Microsoft says the 2-3 year development cycles of big-budget games are over

i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding

Same. Be cool if there was some kind of "ethically made, fair hours and wages for workers" seal of approval for games.
- We already have that, it's called FOSS.
  Facetiousness aside, I really don't think there are any commercially released games that fit the bill.
After playing Battlefield 3 and feeling an indescribable emptyness for AAA games, I turned to indie developers. The desire for more profits can really suck the uniqueness and character from a game when it's designed for accessibility to as many people as possible.
Bonus points if the game supports modding. It's a great way to extend the life of a game as well. Some of my first online gaming memories are from Quake and it's modding scene. Even Sven Co-op is still developing their mod for Half-Life to this very year.
Games like that seem to have a bit more passion behind it which gives it a bit more charm. It's been a bit sad watching old titles milked dry throughout the years in the name of the mighty dollar. Unfortunately the struggle now is finding those gems in a sea of mediocrity as gaming became more mainstream.
- I mean, look at Silica and compare it COD or Battlefield. Smaller indie project, supported by a bigger publisher and filled with heart. It looks like a dream game from when I was a kid.
  Battlezone meets Starcraft.
- Same for me, most of my favorite games nowadays are indies. Like Valheim, Stardew Valley and more
- Sometimes I will just go through the Steam Discovery Queue for like half an hour, it does a pretty good job if you properly give steam your opinion on the games.
Best video recently about this from Yahtzee: https://youtu.be/4LplgYMiLhM

This seems like this is going to be heavily counteracted by better engines, and AI generation.

I wonder how it'll play out though.

I think so too. The process of content creation will become more efficient. I hope it will allow companies to try new and weird things with less risk.
- It'll at the very least make indie studios capable of insane things.
- I believe that, to an extent, this has actually caused some of these problems we're seeing. When tools become easier to use, more is expected from the devs, particularly in the AAA space.
  A tool is made that, in theory, helps you do 12 months worth of work in 6, so they make the game twice as big. However, in reality you still have to deal with various unforseen problems, especially those caused by overconfidence in those tools. The real-world time is actually 9 months, but they're still expected to make that huge game in 12.
  Crunch ensues, which burns people out, which means less quality work and damage to health.
  I think it's generally up to responsible indie devs to use such tools well and control the scope of their projects. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I think this has always been the case, though. Engines haven't just suddenly got better, they've been getting better and better for decades now. Some of those improvements give you features "out of the box" that you used to have to implement yourself. One of the reasons Unity became so popular with smaller developers is because it lets you focus on building your game - most of the tech is there, you've got an asset store for additional models, plugins, etc. so save you time but ultimately making a (good) game still takes time. Making a game is a very iterative process and a lot of the quality of a game these days is less to do with developing the engine and more to develop the mechanics of the game itself - the way your characters move, the responsiveness of the controls, the UI layout and so on. All of that stuff is hard to be given to you by an Engine, because it's specific to your game.
- Exactly, we've been getting better engines, tools and educated game devs for the past decade too and it's what led to current situation. I don't think AI is going to help with anything, it will just result in more soulless cash grabs if it's used the same way ChatGPT has been lately.

Who is setting this standard? Is the general gaming population really upset if the graphics of the new CoD or sportsgame iteration is not hyperrealistic?z

this, i despise the focus on polygon and texture counts so goddamn much
games from a decade ago are still popular and still look good, can we please just focus on performance and actual mechanics
- And story/worldbuilding.
  I don't want a game of a movie of a book, but I like when there are reasons behind the actions and choices.
- Eh, I think we're about to hit complete photorealism on those things without it mattering at all anyway
  What we really need is easier access to assets.
I want more games like valheim. Could care less about the graphic HD quality. Just give me a good game that looks good enough I can forget about my actual life for a while.
- Valheim took 4 years to make.
  I work in gamedev. Even with simple graphics, making a successful game generally takes a lot of time to make. It's not just graphics. Design, writing, QA, art, console compliance, and a huge amount of engineering effort especially in multiplayer games. It takes time to get right. And we've all seen what happens when "AAA" games are released before they're ready just because a bean counter said they had to.
  The blockbuster hits with simple graphics that a solo dev made in a few months are the exception, not the rule.
- Same. I really appreciate the hyperrealistic, amazing graphics of stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 don't get me wrong, but I would be more than happy to accept a game with even like Half-Life 1 levels of graphics as long as it has amazing gameplay and story and lots of real hand-crafted content. Obviously, you can have both (CP2077 again!) but you have to really pay for that, and I'd be okay with those games being rarer and having more games like I described.
I know, Tears of the Kingdom the most graphically intensive game of all time took 6 years to make. I bet they could have cranked out that bad boy out in like 3 years if they had just used the same graphics as Breath of the Wild
- The time sink was probably in prototyping for new ideas to serve as the core of the game, then in generating content that would be considered innovative and fun for people to use that core with. Games are often a moving target where they need to try things that don’t work before finding ideas that will last.
- I suspect a lot of the development time was qa. A game that relies on physics takes a lot of work to get right, and an open world makes it way more open to things that go wrong.
- I believe they also said they spent a year on final gameplay tweaks alone before releasing; TotK is a great example of why we shouldn't be mad when a game is delayed again in again

I just want to know why everything has to be open world today. It seems like developers are just constantly increasing scope and making games almost too big now.

