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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

Question for game developers, has innovation been stifled by the the bar being raised for making a AAA game? I assume making a game like Spyro or Diablo took a lot of time and effort, but I'm wondering if the increasing demand for high end graphics and extremely rich environments has raised the bar too high?

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Absolutely. Graphics get gamers. The lesson learned by Nintendo with the Wii’s prev-gen graphics has not been forgotten by the games industry. When crispy photorealistic graphics set the standard, you either have to expensively match the industry or go cartoonish to smooth over the rough edges.

The golden era of gaming was during the PS2. Not only did it have unprecedented market penetration, but the hardware was both advanced enough to make decent 3D games while not being so powerful that a few deep-pocketed studios could make stunning graphics that blew the completion out of the water.

Those days are long gone. On one end of the spectrum you have the indie market, which uses retro designs to make up for the lack of asset designers (think Rogue Legacy or Shovel Knight), or you have the massive AAA developers that dominate ad-spaces.

Anything in between (~PS2 graphics) isn’t taken seriously. So it’s either indie or AAA. No middle ground anymore.

And yet Nintendo hasn’t tried to compete with the next gen graphics since the GameCube and is doing quite well.

The wii outsold the Xbox 360 and the PS3. The DS sold 160 million to the PSP’s 80 million, the 3DS another 75 million to the PS Vitas 10 million.

Yes, graphics may hamper the gameplay experience, but only if you don't have a good enough machine to run the game. If you mean that gaming companies only focus on the `looks` and not the actual gameplay, then I agree.

Games are designed to grab as much cash from kids and adults alike, with things like loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes. There is little focus on developing a community, and diminishing focus on shipping an actually good product. Today's games by Blizzard can not even hold a candle to names like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 or even Starcraft.

Yes, and it's a linear effort that compounds making asset development in particular much more expensive. For instance, if you have 300 major assets in a game, and one of them takes a sizable percentage of time more to create, this compounds for the entire collection of assets, making your development that much more expensive.

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