Norion said:
I do see graphical jumps slowing down a lot after the 2030's since 10-15 years from now the peak of realism with real time graphics will probably be close enough to real life that there won't be that much left to go in terms of noticeable improvement. After that decade it'll be more about raising the floor and making those super realistic visuals increasingly easy and cheap to produce so that eventually even indie games produced by small teams can look that good and run on handheld devices. |
The other problem is I think this generation of kids doesn't give a shit about graphics, lol. Not to the extent of people raised in the 80s/90s/early 2000s. Those people are old now and no long control what's trendy any more.
You can show them the best looking game ever and they just go "eh whatever". It's the same thing with movies, once upon a time, "this movie has amazing special effects!" used to be a fairly reliable way to sell some movie tickets, nowadays you have kids who'd rather watch "content creators" with $0 budget on Tiktok or Instagram than a 2 hour $300 million dollar event movie.
The future of popular media consumption I think is going to be shockingly different and more driven by home made content than popular corporate media.
I'm not that optimistic about the future of the business, for the short term (next 10 years) I think you're going to see developers killed by rising budgets, then they will try to tell you AI is the savior, but what that's actually going to do is kill the industry entirely as we know it because those tools will be given the the mass public too in order to gain subscription money/revenue. Then the market is going to be flooded with games made by people sitting at home and probably illegally modded versions every popular existing game (ie: hey put Luigi into Mario 64 or Odyssey like you always wanted). When any 10 year old can make their own game with photorealistic graphics in their bedroom just by using text or speech prompts, what value do graphics even have at that point.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 16 May 2024