Last week, my favoured gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video games industry. His answer was not what I expected.
“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before … It’s time for a real hard reset on the business model, on what it is to be a video game,” he said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference’. We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling.”
This surprised me because it seems very obvious, but it’s still not often said by games industry executives, who rely on the enticing promise of technological advancement to drum up investment and hype. If we’re now freely admitting that we’ve gone as far we sensibly can with console power, that does represent a major step-change in how the games industry does business.
So where should the industry go now?
There are so many features that could be enabled with more powerful compute. Of the top of my head are things like improved physics simulations and clipping geometry (e.g. weapons clipping through models or characters). More detailed hit boxes. Etc
But does that make the game more fun, or does it lower the barrier of entry for smaller studios to make high-quality games?
Arguably, ray-tracing does lower the barrier to entry. You place lights where they really are in a scene, boom, everything is light perfectly. Art assets and tuning up lighting are a huge time cost in current AAA games; making that much easier might benefit gaming in general.
Having improved physics modelling might improve physics-based games, but something like Angry Birds doesn’t need a supercomputer anyway, and for most games it’s just added prettiness that greatly increases the production cost
if only that’s actually what they did, instead they add 2x as many strands of grass and skip out on optimization because they no longer need to do it.