people in the tech industry like to overestimate their own skills.

we see the same attitude in software industry - somethin' that has existed since the 60s that software is solved problem. yet everyone has difficulties in shippin' software that actually works whether that's titans like Apple / Microsoft to small mom and pop shops.

Games the difficulty is two-fold. 1: games are an art - and making art to good taste is a complex problem. 2. games are software - thereby suffering from problems encountered by the regular software industry etc lack of labour / resourcing etc

re: Cyberpunk, they tried to solve it again - over-estimating their own abilities to build a game engine (like they did with the Witcher games before) and ending up getting the basics wrong (e.g. resource loading on lower-end systems like the PS4).

Games SHOULD be a solved problem. There is no good reason for us to have to reinvent the wheel over and over. There are compsci white papers that neatly solve all of the big problems games run into.

But games are not a solved problem. There are multiple overlapping reasons why.

One is that gamedevs often just don't do the research. Why would they? The deadlines loom, the milestones have to be delivered, nobody cares if it's a hacky mess right now, surely management will give us time to fix it once they realize that it's broken--but if we don't deliver anything, the publisher cuts our funding.

This overlaps with scheduling and management issues. It turns out that writing good software takes up time[1], and the problem with games in particular is that they don't make money until they're released.

You don't write games like you write business software, where the other company paying for your milestones is the company that's going to use the software; that company usually has a revenue stream even without your software, so they don't have to care as much. For a game, though, there IS no revenue stream until the game launches. Every year that a game is in development without a release is a loss, and that pisses the board of directors right the fuck off, so that means the game needs to be out ASAP.

Because of this, games are often not given enough room in the development schedule to be made correctly. There's no time for research, testing, planning, or any of the other important parts of software engineering--we have to write this code NOW, or it doesn't ship. And if you read that source I linked in the footnote, you'll know that this produces rotten software.

This is compounded by the kind of one-upsmanship that is created by such an environment--leading to a phrase I've heard from friends in other companies: "Very optimistic people who are no longer with the company made this decision". You get into a situation where people made promises to impress the publisher, claiming that they can turn out a game in an impossible timeframe, and that got them fired--but now you're stuck cleaning up the mess, and the publisher has already wasted a lot of money on the years spent thinking it wasn't a mess.

Mix in the siloing of information (because all of this shit is proprietary) and, despite all of the problems being solved on paper, nobody's solved video games.

[1]: https://jacobian.org/2022/sep/9/quality-is-systemic/

I'm genuinely curious, what money did Dwarf Fortress make? The game is very cool, but I think it's a bit unapproachable to the majority for it to make any amount of serious money like Minecraft, Stardew Valley and RinWorld did.

I could be out of loop, but the last time I played Dwarf Fortress, it still used terminal graphics and white I believe in gameplay > graphics, my brother and the majority don't and probably won't even touch the game. (Not to mention the _menues_)

I agree as well that technology wise it still isn't solved, but I think it is the creative side that will be the most unknown part of the project these days.

That is why we have so many bland but technically impressive games. Studios want safe bets, an FPS game is easy, making it interesting to play is still very hard.

While "solved" is a bit optimistic, it is also true that e.g. sports games get sales every year with mainly updates to the player roster.

it depends on what the poster meant by "games" - do they mean engine and graphics? Or do they mean game design/mechanics?

Game engines and graphics is "solved" if you stick to popular concepts (which are those that are easily available in commercial engines).

Game design/mechanics is an unsolved problem imho - unless you consider it solved when merely taking an existing game design (like an FPS) and add nothing new to it (aka, those yearly COD military shooters).

Consider a game like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Taiji/ (inspired by the witness). This game is quite unique, and cannot really be recycled in to another game (without it being just a clone).

Not to mention that entertainment isn't a constant. Meaning people will get bored of X after some time, no matter how good the X is.

As they say: All good things must come to an end.

And: You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.

Try not to take it personally, there are both devs who are replaceable and devs who aren’t, and with ~40 Call of Duty titles on almost as many platforms, a million and one people have worked on it, some doing more mechanical port work than others. There’s truth in there; the games industry is tough, and it’s relevant that some studios that (for example) demand lots of overtime haven’t seen any large exodus, or sometimes there is high turnover and the studio still survives, to parent’s point. There’s a higher level layer to this, that from a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of smaller studios that are easily replaceable, and I’d speculate studios go out of business over contracts lost to other studios far more often than over employee walkouts (which of course fuels the need for overtime to be competitive). This is true for games and for VFX production in the US, enough people want these jobs that high turnover doesn’t seem to slow the business.

you mean like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered? or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from 2019 not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from 2007?

Pretty much, yeah. Annual sports games become obsolete when the next one comes out.

The majority of devs don't work on bleeding edge game engine tech, though.

My sister is a vet. She works in a normal vet practice in our city dealing with mainly cats and dogs. Once I asked her why she doesn't work as a vet in the zoo, an extremely prestigious and wealthy institution with zoological research, wide variety of animals, etc. She just said that all young vets want to be a vet in the zoo. So they have much worse pay and conditions than other vet jobs.

Video game developers don't have terrible conditions and relatively low pay because of some anomalous lack of bargaining power which can be fixed by unionization. They have lots of bargaining power, most of which they use to choose the industry they work in. There are lots of young men who want to work in games, and far fewer who want to work in financial software. So pay and conditions are far worse in games, to the point where supply meets demand in each type of development work.

In a sense, some do - by quitting and/or going indie. There's some good studios out there; Team Cherry (hollow knight) famously doesn't do crunch. They also don't (need to) make any announcements about games until they're ready.