look at the DS in there at the top - oh wait.

Programming costs are really not an issue anymore, the real problem is the cost of producing artistic assets ...

"Back in the day" I used to make models for friends and mods in games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3; at the time it would take me about 4 to 8 hours to create the model, 4 to 8 hours to produce a texture, and about an hour to skin it onto the existing animation. These were very simple models (usually 500 to 750 polygons) and the textures were also very simple (usually 128x128), and you usually were only looking for it to look somewhat like what people wanted.

Its been a few years since I did any modeling, but I have done some stuff (for pre-rendered scenes) which is similar in quality to what games are now using; it would take me a couple of weeks to produce a model, and a couple of weeks to produce a texture, at the quality level of these games.

This is why the 100 person development teams are made up of (approximately) 80% artists.

The reduction in development costs will come from developers producing libraries of content, dramatically improving development tools, and moving towards procedural development; but don't expect to move far beyond what we're already producing (in terms of graphics) in the near future. Ultimately, movies get away with such expensive content because they have massive budgets and a very limited scope (you don't have the ability to run on a street which is not in a scene).

You know, it is important to work on improving in areas like Artificial Intelligence and physics, and it's an area where I am slightly disappointed with Wii's lack of power.   That said, all of these improvements are geared towards pleasing the existing hardcore gamer.  These may result in better games  but they don't do anything to expand the market.

Having opponents as smart and unpredictable as humans doesn't make video games more interesting to people who don't already play them.  Heck, it's debatable that it makes the game better at all!  Super Mario Bros. 3 is still one of the greatest games of all time, and the A.I. is almost non-existant.

So while you're right that there is room for improvement along traditional lines...it doesn't change the fact that change is needed in different areas to enlarge the market for video games.

i'm only going to talk for myself here.

I've been a huge gamer for almost my entire life starting with a bit of atari and commodore 64 before really becoming a gamer with the NES. My gaming peaked with the SNES which was awesome but every generation since my interest has been waning for exactly the reasons this article addresses.

Video games are suppose to be entertainment but they just were not. Gaming felt more like going to work then having fun. I hardly enjoyed any of the games i got last generation cause they felt like complex rehash, bottom line not fun. The only games from last generation I look back on with found memories are smash bros, rachet and clank, and warcraft III.

I guess when it comes down to it, I don't really like games anymore unless i can play them with others. And that's why I love my wii soo much. I'm not in college anymore and don't like next door to any of my old gaming friends. Online play is sort of fun but ventrillo just isn't the same as having your friends with you. But the wii has gotten my girlfriend actually intersted in playing with me and she absolutly refuses to play anything on the computer or the other consols (have a 360 as well).

Say or feel whatever you want, but for me, the wii saved video gaming. I doubt I'd be playing anything anymore if the wii hadn't come along and make gaming fun for all my friends, not just a hand full of hardcore guys i know.

Unrelated. Almost the entirety of your post is unrelated to anything in mine. My post was talking about 100% pure vertical innovation; not horizontal. The two are not mutually exclusive you know.

Even though our graphics are reaching realistic levels we are still far from getting to the point where games are indistinguishable from reality, the characters on screen still don't act like real humans so in that regard its still not at a point where costs are going to go down, AI still has a long way to go before it can fool a person. And like couch said all these things don't make a game better, as some of the best games don't have those features to begin with, so the quest to just make things bigger and faster isn't going to help attract more people to the medium.

Words of Wisdom: You're right, I was thinking more along the lines of the initial thread topic.

I guess the heart of your claim is that costs will start high and go down through the generation. You're likely correct on that, but costs are on the rise long-term. Costs aren't going to start at (say) $15 million per game and then go back down to the same level they were at in the early 80s when one or two people could make a game or the early 90s when games costing millions of dollars were the exception instead of the rule.

Would you still be content with 8-bit gaming then?

The point is not that these improvements make gaming inherently better but that they allow game designers to more fully realize their ideas. A 3D Mario could not be realized without the hardware innovations to make it possible for example.

When people begin using these innovations only because they have them and for the sake of using them, and not because they make the game better, only then is there a problem.

 Two things, the move to 3d alienated more people from gaming, as it made the controls more complicated and intimidating.  Also even though the added graphics were needed to get to 3D since then have games really changed all that much, its still mostly the same games, even with all the vaunted AI and physics and the such the games are still by and large the same, just more refined and tweaked, yet costs of these games have been rising very fast, and yet they still have a long way to go before they can ape reality.

Good article. My big complaint is I don't agree at all that SFII was popular because of its gameplay complexity. All aspects of the game were a revolution, from graphics to sound to the input system, so that was all cool, but --

SFII was incredibly accessible. When it was released, nobody knew anything about the game's depth except it had six friggin buttons. It was fun to just play 1-on-1 in a game that didn't play like ass. Two-in-one combos were put in there by accident! The game wasn't designed to be what it became -- what players made it. Only over time did the most hardcore players begin unearthing the game's hidden complexity, and certainly this varied by city/region/country.

No fighting game has ever been more popular, because it was hardcore and casual at the same time.