Which backs the point that games shouldn't have exploding budgets. Because if Metroid would cost as much as Suicide Squad it wouldn't exist at all. The big budget game trend means, we will have less and less game series, as only a few are profitable with that. So yeah, let's support low budget games, as this means more diversity!

Not many games exist that are *not* big AAA games inside the big AAA game industry. What a surprise. LOL.

I have more shocking news: not many ravens exist if you look at doves, not many trees if you look at grass and not many fish if you look at mountains.

Wholly agree.  Some games are amazing as open world high cost.  But not everything needs to be.  DQ11 was superb.  I recently loved Triangle Strategy and cocoon.  Hades 2 will be superb as well.  

First question a developer should ask themselves is scope.  I get tired of 40 hour games that have 20 hours of good content and 20 hours of fluff.  

Yeah Triangle Strategy is pretty good too.
Currently playing Unicorn overlord and loveing that.

So graphics arn't everything (to me atleast).

Unicorn is on my list.  Probably summer after paper mario and LM2.  Looks really good.  

The other problem is a lot of these studios even with smaller scale games see exploding budgets. Control was 30 million, Alan Wake 2 is 75 million, their next game is probably north of 100 million.

If you have success as a studio, it costs money to retain the talent you have, you have to pay those people otherwise they can just walk to another studio, they already have the work they did for you on their resume and will easily get a job somewhere else if the studio is doing impressive work.

You can push people to work for less when you are a small studio and everyone is trying to make a name for themselves or just happy to have a job, once you break through and have more success in the industry, those people will then say "hey, we want to be paid more fairly for all the overtime and extra work we've done on the next game". And they're right to do that.

So even if you find a way with a smaller, lower cost studio to pump out some smaller scale nice looking games, the budgets will catch up to you in the long run if you have success, because with success comes an obligation to pay people more in line with what everyone else does or you can lose those people. 

And then there's also continuing pressure if you have some success with one game to raise the bar with the next one, which inevitably leads to having to hire more people and become even bigger, then the cycle repeats, those people have to be paid more as time goes on, then you're under pressure to top your last game and now have to go a little bigger in scope, oh now there's a hardware cycle refresh, now budgets double/triple, etc. etc. etc. It never ends. 

If you're an established big ticket studio like Insomniac your baseline is getting to $150+ million for new game no matter what because of your past success. To retain your staff and keep hiring new staff to keep up with graphics/scope demand, you're basically stuck not being able to go below that. Someone asked why Spider-Man Remastered cost like 40 million just for a remaster, that's probably a big reason why.

A remaster of a existing game where the main things they added are ray tracing and a new Peter model should cost less than making a new game.

It also should be a smaller project than Control, even though it is game with a small scope made in Finland.

But no, instead... it's a $39m game. They didn't even remade anything from the ground up. It's a simple remaster.

The Insomniac staff have likely earned multiple pay raises over the years as the studio has grown. You either pay those people what the feel they are owed or you let them go, but you let them go and what is your studio then if you're losing a lot of your talent. 

CD Projekt Red also has kinda gone through this, when Witcher 3 was started the main team had 150 people and the game cost $81 million dollars. The team grew to 250 people over the course of Witcher 3's development. 

Cyberpunk 2077 cost $340 mill (marketing included) with DLC, but that's all-in more than 4x the budget of Witcher 3. Huge increase. The same team by next year will have about 450 people on it. I'm gonna guess Witcher 4 is not going to cost any less than Cyberpunk 2077 did, probably talking a 400 million dollar+ budget, maybe 500 mill+. 

Those people earning 100k, 150k, 250k+ per year ... they got to be paid every 2-4 weeks on the clock. Maybe 5-6 years ago they were at only making 75k. But when you have success as a studio, you have to pay more to keep your staff and then you also have to pay more to bring on new staff because they will want to be paid comparably to other people within the company. 

I rather play neither one.

Unfortunately tools just didn't mature enough to keep development time and costs reasonable if your game's scope and graphics are very high. Top graphics (technical) in turn won't wow as much as the old days due in part to diminishing returns (and yet CGI detail remains hilariously above realtime).

I for one feel that we've reached the point where sense of scale, artstyle, and animations trump any other technical aspect. Hi-Fi Rush is a more beautiful than most AAA games out there. And FF7 Rebirth, whose graphics/resolution got shat on in Resetera and DigitalFoundry, had breathtaking environments that gave me more goosebumps than anything I can remember in recent memory. Thinking about it now, every game whose visuals gave me the chills since the PS4 launched is one that didn't get praised for its technical prowess. The Last Guardian, Bloodborne, NieR Automata, Sekiro, Tears of the Kingdoom, and now FF7 Rebirth.