The die has been cast, and there’s no turning back.
Sony’s Mark Cerny, the chief architect behind the design direction of Sony’s modern PlayStation consoles, has indirectly confirmed that the gaming industry is on the verge of implosion. He hinted that it now takes longer to develop a modern video game than it does to design a new video game console.
In an interview with Games Industry.biz, Cerny revealed that one of his goals with the PS4 and PS5 has been to reduce the “time to triangle,” which refers to the time investment required for modern game developers to take a game from concept to release. He acknowledged the growing criticism about the ever-increasing development time over the past few console generations.
“I probably shouldn’t, but I spend a lot of time on the boards. And I see people asking… if the time to triangle has been greatly reduced, why is it then taking so many years to create a game? And the answer is that is what the teams are choosing to do. They are going after these massive creations that really do need four or six years to put together.”
With increased development time comes a higher budget. Sony’s first-party games, such as Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2, God of War Ragnarok, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, have all seemingly cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, not including marketing costs.
The time required to develop a game has more or less doubled compared to a decade ago, which itself was already longer than the development times from the decade before.
There are several reasons for this trend. One significant factor is the monumental drive in hardware capabilities. Developers are no longer hampered by technological limitations that require ingenuity and innovation to move around, they’re no longer required to learn how to design across multiple architectures, as both major consoles from Sony and Microsoft are now essentially modified compact PCs built on the x86 architecture.
With enhanced hardware comes enhanced expectations. Modern games strive to justify their worth by emphasizing “realism.” Dynamic proprietary game engines, such as Electronic Arts’ Frostbite, are renowned for their physics and destruction capabilities. Developing these proprietary engines is costly and time-consuming, let alone actually continuing their evolution which has led to many studios opting for off-the-shelf solutions like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
Another issue contributing to the increased cost and development time is the modern game developer’s skill set. Many current developers lack the experience and knowledge of their predecessors. Often, they are recruited directly from bootcamps, with resumes primarily featuring the completion of Unity or Unreal Engine courses on platforms like Udemy, rather than real-world experience and problem-solving skills honed through hardship.
There are other factors at play as well. Society has increasingly focused on affirmative action, aiming to include individuals from minority backgrounds and women in the workforce regardless of their skill levels and capabilities. Some attribute this shift to the feminist movement as well.
Today’s game developers often lack competence and creativity, which has declined significantly. Despite the ease of modern console capabilities, it is surprising how long it takes to brainstorm, greenlight, and develop a game.
The pressure to conform to sanitized standards, often resulting in time-consuming open-world designs, exacerbates this issue, especially when the workforce includes hires made primarily for diversity rather than merit.
As consoles have moved away from sophisticated and restrictive architectures and freed from limitations like storage space and lack of internet connectivity, developers have become lazier and more entitled.
The modern era of gaming is largely digital, with physical media declining for nearly two decades. This trend began with Gabe Newell’s requirement of a Steam account for the PC release of Half-Life 2 in 2004.
Game developers no longer compress their assets or use ingenuity to optimize their games. In the past, developers like those behind Halo conserved system resources and saved development time by reusing the prop multiple times, repositioning and rescaling a single model across a landscape.
Today’s games are often unoptimized, with developers relying on the hardware capabilities of modern systems and cutting corners.
This is why recent PC ports frequently depend on artificial upscaling technologies like NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR to achieve acceptable performance levels. Gamers are forced to compromise on graphical quality because developers either refuse to invest time in compatibility and optimization or lack the necessary skills.
Moreover, a significant issue in modern gaming is the influx of affirmative action hires, spurred by the feminist movement advocating for more women in the industry. Many of these hires lean left politically and seem to despise “gamer culture.”
Despite their apparent disdain, they hold significant control over the content we consume.
It wasn’t until the push for gaming to become more “inclusive” due to perceived racism that people began to notice the driving force behind why modern games feel uninspired and safe in design.
There’s a noticeable fixation on diversity not just in creative design but also in narrative. When consumers started to observe a pattern linking “woke” video games created in collaboration with Sweet Baby Inc, a narrative consultancy firm, questions began to arise.
ESG (Environmental Social Governance) is a significant force influencing workplace behavior, spearheaded by major players like BlackRock and Vanguard, who hold substantial stakes in numerous publicly traded corporations.
Their ESG policies prioritize issues such as climate change and diversity. With significant ownership in game developers/publishers and support from ESG-backed hedge funds, they’re exerting pressure on corporations to adopt inclusivity policies that promote diversity and inclusion.
This often entails hiring individuals based on gender or race, especially from marginalized groups, irrespective of their qualifications. These agendas also extend to shaping marketing strategies and products.
