“Games look worse than they did 10 years ago, on hardware that is like 5x more powerful.”
This, as a generalisation, is not true. A critical example is Demon’s Souls (2009 vs 2020) which was quite the transformation. Nevertheless, I do agree that games have been increasingly becoming more demanding of hardware for very little pay off in terms of visual quality. One can thank NVIDIA for that. At any rate, due to said visual fidelity and graphical demands, AAA games are now hitting 9 figures in development costs which is problematic. Furthermore, the gameplay loops have seen very little evolution in the AAA space whereas companies keep dumping wads of cash on dubious graphical technology like path tracing (which we’ve seen before, those of us who were here for Giants and Larrabee). Pathtracing brings nothing to the table in terms of gameplay and is basically a tech demo to convince people to buy overpriced hardware (in terms of efficiency). Handheld on the other hand has driven people to games like balatro, vampire survivors, valheim, etc, that have very little in terms of graphical fidelity but have well crafted gameplay loops. I think that’s the market Sony is eying.
It is more and more true as each developer looking for them shiny games switch to UE5 and dont bother replacing its shitty ghosting and blurry TAA and ML upscaling crap.
UE5 is amazing but publishers think you give middleware to a dev team and they can make a baller game like if it were a powerpoint presentation. They have laid off a significant portion of the accumulated know how to save some pennies (and because some people took advantage of some movements to take vengeance upon people like Avelone) and now they are staffed by people who are very inexperienced and frankly, untalented. To further the problems, one of the dirty secrets of the industry was to offload large swathes of the work to code monkeys from low income regions, again, to save cash. Now we’re at a point where most of the talent that survived the great purge is either captive at large publishers or working with indies. We severely lack AA games that were always scratching a very specific population’s itch (except for 4x and grand strategy, boys be eating well).
