Since everyone else is commenting on this NYT article, I thought I’d throw in my 2¢. The answer as I’ve said before is that graphics are a shorthand for system power and have been for so long, we’ve collectively forgotten that.

To quote my past self from my writing on FF Wiki where I can’t link because the opinions are too spicy on certain topics:

The truth of the matter is gamers have been taught to treat increased graphical fidelity as a hallmark of quality because until the last couple console generations it was the easiest demonstration of the increased power of the system. Of course, both gamers and marketers completely missed the underlying point, so gamers get into wars over graphics without understanding what the hardware guys were trying to sell because graphics, rather than practical technical benchmarks, have been thrown at their heads since they were in diapers. Many gamers today are not old enough to remember a time before home consoles were a relatively mainstream thing, and the number whose gaming habits predate the NES is a small fraction. Most of the gaming public have never heard anything but "prettier than the competition." So when you get into arguments about FPS, it’s really because being able to look pretty and keep a consistent 60FPS is considered something that’s still relatively hard, while counterintuitively also being seen as the standard because we’ve been especially bombarded with everything having it for enough years it’s lost any semblance of meaning.

That was written in a decade ago, two Rants after I talked about Project Morpheus as revealed in 2014, which would be renamed to PlayStation VR the following year. Not a single thing has changed since then. The PS5 Pro was hailed as the system that gives you the "graphics mode" PS5 fidelity at the "performance mode" 60FPS. Why? Because graphics are the only means people have to judge the system. Same as ever.

I’ve seen several points flying around and without linking any to single anyone out, here are a few of them:

"People asking for shorter games with worse graphics are liars."

The truth of the matter is, on the whole, yes. The average gamer is a magpie. The go-to counterexample is, even in the article, Minecraft, but Minecraft is the exception, not the rule. There are a lot of indie games with "worse graphics," but you have not heard of more than a fraction of a percent of them. Indie games are an ocean of efforts of which only a drop will ever become a household name. The better you can make your game look, the more likely it is someone will give it a chance. Trust me, I am fully aware of this with my own offerings.

"Games are already shorter and smaller than they used to be."

Oh, my God, yes, but also no. I remember the birth of the "ten hour shooter" and then the "online only shooter." I remember Final Fantasy X being criticized for being short on Toonami because it was "only 40 hours." That said, the prior three were also in that ballpark for the main story, which was actually up from a steady rise of everything before, and they mostly have been ever since. It might have had more restricted environments, but it wasn’t actually any shorter. I bring it up specifically because others brought it up specifically. This isn’t necessarily a question of graphics so much as storage, but considering so much is pure download at this point, which is its own entire conversation, storage isn’t the problem it used to be. Which brings us to a different conversation about content. When games are hyped up with how "big" they are, the immediate question is "and how dense?" Because you can make a big world with nothing in it and it’s very easy to do. When games are hyped with how "long" they are, the question is "and how well-paced?" You can make a long game full of time-wasting annoyances and that is also easy to do. You can spread your content wafer-thin and never give the player anything to sink their teeth into and put it on the back of the box as a selling point. Ultimately, this fluctuates and depends heavily on the individual game. Online connectivity introduced new types of games, and thus the proliferation of them as more people got online, leading to a skewing of the numbers along with the idea that it was going to be a ghost town in a few months despite that being true of more or less any game by that point, just less visibly. Live service games are in vogue now, but if Concord is any indication, it’s a saturated market that’s on its way out.

"But it’s because graphics were holding it hostage, because areas got smaller in 3D!"

This isn’t necessarily the case. Final Fantasy XV is a very pretty game with some pretty broad vistas and a lot to see, do, and collect. The world itself might be modestly sized on only a single continent, but it doesn’t feel small. How long does it take to beat? Ehh, less than 30 hours? But there’s an additional 70 hours of optional content, so who’s to say it’s actually smaller? It’s all a matter of how you prioritize your content. FF7 Rebirth is basically double the length of FF7 Remake no matter how you slice it, but FF7 Remake is itself literally the same length give or take as the entire original Final Fantasy VII despite being based on a segment only ⅙ of that. Technology is always going to introduce some limitation and we are the least limited we’ve ever been. Some of the reverence for the past is nostalgia goggles, because older games often had gonzo encounter rates that meant you could not beat the enemies off with a stick to save your life, but there was also minimal room for side content, so how long a game was was a much simpler question. And chances are it felt longer because you were a kid and kids simply have a dilated perception of time because they’ve seen less of it go by. And also probably because you sucked. A lot of the length was probably you wandering around aimlessly checking barrels and getting lost or having no idea what to do because of poor signposting and translation errors. Sure, you could walk over more of it maybe, but there was rarely any actual benefit to it.

