Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks I’m demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.
I confess I don’t read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews I’m all ears.
I do like that there are “ugly” games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that there’s money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that they’ll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I don’t have a context to make sense of it. I haven’t even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesn’t go as far as it used to, I guess.
You’re right that it’s not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. It’s too large and slow to really say how it’ll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there aren’t as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like it’s becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything I’ve ever heard of. There’s so much, everyone’s bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess I’m on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.
I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasn’t done.
2D isn’t even necessarily cheaper. For small games there are plenty of devs who have the skillset to get some 3D models in place but absolutely could not even begin to hand-animate the same volume of assets. It’s not a linear thing anymore, if it ever was.
It’s true that most of what you hear in publicly available forums is business talk. In the industry’s defense, it’s hard to live life on a constant doomsday clock and a lot of the stuff that keeps people employed has historically been some combination of appealing to investors and successfully gaming the marketing game (and I don’t just mean for “AAA”, whatever that means).
It’s not that the artistic conversation doesn’t happen, but it lives in game jams and watercooler talks and academia. It doesn’t help that it’s often dry as all hell. It’s one thing to watch famous actors running around in costumes and talking about how long they spend on makeup every day, but who wants to hear about burndown charts and the finer points of coding some random tool to make sure every drawer in an RPG has at least one Handkerchief inside it?
For the record, I agree with you that part of it is that in a world without centralized media consumption and driven by algorithm filtering of on-demand content we are no longer all talking about the same five things. That is not just about games, but people still haven’t fully wrapped their heads around how much it’s messing things up. I one heard a games industry person say that he firmly believed the goal for an indie developer should be to “own a word on Steam’s search”, and he was not wrong, but that’s still a depressing thought. Just like if you’re making a TV show the goal is now to break the Netflix top 10 in multiple countries and so on. Storefront placement has replaced the old human gatekeepers and it’s not all bad on that process, but it’d be nice to have a door number three we can open somewhere.
It’s a little surprising that 2D and 3D are such different skillsets for game dev, since I’ve seen so much indie 2D and 3D animation being done in blender in the past few years. It’s not something I know much about in practical terms though, I’m not in the industry and I don’t know the practical tools or workflows at all. The one thing I do know is that the number of A’s there are in a conversation about game developers is roughly equal to how loud one feels like screaming.
I do worry that Steam is getting too big for its britches though, and I’m trying to spend more money on places like GOG or Itch.io. The one good thing about there being such an unremitting storm of content these days is that you can easily decide to spend the majority of your time away from the more commercially driven stuff.
Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks I’m demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.
I confess I don’t read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews I’m all ears.
I do like that there are “ugly” games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that there’s money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that they’ll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I don’t have a context to make sense of it. I haven’t even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesn’t go as far as it used to, I guess.
You’re right that it’s not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. It’s too large and slow to really say how it’ll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there aren’t as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like it’s becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything I’ve ever heard of. There’s so much, everyone’s bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess I’m on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.
I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasn’t done.
2D isn’t even necessarily cheaper. For small games there are plenty of devs who have the skillset to get some 3D models in place but absolutely could not even begin to hand-animate the same volume of assets. It’s not a linear thing anymore, if it ever was.
It’s true that most of what you hear in publicly available forums is business talk. In the industry’s defense, it’s hard to live life on a constant doomsday clock and a lot of the stuff that keeps people employed has historically been some combination of appealing to investors and successfully gaming the marketing game (and I don’t just mean for “AAA”, whatever that means).
It’s not that the artistic conversation doesn’t happen, but it lives in game jams and watercooler talks and academia. It doesn’t help that it’s often dry as all hell. It’s one thing to watch famous actors running around in costumes and talking about how long they spend on makeup every day, but who wants to hear about burndown charts and the finer points of coding some random tool to make sure every drawer in an RPG has at least one Handkerchief inside it?
For the record, I agree with you that part of it is that in a world without centralized media consumption and driven by algorithm filtering of on-demand content we are no longer all talking about the same five things. That is not just about games, but people still haven’t fully wrapped their heads around how much it’s messing things up. I one heard a games industry person say that he firmly believed the goal for an indie developer should be to “own a word on Steam’s search”, and he was not wrong, but that’s still a depressing thought. Just like if you’re making a TV show the goal is now to break the Netflix top 10 in multiple countries and so on. Storefront placement has replaced the old human gatekeepers and it’s not all bad on that process, but it’d be nice to have a door number three we can open somewhere.
It’s a little surprising that 2D and 3D are such different skillsets for game dev, since I’ve seen so much indie 2D and 3D animation being done in blender in the past few years. It’s not something I know much about in practical terms though, I’m not in the industry and I don’t know the practical tools or workflows at all. The one thing I do know is that the number of A’s there are in a conversation about game developers is roughly equal to how loud one feels like screaming.
I do worry that Steam is getting too big for its britches though, and I’m trying to spend more money on places like GOG or Itch.io. The one good thing about there being such an unremitting storm of content these days is that you can easily decide to spend the majority of your time away from the more commercially driven stuff.