I can assure you it's not the developers changing the scope...
Easier level design. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of open world games just had their landscape generated and then slightly tweaked afterwards.

we all know this is nonsense, right? like, the development cycles have gotten so long because theyve just decided that its better that way

- im not advocating for things like fifa, cod or NBA, but a~15 year wait between games of the same franchise like elder scrolls is pretty ridiculous
2-3 years? In the 80s devs could crank out games in weeks!

You can just go get Unity or UE right now. With UE you can make a $1million before you need to pay a royalty and the tooling is substantially better than any of the tools id released back in the day. (And fwiw I think it's a crying shame id tech engines are no longer open sourced too!)
- You can just go get Unity or UE right now.
  Making a brand new game with an existing engine is not "build on top of one another like mods do", though. Games engines do not include the game logic of the games.

So they will crunch developers more, pay them less and/or replace some of them with AI crap. That's why i only play indie gamesor put on my skull and crossbones patterned hat

We are getting to a point where development cycles are getting longer than some consoles lifetimes.

GTA5 and TES5 were the two most popular games of the PS3/360 generation.
Despite that, there were no new Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto games released for the entire 7 years that the PS4/XB1 generation lasted.
By the time Elder Scrolls 6 is out, baby Dovahkiin will probably be old enough to vote and die for his country.

I prefer quality over quantity, especially given the number of studios that are out there.

But if this just means we wait 7 years to get a Redfall, yeah.. no..

I prefer quality over quantity
Microsoft has GamePass. They want continuous new releases. They didn't release Redfall because they thought it was ready, they released it because they thought it was good enough to get with a GamePass subscription.
- Even Microsoft wasn't happy with Redfall - I don't think it was like they decided to release it in that state because of Game Pass, it seems the whole project was a greed-driven disaster that started prior to the Microsoft acquisition.

Longer game development cycles for big-budget games are here to stay

Good! I’m sick to death of games being announced years before development starts, only for the company to crap out some half assed thing because they ran out of time.

Take the time that’s needed to make a good game.

FOTM? What is that?

It was over a long time ago for me when I realized that most AAA games were all the same. Might as well wait until they're $20 anyway.

There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.
It was over a long time ago for me when I realized that most AAA games were all the same.
Do people actually believe this or is just one of those cliches that people repeat when they don't have anything meaningful to contribute?
I'm curious how many similarities there are between games like Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6 and Starfield? I could make the list bigger but figure that's a good starting point.
Patient gaming is the best - the bugs have (mostly) been fixed, DLC is available, and when you get stuck on something chances are there’s info online about it
- Hell yeah, I'm waiting for the first sale of Diablo 4 on the console. (cross fingers it's this coming holiday)

This isn't really news anymore, and it's not exclusive to Microsoft studios. Many games come to mind, notably GTA/RDR off the top of my head (outside the obvious Bethesda titles, since everyone's more focused on them right now). GTA is also extremely close to the ten year mark between titles; RDR2 was eight years. These big, open world games have constantly been getting larger and taking more time to make for ages now.

They get larger, have more features, content and better graphics but they don't seem to be getting any more fun to actually play
- I think that's subjective. While I do agree with you to some extent I think that there are people out there that love these games and they play them for a long long time. Perhaps they are catering to a different crowd.
I really don't care if they have a 15 year cycle. Just keep the games fresh and build upon it.
Use destiny as an example.
I don't care as long as the pipeline has enough different good games that I get one per year. I can wait years between games in a franchise as long as there's something else to play in the interim.

Tbf we are already reaching diminishing returns with exponentially increasing the complexity of the game graphics (Polygon count) for some years now. For example, NFS Most Wanted 2012 still looks gorgeous to me to this day.

Style > Graphical fidelity If a game has good style and design, it's amazing how well it can hold up.
- Absolutely agreed. What are your favorite stylized games?

I just assumed that AAA are going to be online-only and jammed with macro-transactions.

COUGH Fallout76 COUGH GTA-Online

Cheers -Henry

Yet they're the ones making a new flight simulator while everyone was expecting them to stick to the current one and make it better over time for at least 10 years (as Microsoft said)

Yeah I mean the trend has been obvious for years now, whether you look at GTA or Counterstrike. The times where you released a game, the game was now finished and you move to the next one are long over.

I mean I'm a fan of elder scrolls. What's going to happen it its development cycle?

I mean if it got to 9 years between games, that eould be a big improvement for TES. Skyrim came out in 2011.
- Exactly. What's going to happen? 30 yr dev cycles?

The next big thing are full RT graphics without rasterization. The industry will then need the next 10 years or so to fully adapt on that.

After that there won't be any more great improvements. RT already means full realism. You can't make it more realistic.

There can be improvements that we cant even imagine yet, but I think RT is the next Big thing and it might take some years before theres something as big. But who knows
There are many areas that can be improved upon to make games more realistic, just probably not graphical. NPCs using smarter AI, better physics, a more dynamic environment (better destruction, better NPC interaction with objects), and who knows what else that I can't think of now. There's still a lot of progress to be made, I just don't know if we'll have enough horsepower to run all of that, we're already reaching physical limitations on chips.

If games will take so long to create, we will probably also see price increases. They will have to fund that development time in some way. I think I do prefer the games like Skyrim where they did take their time to develop the whole world with a broad storyline and many small things that you can do, instead of rushing out a game in a year or two that has no replay value after playing the main story once.

I think we are already seeing price increases on many games that are starting at $70 (USD) these days. I don’t think we’ll see another increase for quite a while.

Yeah, it's more like 8 years now.

Sounds like Microsoft is about to find out the hard way.