Gaming

"One of the reasons for [microtransaction hell] is the rising cost of games' development."

NO!

Budgets... follow... revenue. Never the other way around. How much a publisher wants to spend on a game is a direct reflection of how much they expect to make. Games can go over budget. Games can under-perform. But these systems were not strapped on in desperation, due to some intrinsic rising cost in making... a game.

It has never been cheaper or easier to make a game. The video is explicitly about that, and it still fucks up this fundamental relationship. Companies keep pumping in more money because they expect more money. The brazen exploitation of sticking real-money fees into a fucking console game has let them expect a king's ransom. Ban that and the budgets will dip right the fuck back down. Probably just by releasing games with only a year of development. Did you not include all the crazy stuff you wanted? Yeah, that's art. Unused ideas go in the next game.

Even if you want high realism: build your fucking tools. "Procedural generation" doesn't mean randomness, it means rules do work for you. Why are cloth and paint and dirt still enormous hand-twiddled images? What is that Quake engine bullshit? Generating wood grain as-you-need-it was in the first Alone In The Dark, with literally dozens of polygons onscreen. Your game should not have a 20 GB lump of wasted human effort, just to make players go "yep, that's wood."

Artists should be defining a style and picking examples. Yeah yeah yeah, "AI" promises that, but I've been banging this drum for over twenty years. You don't need a neural network to stick freckles on a face texture at 4K instead of 128x128. We have achieved dot technology at arbitrary resolution. You can ship the tools that generate these images and make the user run them at whatever resolution they want. It might even be faster than sucking data off an overstuffed hard drive.

And where you really need handmade detail, maybe do it in vectors instead? Like it was cute, back in the 90s, when Half-Life's black-and-yellow diagonal warning stripes were pixelated on a $2000 Windows PC, but Perfect Dark's were crisp on a $200 N64, because the clever lads at Rare figured out you could just rotate the goddamn texture. But if you're still halving texel size by quadrupling texture size then you're doing something wrong. It's ballooning your budget and pissing off players and dragging out schedules and you've had all the time in the world to do anything about it.