Tom

Yeah, it boggles the mind why they continue to insist on taking this path beyond mindless investors wanting growth however it's achieved. They don't even have to look far back to see the benefits of a healthy ecosystem where they adequately support smaller releases (by which I mean, literally anything not FF16 and FF7). I mean, for crying out loud, would Nier Automata get made at Square today if all we still had was that original game? Probably not because the numbers ostensibly wouldn't justify it, even if that game itself wasn't an outright flop. And yet that series only enjoys the prominence that it has now because they took that additional chance on it when it did and I think it's fair to say that game bolstered Square's profile as a publisher capable of producing games beyond what they're conventional associated with.

They have other pillars of their business like their manga and music publishing that I feel like aren't saddled with these ridiculous targets. Like you said, they have such a rich stable of IP that they can turn to as a reliable cushion. If you throw those babies out with the bathwater when the water turns out to be lukewarm, what else is going to ensure they can whether those storms until they put out another big release? It sure ain't gonna be their blockchain efforts or anything else they're still hellbent on pursuing, that's for sure!

Yeah, I'm pretty much of exactly the same mind as you. So few games actually justify the usage of this advanced technology in terms of actual gameplay design; even a lot of the examples that get touted as being impossible on past generations of hardware because of the m2 drives or whatever, it's like, versions of those games already existed and the utilization of that new tech ultimately smack as a specious solution in search of problem, and a costly solution to implement at that. The proposition of "better, raytraced lighting at high framerates" in an expensive package that brings little else of tangible benefit to a game's real bottom line doesn't exactly make for a convincing argument that this jump in particular has been particularly necessary or worth the expense. I barely ever turn on my PS5 despite otherwise being satisfied at what it does offer for the games I play on it and, at this stage, outside of the Switch 2, I'm mulling just not bothering getting any regular old console the next time around, especially if the sort of exclusive Japanese developer support that I'm most interested just isn't going to be there.

Artificial goosing on the part of investors right now aside, I've definitely felt for a long time that this industry has been in for a reckoning when it comes to this stuff and I doubt Square is going to be the last to feel the squeeze with these high-end releases, either. The Switch and Steam Deck in particular show that, at a mass market level and for handhelds especially, 1080p is still a more than sufficient maximum resolution for delivering on developers' visions and that people are fully willing to discard fancier features if they gain tangible benefits in return like, indeed, portability. And that's without getting into how even if you do have the money and staff to produce the glitziest games, so much stuff that runs on engines like Unreal 5 is just absurdly heavy even on top of the line hardware, let alone anything further down the chain. I believe a lot of those advancements can have a place in game development in the future, but only when they're a lot more cost effective both in terms of in-game implementation and just sheer development cost. Otherwise, yeah, I think the industry would be significantly better served dialing its ambitions back and refining their know-how on what's most readily available and accessible, especially when consumers aren't subsidizing things by buying the requisite hardware in large numbers.