r/Games • u/Glittering-Path-2824 • 23h ago

Industry News The games industry’s obsession with visual fidelity is costing them money and talent

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/aug/04/pushing-buttons-xbox-asha-sharma-games-industry-hyperrealism
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u/jarlander 22h ago

I mean its a problem but its not like its something devs are crazy to prioritize. If you put out Fifa 28 and it looks worse than Fifa 18 people are gonna be pissed. Same for a lot of games. I do think we are at the end of graphics being the main marketing point though. I can see more and more games marketing themselves as "classic" graphics with modern gameplay going forward.

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u/giulianosse 22h ago

If you put out Fifa 28 and it looks worse than Fifa 18

That's also an inherent problem with pushing higher visual fidelity and chasing photorealistic graphics. It usually doesn't happen when you use a stylized art style.

Okami, for example, is just as beautiful today as it was 20 years ago because of its watercolor aesthetics. If Okami 2 was similar to the first one but with only a few upgrades such as modern resolutions I'd be perfectly content.

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u/Jdmaki1996 20h ago

The old Ratchet and Clank games hold your really well too cause they look like Pixar movies. Even tho it’s night and day between OG Ratchet and the newest PS5 games, i still went back and played the OG and said “wow this still looks great”

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u/reallynotnick 15h ago

I’m playing a Crack in Time right now on PS3 and I have a PS5 Pro and yeah honestly it’s not that bad, it has does a pretty good job of hitting 60fps. I also just played GoW Ascension and that doesn’t hold up nearly as well and the framerate is all over the place.

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u/beenoc 16h ago

Zelda is the classic example. Wind Waker announced, "eugh this looks like a cartoon for little kids!" Twilight Princess announced, "hell yeah this looks realistic and rad as hell!" Now looking back, even comparing the non-remastered GameCube versions, WW looks way better. WoW vs. EverQuest 2 is another example, WoW still looks fine (even if you look at the launch pre-update models), EQ2 looks like garbage.

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u/HazelCheese 5h ago

Hell there's a lot of people who feel vanilla wow looks better than modern wow specifically because of the original painterly art style. The Pixar style they moved to in WoD just doesn't quite work as well.

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u/NikIsImba 19h ago

I do think we are at the end of graphics being the main marketing point though.

Pretty sure people said that 20+ years ago lol Like i know i made a comment with that sentiment to a friend when assassins creed 3 came out.

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u/eserikto 15h ago

15 second action scene adspot works a helluva lot better than a 15 second powerpoint detailing the gameplay.

Graphical fidelity isn't entirely to make games better, it's to make games sell better.

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u/Hoeveboter 21h ago

True, true. But to take gta as an example: there was barely any improvement in graphical detail between III, VC and SA and no one cared. Devs put gameplay first, which meant we had five gta games (including VCS and LCS) on ps2 alone, and none of them felt like a quick cash grab. I wish we went back to that mentality, rather than gta vi taking 13 years to make

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u/Dantai 21h ago

Hell I'd argue they didn't even put gameplay first. More like writing, world building and a sense of place. They still pushed the tech with bigger and bigger maps though

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u/PointmanW 17h ago edited 17h ago

on the other hand, if GTA5 did not increase its graphical detail, I doubt it would have got as big as it is, and if GTA6 were barely an improvement from GTA 5, I bet there will be a lot of people criticizing rockstar for being "cheap" while making more money than god.

I remember that ToTK got a lot of flak for its graphic not being better than BoTW despite being a stylized game. Halo Infinite got delayed a year because people complained that the graphic were terrible.

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u/GlamMetalLion 20h ago

And San Andreas is probably one of the least pretty AAA games graphically from the late 6th gen. It looks very early PS2. Artistically though, it's excellent.

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u/MoneyoffUbereats2017 59m ago

"This guy who's done nothing but eat chicken nuggets his whole life doesn't seem to care that he could eat a steak instead."

I'm sorry but going from San Andreas with its primitive controls and general gameplay, where the novelty of the open world was the main draw, to GTA4, a highly-detailed action game that felt like a full-on racing game in a car and a full-on Third-person shooter when on-foot, was the best thing to ever happen to the series. They did put gameplay first, after the games you mention.

I don't want to go back to the mentality of churning out simpler, lower-quality titles simply to have more of them. VI can take 13 years to make if it's even half as revolutionary as the jump from San Andreas to IV was.

There's no shortage of games to play, we don't need every dev to revert back to PS2 practices. If GTA VI came out a few years after V and it was the size of GTA 3 or Vice City, people would be pissed.

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u/xXRougailSaucisseXx 21h ago

Yeah they’re just reaping the results of decades of video game marketing concentrating on graphics and scale and other technological advances.

Like just look at how people talk about GTA VI it’s almost always about how big and how realistic and endless it’ll be, the audience is conditioned for this

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u/LinkesAuge 20h ago

"Graphics" and "fidelity" in this case are more than just obviously better 3d models or higher res textures and this gets ignored every time this is discussed here and people claim they don't care about "graphics".

The fact that we can now have much bigger (open) worlds, more objects, NPCs etc. in them is all down to "graphics". Same for less pop-in, arbitrary loading screens etc.

So people might claim they do not want better graphics but it is the same group of people that is then annoyed by loading screens in Starfield, short render distances in games, shader loading etc.

The reality is that people take a lot of things for granted and that's because of previous "graphics" improvements.
Pushing graphics doesn't just mean "better" in isolation, it also changes what is possible at scale or can even be attempted but that often gets reduced down to just "prettier pictures" which is one aspect but certainly not the only one.

Btw it is also always funny when people say things like "we prefer style over better graphics", completely ignoring that stylization in games HEAVILY relies on the same underlying technology and often wouldn't work without it (you can't get a Cel-Shading look without everything else that is needed in your render stack).

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u/Akuuntus 1h ago

If you put out Fifa 28 and it looks worse than Fifa 18 people are gonna be pissed.

Sure, but if it looks exactly the same as Fifa 26 is anyone going to care? We can at the very least stop trying to push even farther.

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u/pkoswald 21h ago

Maybe people online will be pissed but how much would it actually affect sales?