The Ultimate Bloat

[Rudolph]

Lately, I could not help but notice how pretty much everything in media seems to keep getting bigger and bigger every day.

 

Games are getting so big that in certain cases, entire DLCs worth of content are removed altogether to accommodate for new content, theatrical movies get turned into miniseries because the director's cut turns out to be 4 hours long and even freaking video essays on YouTube can last well over 9 hours!

 

Just what the hell is going on? Can someone explain this to me? I get that capitalism implies infinite growth, but I do not see this applying to the examples I brought up, as this all looks more expensive - and expansive - than profitable in the long run. I am no business person myself, but I would think that making things as short and lean as possible would be the preferred approach, if not to leave people wanting more, especially with all the claims made about people having shorter attention span these days. I do not use TikTok myself, but it appears to be doing extremely well - which makes it the exception to the rule, at least as far as I can tell.

[MFG38]

This thread reminds me of this video I watched once that focuses on games specifically and why they're too big these days. Agree with a lot of the points presented herein.

 

 

[Individualised]

AAA games take so long to produce these days that if you start development in one generation, it will almost certainly end up releasing on the next generation of consoles instead.

[Rudolph]

I am honestly shocked that the industry as a whole has yet to capitalize on the whole resurgence of retro aesthetics as a way to dramatically reduce production costs and maximize profits. I mean, I suppose there is also an incentive to make games that use the latest technology in order to drive hardware sales, but even then, the hardware that seems to be all the rage these days is handheld game consoles like the Switch and the Steam Deck, so I would expect the games to get just as lean and compact as the physical platforms they run on.

[Sonikkumania]

While eating, hunger grows.

[Daytime Waitress]

It's exasperating watching your favourite crime drama and seeing the detective just about to solve the mystery, only to have it slip through their fingers...

 

11 hours ago, Rudolph said:

I am honestly shocked that the industry as a whole has yet to capitalize on the whole resurgence of retro aesthetics as a way to dramatically reduce production costs and maximize profits. I mean, I suppose there is also an incentive to make games that use the latest technology in order to drive hardware sales, but even then, the hardware that seems to be all the rage these days is handheld game consoles like the Switch and the Steam Deck, so I would expect the games to get just as lean and compact as the physical platforms they run on.

 

Take a look at the Steam front page and what do you see?

An ocean of asset flips.

 

Now cast your eyes over the Nintendo e-shop.

A vast mountain range stretching to the horizon, each and every peak comprised of anime tiddies from incalculable numbers of hentai shovelware.

 

And now gaze upon the mobile game shops.

A never-ending wasteland of digital Skinner boxes.

 

Hell, despite their cache, their clout, their obscene amount of money, the AAA publishers might just be just as much of a statistical anomaly as the lone indie dev/small studio earnestly toiling away on their dream project.

 

Because it we go by sheer volume - and drop your retro aesthetic stipulation - the "industry as a whole" pretty much already runs on the premise of churning out whatever with the least amount of effort for the maximum amount of profit enough profit to continue the ruse.

[Kinsie]

On 12/4/2023 at 1:48 AM, Rudolph said:

Games are getting so big that in certain cases, entire DLCs worth of content are removed altogether to accommodate for new content, theatrical movies get turned into miniseries because the director's cut turns out to be 4 hours long and even freaking video essays on YouTube can last well over 9 hours!

My favorite game this year (and also probably next year) is 80mb. Maybe you're just looking at all the wrong stuff?

 

6 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

Take a look at the Steam front page and what do you see?

An ocean of asset flips.

 

Now cast your eyes over the Nintendo e-shop.

A vast mountain range stretching to the horizon, each and every peak comprised of anime tiddies from incalculable numbers of hentai shovelware.

 

And now gaze upon the mobile game shops.

A never-ending wasteland of digital Skinner boxes.

Video games are actually good. Maybe you're just looking at all the wrong stuff?

[Rudolph]

3 hours ago, Kinsie said:

My favorite game this year (and also probably next year) is 80mb.

Oh, I am aware of indie/small-team efforts. In fact, I have been checking out quite a few demos lately, such as Space Wreck, Wizordum, Rough Justice '84 and Roboquest (that one is pretty big, however). But those tend to remain fairly small due to the limitations in terms of budget and resources.

