alt Hacker Newsfor better or for worse, gaming has gone mainstream. there are now a lot of dollars chasing easy wins. even a computer graphics enthusiast, it is really sad to see that they have optimized for incredible rendering pipelines and utterly forgettable assets, mechanics, and stories.
but if you rewind your render quality expectations by about ten years, there are still great games being made for way under $100mm. I'll plug two of my current favorites:
* factorio ($20). if you don't already know what it is, I can't really summarize it here. the entire team is < 10 people, but it's rare example of engineering excellence combined with a carefully curated user experience. I try to get all the devs and PMs I work with to read their blog.
* zero k (free). a bit more wacky, but one of the best rts of all time. they also have an interesting dev blog, and for a nice cherry on top, it's open source. some feature requests on the forums get the reply "great idea, I look forward to your PR", which I find pretty funny.
I think the creative sweet spot is somewhere around the playstation 2, maybe a midpoint between PS1 and PS2, especially if the gross hardware speed takes optimization work out of the picture.
Modern games are wrestling with a lot of uncanny valley stuff still. They've improved a lot from the polar Express movie, but it's still an issue.
I recall the recent ads for first descendant where a guy is clearly smoking, which I thought was some vaping thing in realtime, but the smoking is even worse. Probably cigarette companies shadow funding things there.
It's been pretty lightspeed how the days of google do no evil has went to the great woke purge after covid and now is no holds barred mamma sociopathy. It was like 5 years.
I get the MBA sociopathy has been bubbling under the surface and lots of scary movements around the borders, but it is scary what is going on with big tech.