on PS3/360 and those all looked gorgeous. Around 20GB as well, so totally fine storage-wise. 2011 was just right. That's all I'll ever need, and hell that was 13 years ago!

And yet Minecraft is still one of the most popular games ever...

Honestly i rather liked the styled simple graphics of Blue Dragon, or the pixel artwork of Odin Sphere. I enjoyed MegaMan X on SNES but not the 2.5D versions on PSP where they used 3D models. Nintendo assholes they are, will port a game to the DS or 3DS and it looks like PS1 graphics, and it still sells.

The occasional game with realistic high quality graphics is one thing, but most of the time i don't think it's worth it. Find a good middle-ground, and put the rest of the money into everything else.

Oh i forgot to add in for my part, to try and keep the game under say 10 Million dollars budget, or invest more making engine and models/sprites/textures and then reuse a lot of that for another game reducing the next game(s) overall cost.

To be fair, I'd say Nintendo are one of the few large publishers that haven't been pouring unsustainable amounts of money into high-res graphics over the past few years. Which is probably a big part of why they have been 'winning' - they have been focusing more on gameplay, creativity, quality. They have been playing it smart and have avoided falling into the same trap as the likes of Activision, Ubisoft, Sony.

Yes, I definitely agree. Game engines should be re-used more, rather than being cast aside after one game. Many great/classic games were made possible due to re-use of engines/assets: e.g. Baldur's Gate 2, several of the classic Tomb Raider games, Majora's Mask. This is also why many recent mods have been so successful, because they are focusing on content generation and not wasting time re-inventing the engine (Nehrim, Enderal, Fallout London). It also helps keep costs down, reduces bugs and significantly reduces the 'lead time' between new games being released. GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas were all released within a span of 3 years, using the same engine. It will have been over 10 years since GTA 5, once GTA 6 eventually gets released. A whole generation of kids grown up between a popular game and its sequel.

Actually, when you think about it, it seems particularly backwards that engines were being re-used more 20 years ago, at a time when 3D graphics were evolving so much faster than they are today. In the late-90s/early-2000s, game engines should have very rapidly become obsolete, due to the pace of graphical advancement. Yet, we often got 3-4 decent games out of one engine, for a popular franchise. Today, we are at a point where graphical evolution has pretty much flat-lined, and yet developers are still making the extremely wasteful decision to use an engine for 1 game, then throw it away. Absolute madness.

Indeed. Unless you needed something extra, the previous game engine should have sufficed, throw in different models and textures, level structure and story and poof! New game! Maybe reprogram some of the particle effects and how some graphical effects work for events. Look at Idea factory, if you play Neptunia series and Fairy Fencer F and you realize it's the same engine since the combat is the same (bit slow strategic but workable).

You can also do a lot with very little, but i'm sure most of these companies forget that.

Ktchong you just called me a racist which means you didn't really READ my post, I said Mainlanders, NOT Chinese in general. I emphasized a LACK of Free Speech on Mainland China, hence the term MAINLANDERS, I was not referring to any Chinese who were born and raised anywhere outside of this environment. Mainland China is not a synonym for Chinese people and I would appreciate an apology.
Also I never said US is the be all, end all. In fact, generally for a comprehensive quality game in total, I think the Japanese do a better job in the total package when you include a good story being included. Do Western devs. always do a subpar job in comparison? No but the numbers of quality games as a whole drift the way towards the Japanese games.
Now when it comes to arcade games, they went toe to toe, pre-arcade shutdown in the West. Also point and click Adventure games always knock it out of the park for me. Many others do a good job, the whole ES series with exploration and immersion and include a ton of lore. Arx Fatalis is really great. Platformers they can go toe to toe as well.
One of the best cases I will make for Japanese developers is XBox Indie games. Whenever I bought games there I would buy Western but for certain genres like platformers and even this one FPS games I leaned Japanese. Why? Because whenever I saw some Western platformers that looked prettier there tended to be a gripe on the gameplay end. I own that Biofield(or Biowhatever) FPS and while it is ugly, like PS2 or even PSOne level, it plays tightly. They want to make sure the gameplay was tight. Granted when it came to the RPG's this was less of a problem because you didn't need as tight, gaming timing mechanics as some of the aforementioned games would need.
The only part of rc's statement I forgot to say I disagree with would be I think the level should be original XBox not PS2 as THAT was where we got "Ninja Gaiden" and that game was ported TWICE, first onto the PS3 then the Vita. That game had a completely clean character model with Ryu and the rest and no jaggies or even slightly blocky character models.
edit: Just wanted to add on the LA Noire bit, the sad thing is with all the money that guy spent Rockstar could theoretically MASSIVELY license out the assets of old LA that were created from all the aerial photography shots. Like for the History documentaries and others they could plonk it right down, do a bit of tinkering and voila. You could also likely create a cool new VR setup and I don't just meant under LA Noire but as a historical museum setup.

I guess they have been hoping for the VR side of things, but like 3D in general, it is either a lost cause or just too early days.

We've certainly come up against some limitations now, as you and others say.

It's kind of hard to anticipate where we go from here.

Streamed gaming is supposedly where it might go, but we could be talking huge amounts of data for some games. So to combat that, we still need a local install. Or will playing games in your browser or similar, improve enough.

Of course, with visual novel type games, we have kind of gone back to the days of text based games, only with better visuals and audio.

At the end of the day, it is about what folk are happy to engage with.

Hell, so many folk now seem happy to use audiobooks rather than read a book. I personally don't get that, except for the level or degree of immersion, which some folk seem happy enough to have less of, if they can do so more easily. An audiobook to me, is like a movie, only without visuals, so seems a pared back lesser experience. Sure you have to listen to more diatribe than a movie provides, but like a movie it is real time and you have to keep up, and an audiobook is much slower than a movie, so attention span is everything.

Me, I'd rather put that effort into just reading the book. And yes, I know you can rewind and fast forward etc, but that just seems painful to me, certainly with my reading style, where I constantly go back over things to get the best grasp I can, and very quickly. In a way, audiobooks can be a bit like speed reading, where you focus on the overall picture rather than the details. That has no appeal to me, who considers that details are everything.

I guess it can be a bit like my wife, when we watch TV shows, where she falls asleep at various stages, and never gets the full picture, often not even enough of a picture. She can of course watch the whole show again, like it is almost the first time. So it boils down to whatever you are happy enough with, enjoy enough I suppose.

Of course, our lives can have far too many interests, so many folk just seem to gloss over everything, in an effort to keep up or not get bored etc.