 

Those limitations are clearly nowhere near as much of a concern for AAA studios and as such there is a weird disconnect between hardware and software: the Nintendo Switch is a smashing hit despite being only slightly bigger than a large smartphone while AAA titles that can run on such console seem to always get bigger and bigger. Surely, if a bunch of demosceners in the early 2000s could create something like .kkrieger, then you would think huge-ass companies with all their money and resources would have followed suit eventually, right? It just boggles the mind.

Edited December 4, 2023 by Rudolph

[Kinsie]

7 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Surely, if a bunch of demosceners in the early 2000s could create something like .kkrieger, then you would think huge-ass companies with all their money and resources would have followed suit eventually, right?

You're right, why didn't the demosceners get into AAA games?

[dasho]

Really wanted this to be about a Doom TC that made every enemy extra-wide like the Wide Putin videos:

 

[Rudolph]

11 hours ago, Kinsie said:

You're right, why didn't the demosceners get into AAA games?

More like why AAA games kept getting bigger in size. I get that .kkrieger was just a tech demo, but still, the fact that it is only 96kb is impressive.

 

[realjohnmadden]

Why optimize when you can just brute force it? It'll work fine on your systems - they're highly powerful after all. 'And the customer?' Who cares, we need this game out by January. Game's 100gb because we need the sounds uncompressed? As long as it runs, it's good.

 

This reminds me of how in Fallout: New Vegas, they had to cut stuff from the game in order to fit more content. NPCs in random areas? Gone, so they could allocate memory in an engine that's probably made of duct tape and prayers.

[Kinsie]

15 minutes ago, realjohnmadden said:

This reminds me of how in Fallout: New Vegas, they had to cut stuff from the game in order to fit more content. NPCs in random areas? Gone, so they could allocate memory in an engine that's probably made of duct tape and prayers.

That era of Bethesda engine suffered terribly from the PS3's split memory pools (256mb main, 256mb vram) compared to the Xbox 360's single unified one (512mb).

[magicsofa]

People are suckers. Bloated products will remain in production as long as people buy them. And most people who are accustomed to modern consumerism have a hard time not spending a few extra bucks.

 

The company I work for makes digital amp modelers. When you buy the physical unit you get 2000 speaker models included. 2000 SPEAKERS... (not amplifiers which usually give more character to the sound than the speakers themselves). And yet, when we put out additional models that you can download and add to your unit, people go fuxing WILD over it. After a recent release of some shiny new ones we pulled over 30k in a single week just from downloads. There isn't a shred of a reason why someone would ever need these additional speaker models... you can achieve any sound with the existing 2000 models which by the way can be adjusted further. But many people just like the feeling of buying stuff more than the feeling of learning how to tweak settings.

 

Anyway I noticed this recently because in order to play Rocket League I have to go through the stupid Epic Games launcher. So I get to see all the ridiculous ads for these stupid ass titles that always say something like "Starting at 99.99... Three exclusive outfits included!" 

 

Basically the Industry has realized that if you simply take a chunk of content out of the main bundle, and charge $20 for it while keeping the base game at the same price, people will fall for it enough that the company makes more money. If consumers simply decided today to stop falling for it, the Industry would pivot by noon tomorrow.

[Rudolph]

I wonder how long they can keep this up before it all comes crashing down - or the bubble bursts, to go with the bloating metaphor. Like, at some point, things are going to get so expensive that they will not even be able to make a profit.

 

Right?

[Cutman 999]

There were actual limitations on how big actually you could do anything, for videogames was memory and technical capabilities, for movies was the actual film itself. So now with the pressence of the internet and capacities to produce whatever you want, logically many products could become big since there's no limit.

[magicsofa]

20 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I wonder how long they can keep this up before it all comes crashing down - or the bubble bursts, to go with the bloating metaphor. Like, at some point, things are going to get so expensive that they will not even be able to make a profit.

 

Right?

 

Yeah but, there are teams of accountants and market analysts that are constantly crunching the numbers and aiming for that sweet spot of how much people are willing to spend. I bet that in order for a "crash" to happen, it would either have to be a widespread shift in consumer thought pattern that catches the analysts off guard, or just a more overarching depression/recession/other pressure from the general economy that would suddenly push these products into unaffordable territory for enough people.