"Games are huge and EVERY part costs money; graphics are just visible."

Yes and no. Graphics do legitimately cost a ton compared to most other departments, but the truth is that the real cost center is marketing. When you look at Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the game sold like gangbusters, but still failed to make money, in large part because the publisher had dumped so much into marketing the thing. Publishers are a bane to the industry for that reason, and the expectation that every game HAS a publisher is a blight on certain storefronts that shall not be named. Thing is, the people most invested in trying to stem the tide of red ink that the industry is bleeding right now is… the publishers. Because they’re the pocketbook of the industry. So obviously, they’re not going to suggest cutting their role back, because that might make people realize they’re not quite so necessary in a world where crowdfunding exists. That makes the art department the next closest target. And make no mistake, all parts of the art department are grossly underpaid. I know the original actress for Bayonetta speedrunning the end of her career kind of killed the conversation, but the voice talent especially is a department that suffers a daily salary and some characters only take a day to record. These are people who work a supermarket job between lending their talents to roles that can make or break a game being worth millions. That doesn’t bode well for whatever poor sucker has to model the bushes. Which brings us to…

"CEOs are the most expensive employee in the company."

Yep. No two ways around it, CEOs, especially gaming CEOs, have one job: figurehead. In theory they have important duties having to do with public relations, networking, and making big decisions, but the fact of the matter is, wait for it, they’re almost all . They wouldn’t know a good idea if it whacked them in the side of the face with the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica, so their ability to make meaningful decisions could be matched by a drinking bird with a rubber stamp that says "[NO]" on the average day. On a less than average day when they open their mouth to announce the direction of the company, their unique ability to not know a thing about the industry rarely means it’s a good thing. Just look at what came before the recent replacements at Square Enix and Unity. Their ability to network just means meeting up with other CEOs and investors with deep pockets to eat and play golf. Which is to say it’s just the upper class shmoozing with each other on company time. And as for public relations, that duty has been largely replaced with what James Stephanie Sterling has dubbed the "Sad JPEG," which is to say some text-based image saying "we’re sorry" because making a sobbing influencer apology video would require summoning crocodile tears and that might take effort. Someone has to have royally screwed up if it’s bad enough a CEO has to get in front of a camera and mic, because there are other people who are lower in the chain for that. So what is a CEO actually good for? Being a name and face that shareholders can see however often they meet, because consistency means they don’t all scurry away with their stock money. Which is fake. I mean ALL money is fake, but stocks are especially fake. Gambling for the rich using company names for fantasy football, because GameStop proved a company can be one foot in the grave and still have a stellar stock price. If you’re being generous, a CEO also sets the tone for company policy and culture, but the fact of the matter is gaming pretty broadly reveals that as a condemnation. Credit where credit is due, as much as I have a blazing frustration with Nintendo to rival a thousand suns, Nintendo, in this case, is legitimately one of the good ones.

So what is the solution?

The solution is a little more complex than "shorter games with worse graphics." This is a Rant I’ve been trying to write for literal years now, but it’s never quite been able to make it to the page in a way I like, so I’ve broken off parts and pieces over the years for things like mobile gaming.

The honest truth is that games simply lack a diversified portfolio. With phones having failed their promise to occupy the space handheld systems vacated, with maybe some hope from rumors that Sony is now trying to fill that space again, major studios have been deprived of the systems they used to be able to experiment on. It’s been so long since anyone saw a mid-range title at a $40 price point that when ReCore came along, nobody knew what to make of it and nothing like it has been attempted since. Indie games have largely filled the niche of smaller games at lower prices and the major players have let them because those games simply aren’t exciting to shareholders. It’s like trying to play a game of poker on nothing but big hands going all-in every time.

