[hibikir]

Copying a game from the 90s is easier than ever. We see small teams making 90s level games all the time. It just happens that in the market, those are now just indies.

The market demands not just better, more complicated games, but mostly much higher art budgets. Go look at, say, Super Metroid, and compare it to Team Cherry's games in the same genre, made mostly by three people. Compare Harvest Moon from the 90s with Stardew Valley, made one person. Compare old school Japanese RPGs with Undertale, again with a tiny team. Lead developer who is also the lead music composer. And it's not like those games didn't sell: Every game I mentioned destroyed the old games in revenue, even though the per-unit price was tiny. Silksong managed to overload Steam on release!

And it's not just games. I was a professional programmer in the 90s. My team's job involved mostly work that today nobody would ever write, because libraries just do it for you. We just have higher demands than we ever did.

[ryandrake]

I wonder if the gaming market is actually demanding more complicated games, or if it's just that complicated games with massive budgets are all the studios are offering, so gamers accept what they're offered.

[godelski]

I think you're ignoring multiple critical variables, including what the parent mentioned.

A pretty obvious one is that there's magnitudes more players these days and many more options for how they can play. Hell, there's even a few more billion people on the planet so it's more than just percentage of people owning systems that can play games. I'll let you think about others because I want to focus on what the patent said, but if top selling games weren't making at least an order of magnitude more money then that'd be a very concerning sign.

The parent said hardware was a big unlock and this is undoubtedly true. I don't just mean that with better hardware we can do more and I don't think the parent did either. Hardware is an unlock because it enables you to be incredibly lazy. If your players have powerful hardware you can get away with thinking less about optimization. You can get away with thinking less about memory management. You can get away with thinking less about file sizes.

The hardware inherently makes game development easier. We all know the quake fast inverse square root for a reason. Game development used to be famous for optimization for a reason. It was absolutely necessary. Many old games are famous for pushing the limits of the hardware. Where hardware was the major bottleneck.

But then look at things like you mentioned. Undertail is also famous for its poor code quality. All the dialogue in a single file using a bunch of switch statements? It's absurd!

But this is both a great thing and a terrible thing. It's great because it unlocks the door for so many to share their stories and games. But it's terrible because it wastes money, money that the consumer pays. It encourages a "good enough" attitude, where the bar keeps decreasing and faster than hardware can keep up. It is lazy and hurts consumers. It makes a naïve assumption that there's only one program running on a system at a time.

It's an attitude not limited to the game industry. We ship minimal viable products. The minimum moves, and not always up. It goes down when hardware can pick up the slack or when consumers just don't know any better.

Things like electron are great, since they can enable developers to get going faster. But at the same time it creates massive technical debt. The fact that billion dollar companies use a resource hog like that is not something to be proud of, it should be mocked and shamed. Needing a fucking browser to chat or listen to music?! It's nothing short of absurd! Consumers don't know any better but why devs celebrate this is beyond me.

People should move fast and break things. It's a good way to innovate and figure out how things work. But it has a cost. It leaves a bunch of broken stuff in its wake. Someone has to deal with that trash. I don't care much about the startup breaking some things but I sure do care when it's the most profitable businesses on the planet. They can pay for their messes. They create bigger messes. FFS, how does a company like Microsoft solve slow file browsers by just starting it early and running in the background?! These companies do half a dozen rounds of interviews and claim they have the best programmers? I call bullshit.