 

I have heard that independent titles are slowly gaining more popularity in general. Haven't really done research to specifically verify that, but it does make sense at least from the production side as the cost for small teams to develop and distribute keeps getting lower and lower. So if continuing on this trend it probably wouldn't really be a crash or bubble burst, instead it would be indie devs slowly becoming more competitive over a long period. In this scenario the big companies will have time to react, and will be able to keep themselves in business just by easing off the gas a little bit and hiring a few pixel artists. They are profit machines, not passionate artists. They will not go down with the ship. They'll just make whatever sacrifice is necessary to stay in the market.

[OpenRift]

I think what's changed is the level of analytics of both multi-billion dollar media conglomerates and small content creators have access to and how they decide what their next move is. The problem is that a lot of them either lack the discipline to understand when it's time to stop because they see that sweet, sweet cashflow, or on the more independent side of things, they have to milk content trends for their living or to fund bigger projects because variety and originality isn't consistently profitable, especially on places like YouTube or TikTok. I think there is a way to work a good balance as a smaller content creator, but there's plenty of more creative projects that turn into mediocre slop because the creators are tempted by promising analytics and their ideas overstayed its welcome.

[dasho]

As usual, I will never forgive the Oblivion Horse Armor DLC

[Li'l devil]

Shut up and buy the new CoD! Don't forget to buy SSD with at least 512 GB capacity or else the game wouldn't have enough space!

[sptz33]

I might sound very off topic, but what always bothered me about games now is how everything needs to look like real life. So real that you can see the pores on characters faces, so real you can count every piece of rock on the ground, so real that it almost looks like a movie! And yeah, this tech is cool... but I don't want to spend 2 or even 3k on a PC that can run it. It seems like it just became a luxurious thing, which probably always was, but still makes me somewhat feel low. For example, I have been playing Colin McRae Rally 3, 4 and 05 and every time I play them, I just think "Man, all I want is this same visual style, but just maybe make the physics a little better, smooth out some polygons/rough surfaces just a bit, don't even touch the texture resolution, maybe add widescreen support - I will be a happy man." That is just a racing game of course, not that much of a big scale content wise. FPS games wise, as an example, CS Source and COD 4 have the perfect graphical fidelity and visuals that just hit the spot for me, it looks just real and believable enough to me, I don't need more except a bigger map and more things to do in it. I keep fantasizing of a game like say Arma 3 with a mix of Battlefield 4, but with a visual style of CS Source with a bit of polish here and there.

 

All I am trying to say and that's the way I see it at least - a lot of those games releasing that fit my interest, while they look "amazing", also feel incredibly empty. I want something that is new, released currently but can also just run out of the box on ancient hardware. I just don't see the appeal in spending so much on hardware, just to play something that isn't going to be worthwhile. And it feels bad for the devs, a lot of them probably get paid jack shit for putting so much effort on the work they do.

 

Might be sounding dumb in a few places, but just my take on it.

[sptz33]

9 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

Shut up and buy the new CoD! Don't forget to buy SSD with at least 512 GB capacity or else the game wouldn't have enough space!

Another year, another Slop of Duty. Gotta eat it up! lol

[Rudolph]

8 hours ago, sptz33 said:

I might sound very off topic, but what always bothered me about games now is how everything needs to look like real life.

No, the rush for photorealism seems to be a contributing factor to games getting so big lately. I mean, I get the appeal in certain cases, but to this day, when it comes to human models, VFX artists have yet to figure out how to deal with the uncanny valley, no matter how much money and resources get poured into their projects. I would rather have less-realistic, more-stylized visuals, especially if it can ensure decent, consistent performances.

Edited December 6, 2023 by Rudolph

[Lofwyr]

Add a ten thrillagorillabyte software suite to render a simple textured quad.

Aka "engines".

 

It's not just games tho, anki, that flashcard program, building it ...the files the build system pulls and generates take up more space than my entire operating systems software, and I use Slackware linux, aka "Install everything from the repo because of no automatic dependency resolution".

Does not really matter that much ,but that fact still "amused" me.