That’s why everything is so precarious. The "win big; lose big" mentality has never been sustainable and economics have put less money in the pocket of the average person. We don’t need ALL games to be smaller and less pretty; we need SOME of them to be smaller and less pretty, and importantly, to take more risks. Selling the same games over and over only works for so long. Smaller games are where you get to innovate. But again, the industry has largely left that to indies so they can all wait around until someone makes a hit and then all copy that, because pencil-pushers are basically locusts. Only when a good thing is stripped bare do they start looking for the next thing, because they have no ability to create. Only to say "no," and they’re going to say "no" to anything that isn’t what already worked, because they don’t understand games.

Kemco has demonstrated that budget titles really can hold a company aloft. You can search Google Play for "RPG" and be flooded with their vast catalog of completely adequate offerings, all equally capable of occupying ten hours or so before you move on to another one. But out of all of them, Illusion of L’Phalcia is the only one with a PS4 release, because it managed to capture lightning in a bottle just well enough to be worth it. It’s not going to blow you away or anything, but it’s shockingly good for what it is. It has decent ideas and excecutes on them well and it managed to stand above dozens of others that a pencil-pusher would see as just like it. It only takes one real good success. Not that the others aren’t worth keeping around; they’re just smaller successes.

And really, the industry just needs more of that.

People simply have been trained out of, or have never lived in a world with, games that aren’t a major blockbuster. And that’s honestly kind of just sad. This has been a problem for so long, people legitimately don’t know they used to have options. Things they could maybe afford and enjoy rather than having to spend a week’s worth of groceries on one game they might not even LIKE.

It’s going to take a lot more to get things diversified again than it did to stop doing that. It’s going to take a commitment from publishers to either make their own app storefronts, or the Big Three to start making handheld systems again, and it’s going to take a lot of pressure for anyone to be the first to take the plunge on signing off on smaller games, because as much as CEOs are like locusts, they’re also a lot like penguins, all jostling around waiting for the first one to be pushed into the unknown to see if he gets eaten and only following once it’s been a minute without blood in the water.

If it sounds like I’m doing a lot to compare CEOs to dumb animals, yes, yes I am. It’s hard to overstate just how patently useless most gaming CEOs are. How incredibly incompetent. How completely unfit they are for their positions. When you get one who’s actually a creative soul, you get Nintendo or Valve, full of the weird and wonderful, but Nintendo doesn’t share is the thing and Valve’s model is quite frankly so different that it can’t be used as a general model, because Valve doesn’t have shareholders to keep happy. When I say "" in red Chiller font, it’s because pencil-pushers have one distinct ability: the ability to say "no." And that can be incredibly important to a company bleeding red ink, because no matter how many dangling limbs you have to lop off, you’re going to get the business back to its core eventually and even if that means it’s barely dragging itself along by its chin, it’s a stable starting point to start growing back from. The problem is that nobody tells them "good work, we’ll call when we need you again." They overstay their usefulness and stifle any attempt to regrow from there because they only understand "no."

When you look at, say, Chuck E. Cheese, to go outside just gaming for a sec, Chuck E. Cheese could very well have died in the ’80s. It was saved by one exceptional individual who took a look at all the dangling arms of the flailing business and rather than looking at the decrepit facilities and miserable staff, he saw the light in the children’s eyes and understood what was worth saving. I’m not even joking, he scoped out a location and it was dirty, half broken down, and staffed by rude people who didn’t want to be there, but he saw how happy the kids were in spite of all that, which was how he knew it was fixable. He was able to say "no," but he was able to do it constructively, and came in with his own ideas on how to improve the core experience. He had the creative spark. He understood how to say "yes" in the right measure.

"Shorter games with worse graphics" is an easy sound bite. But nobody is going to actually do it, because they don’t have the courage or vision. The fact of the matter is because none of them know what makes games good, the only thing they understand is that making them pretty will get the attention on it. That making them safe and inoffensive will mean there will be broad demand for another one. But ultimately, it is not just graphics in play here. There’s an open grave they’re still actively digging with the status quo, because they only understand the status quo.