By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 29 February 2024
Edit Thread
Chrkeller said:
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.  

Yeah "support" as in more people getting fired as jobs get automated. That said I don't think AI is ready for prime time professional level usage at this point and possibly won't be for a long time, talking like 10+ years. 

As for GPUs, if AI takes over more of the rendering entirely it won't stop at lighting, GPUs themselves will likely go the way of the dinosaur as AI cores like tensor cores may just generate a photograph like image that doesn't even really use polygons or lighting at all but just approximates what it should look like based on a data set that its fed. 

But if that happens then it will likely mean you can just get photorealistic visuals on any kind of device and any one can make that from their own home, which is going to present a whole host of other problems for the traditional game industry. 

Though I don't see that happening for a while, for the time being for people banging the drum saying they want 2-3x better graphics than PS4 which will require budgets to skyrocket even higher ... who is paying for that exactly? Are you going to pay $120 for a game? And then what? Another dramatic jump for PS6? $500 million dollar budgets as the new normal? How many studios will be able to keep pace then? Right now sadly a lot of real people are paying for it with their jobs and livelihoods. 

This whole thing is not sustainable, if it was Sony wouldn't be firing all these people, if it was they wouldn't be going running to the PC, the simple fact of the matter is you can't increase budgets several times over every 6-7 years, keep the price of the games more or less the same (minus/plus $10 whopping bucks), and have no hardware growth either, PS5/XSX are on pace to sell less than the PS3/XBox 360 did. That's not a healthy business model and even Sony knows it.

Last edited by Soundwave - on 29 February 2024