Soundwave said:
The issue is while the problem is bad already ... hundreds and thousands of people losing their jobs ... and this is Sony, if they are closing 4 studios in 4 years, how do you think it might be going with other normal sized 3rd party studios?
It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to max out a PS4 even.
And so how is this going to be tenable in the future for people who are banging the drum and demanding "better than PS4 graphics!" but also will start crying loudly if games are made even $10 more expensive for them?
Like what are we looking at cost wise to make big epic games that are an order of magnitude larger than a PS4? $300 million? $400 million? There are reports that Cyberpunk 2077 all-in cost $436 million, lol. And keep in mind this game is made largely in Poland where they get away with far lower salaries, to make this game in the US or Japan or the UK or something likely would've cost significantly more. GTA6 is probably well north of a half billion dollars budget.
How are you supposed to get graphical fidelity 2, 3, 4x above that when PS6 rolls around? It's unsustainable, I've been saying that a long time, now we're seeing in real time this whole thing play out. Sony saying they're going to move into PC moreso, massive layoffs at Sony, now just in the past hour we've learned EA will also be laying off hundreds of people and has canceled games. Even when the next-next generation rolls around (PS6, Switch 3, etc.) is a studio magically going to be able to make even Horizon: Forbidden West scope games + visuals for dirt cheap? I doubt it. I think PS4 is an inflection point for the industry where a lot of developers simply aren't going to have the money to make projects much bigger than that. |
The answer to all that is GPU AI, like ray tracing. The biggest advantage of Ray Tracing is the gpu producing light and reflections verus those aspects being developed.
More AI support to developers will be coming. Graphics are not going to stop anytime soon.
