Our marketing team isn’t good enough to change consumer behavior like that. I’d love to work with a team with that ability.

Some games do that, especially at a generation border. It’s not a ton of extra effort, but it’s low-return: a game doesn’t sell better or get a lot of press for being smaller.

I’m not super bothered by Tue copyright issue - the copyright system is barely serving people these days anyway. Blow it up.

I’m deeply troubled by the obscene power use. It might be worth it if it was a good tool. But it’s not.

I haven’t gone out of my way to use AI anything, but it’s been stuffed into everything. And it’s truly bad at it’s job. AI is like a precocious 8-year-old, butting into every conversation. And it gives the right answer at about the rate a ln 8-year-old does. When I do a web search, I then need to do another one to check the AI’s answer. Or scroll down a page to get past the AI answers to real sources. When someone uses it to summarize a meeting, I then need to read through that summary to make sure the notes are accurate. And it doesn’t know to ask when it doesn’t understand something like a proper secretary would. When I go looking for reference images, I have to check to make sure they’re real and not hallucinations.

It gets in my way and slows me down. It needed at least another decade of development before being deployed at all, never mind at the scale it has, and it needs to be opt-in, not crammed into everything. And until it can be relied on, it shouldn’t be allowed to suck down as much electricity as it does.

The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality. Same for 4k FMV. It’s not management that drives the desire for high-res textures and diverse asset libraries, it’s generally the art team. Once they’re allowed to care about what kinds of shrubbery exist in Borneo and which exist in Minneapolis, you end up with 30 kinds of plants. Multiply that out for rocks, cars, rugs, etc and add in the expectation for 4k or 8k screens and individual assets get huge and the library gets huge.

You’re right that it’s possible to do “pretty good” graphics for less, but it’s telling that your examples are from a decade ago and/or heavily stylized.

It’s also about what people want to buy. If games with that aesthetic reliably sold like gangbusters, AAA would follow.

Game Dev here.I WISH we could still ship with N64 quality textures and audio. We’d use so much less disc space and probably finish sooner and cleaner.

https://generalstrikeus.com/

To me, there’s concentration and there’s flow state. Concentration is more of a manual process where I intentionally ignore distracting events. It involves building a structure that can hold up to bumps and it’s hard work. Flow state is a groove where distractions melt away and only the task remains. One can turn into the other, and and depending on how your brain works they can both be fragile.