it's massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic'd to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or a couple of photorealistic guys punching each other.
the actual cost of making games is now almost completely decoupled from their graphical fidelity and that's a good thing. every task in game dev takes less time than it ever took. everything is cheaper to do.
so when you see a big company grind their workers into paste forcing them to deliver more and more on tighter and tighter schedules, please be aware that it has nothing to do with graphics or hardware or gamers' demands for anything, and everything to do with the capitalist thinking that says: oh, you can work twice as fast now? i will give you half the time
Yeah, this is one of my biggest frustrations with people who skip past "labor needs to improve" to just land in saying "all of those advancements and achievements are worthless." The big thing is ignoring the amount this does actually trickle out to the entire medium of this art form, more so perhaps than any other collaborative art form humanity has managed to create other than maybe music to a degree. The amount that advancements are shared across this industry without being gated by endless patents and capitalist roadblocks to sharing expert methods or tools is actually quite good.
But the other thing that absolutely kills me is the irony of some people shitting on this work while claiming they're pro-artist, pro-worker, or pro-labor. Because there is another side of this that so many people can't seem to hold in their head simultaneously because it's too cognitively disonant: a lot of devs love working on evolving game technology and making really cool and/or realistic graphics! They're not all literally slaves who have a gun to their head and none of this would ever exist if it weren't for the gun. They're also not all capitalistic simps or tech bros. In fact, the smartest tech artists I've worked with are the farthest possible delta from a tech bro!
Even if we lived in some kinda union-filled socialist Utopia, people would still make ALL of these things! Because many of them are the natural and obvious thing to do when exploring the extents of this technology and art. Painters and sculpters and filmmakers and everyone else have all explored the extents of simulating reality in different ways, this is just the next step, and ALL of the tools in this case can be re-used for other styles and approaches.
I just wish more "pro-art" and "pro-labor" people would realize that to passionately care for the well-being of happiness of people also means accounting for the fact that people like to create things, some of the things people naturally like to create are "realistic" or "highly formalized" and not loaded with impressionism or poetry or dreamscape aesthetics and no that's not because of capitalism, and the fact that capitalism exploits the fundamental joy people get from creating so easily doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bath water and say that the things people create that best fit certain capitalistic models are therefore inherently awful and have no creative worth, ethical worth, or labor worth.
I may go so far as to say one is not actually pro-artist and pro-labor if one thinks a certain art style is ethically worthless and therefore the natural conclusion of that thought process is that some artists should just never have a job instead because actually some of them did choose to do this and some of them actually did like it (even if any or many other factors made it suck at the same time).
I've maybe had to defend that "good graphics technology is actually really cool and makes people really happy to work on" too many times in random Discord servers full of people who unironically think everything should look like a Suda51 or PS2 game or something and anything with even remotely "realistic" graphics is dogshit independent of style or art direction. I'm pretty sure most environment and lighting and VFX artists I've met who work on AAA games actually really enjoy it and some have no desire to work on stylized art literally at all.