Sweet Baby Inc has been involved in various narrative projects labeled as “woke” by consumers. Examples include the Saints Row reboot, which failed so dramatically that it led to Volition’s closure, and Square Enix’s Forspoken, whose developers were shut down just a few months after the game’s release.
Compulsion Games’ “South of Midnight” faced accusations of race-swapping the main protagonist after contracting Sweet Baby Inc. Similar criticisms of character race-swapping were directed at Alan Wake 2 and God of War Ragnarok, both developed in collaboration with this small Canadian company.
A political agenda is being thrust upon consumers, pushing for “realism” in a way that advances specific viewpoints. This includes making female characters in video games appear more masculine and sexless.
For instance, Microsoft has implemented a “Product Inclusion Framework” to help developers avoid sexism in their character designs, encouraging portrayals of female characters as strong and unattractive, often with squared jawlines.
The last two years have seen some of the largest commercial failures across the entire gaming industry. Development costs and timelines have skyrocketed, yet many games still release buggy and broken. Coupled with a push for “inclusive” character designs that render characters into unattractive, androgynous forms, the situation is dire.
As ESG hedge funds struggle and investors withdraw, there’s less profit to be made by companies forcing such agendas on consumers, who are starting to resist and refrain from buying every new game, possibly due to the “woke” factor.
When PlayStation’s chief architect, Mark Cerny, hints that game development durations will soon surpass the time it takes to conceptualize and design an entire console, it’s clear that the industry is on the brink of implosion.
“I probably shouldn’t, but I spend a lot of time on the boards,” he admitted. “And I see people asking, ‘If the time to triangle has been greatly reduced, why is it then taking so many years to create a game?’ And the answer is that is what the teams are choosing to do. They are going after these massive creations that really do need four or six years to put together.”
Consumers are becoming more wary and informed, asking questions only to be met with accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia from journalists and even developers themselves with the likes of Ubisoft and Activision corporate emails suggesting that DEI and ESG are deeply rooted into their corporate structure, with Activision themselves installing an officer for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at every development team.
Attractive women in gaming are criticized as misogynistic unless the game panders to the queer demographic, as seen with Hades 2. More developers are jumping on the ESG bandwagon, imposing self-censorship, using woke western localizers to alter game dialogue with ideological inserts, and diluting their franchises. Sony, for example, has been demanding developers censor their games on PlayStation for years now.
This trend towards simplifying games for a broader market is evident in Capcom’s Monster Hunter, which is now becoming an open-world game alongside removing sophistication and generally dumbing the game down to be more accessible to a winder range of audiences.
The irony is that modern game developers are trapped in a quagmire of their own making. Consumers are beginning to push back against obvious ESG pandering, such as Ubisoft’s decision to introduce the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s first real-life historical figure protagonist as a Black man rewritten as a samurai during Japan’s Sengoku period.
Developers no longer create games for gamers, which is why they continue to falter. Games now take an enormous amount of time to develop, and many are made by activists for activists. If developers decided to shift away from producing progressive content, it would take anywhere from three to six years to see the results of such efforts.
Consumers have only recently started discussing how modern game design is drastically inferior to older titles and recognizing ESG’s influence over the industry, which is slowly but surely being transformed into an all digital live service model
To start making games that consumers actually want, void of this cancerous rhetoric, developers would need to begin right goddamn now. And even then, the results wouldn’t be visible for years.
Meanwhile, everything currently in development is so far along that it’s nearly impossible to alter, leading to continued commercial failures and more studios potentially going under.
There’s a shortage of major releases, with the PlayStation 5 having only a handful of true exclusives if you exclude timed releases and remakes. Following a string of failures tied to the PlayStation console, Square Enix is now adopting a multiplatform strategy.
However, given the self-censorship and removal of heteronormative content in their games, it’s doubtful this will revive the dying Final Fantasy brand. Major corporations like Microsoft, Sony, EA, and Take-Two have been undergoing massive layoffs in their gaming divisions, studios are being dissolved.
They’re overstaffed and overinvested in a failing ideology, which is why many upcoming big-budget releases are hinging on the anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto 6, a title likely to be an inclusive narrative disaster.
If we don’t introduce innovative ideas, games themselves will become monotonous and boring. Additionally, “grand and elaborate” types of software are complex in content, requiring time, labor, and expenses to produce. Even if billions of yen are invested and a hit game sells a million copies, it might still be at a loss. In that case, it’s not sustainable as a business. Even a “light, simple, and compact” game can be well-crafted and enjoyable.
Hiroshi Yamauchi continues to be right on the money. Gaming has become too expensive to be commercially viable. With Mark Cerny inadvertently admitting that development times will only increase in the future, the bubble is bound to burst sooner or later and I for one cannot goddamn wait.
