i wonder what the future of gaming is gonna look like.
while the industry has clearly been shifting away from single player oriented games, imo the best games are still the AAA, high production quality single player games. granted, i've only had a ps4 for a few months, but games like TLOU, Red Dead 2, God of War have had me absolutely floored*. but those games aren't going to be the norm, and the massive production cost basically rule out indy developers from making games that can compete on that stage. god of war and red dead probably cost something like 200 mil or more to make, let alone marketing. the development of god of war lasted for like 5 years. these kinds of games cant be produced with regularity because of their scope. and one bomb like fallout 76 can derail them because they sunk so much money into making them. santa monica studios was ready to hang up god of war after ascension got lackluster reviews.
with the improving tech, companies are going to have to spend even MORE money to develop the highest quality games. if TLOU and Bioshock set the standard for the PS3, and if Red Dead/God of War/Horizon set the standard for PS4, what's the leap going to be for PS5? what are production costs going to look like, and how many copies are they going to have to sell to turn a meaningful profit? at current production costs, you have to sell several million copies just for this genre to be viable. i imagine with increases in production cost, we'll see less and less studios willing to develop these games, or they're going to have to increase prices from the standard 60 to something else.
tl;dr, i worry that these amazing big budget games are going to become more of an endangered species, which sucks because they're jaw dropping. before people played games and thought "hm, they should make a movie for this." but now, what's the point of a RDR2 movie or God of War movie? the game already accomplishes it.
*just gonna reiterate one more time... i legit think god of war is the best game i've ever played. i already know i'm gonna NG+ it immediately after i finish the campaign. and at some point in the future i'll come back and just play raw Give me God of War, which from everything i've read is substantially more difficult than NG+