alt Hacker News> a target release date of 2030
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for a StarCraft shooter despite it not being StarCraft at all (I enjoy the universe). I wanted StarCraft: Ghost back in the day, and this feels like a taste of that dream.
That said, targeting a release of 2030 is wild to me. Look at the Astra game dev hype that's hitting twitter right now. Yes it's all filtered to the best possible examples / yes people are not one shotting these things, but still it's very clear that LLMs are beginning to be very capable at game dev in a way that doesn't look/feel like ass.
LLMs are going to become more capable over time. I think most of us can agree that eventually they'll be competitive with AAA developers given enough GPU cycles. I would argue that given rate of improvement, we're looking at that point coming in the next year or two.
To emphasize this point, a year ago GPT-5 got released. This was the type of game it would make: https://youtu.be/yTHo7tMborY?t=324
This is the type of game Astra is making: https://youtu.be/GuO_Eo34C8E?t=348
It's just starting to be capable of making assets in blender / unreal. Given this rate of advancement, what is the state going to be like 4 years from now? It really feels a bit like the "travelling to distant stars" problem, where at some point it's faster to wait for better engines than to leave now. I worry that by the time this gets released, the market is going to be flooded with fully custom AAA games that are hyperniche. 4 years out is a long, long time to wait, and it's a longer time to bet on success / market dynamics.
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Apparently 6 years is not an uncommon development cycle for AAA right now. For a random example, Ghost of Yotei which is also an open world game, was in development for 4 years. That game is a sequel too, and I think Sucker Punch is probably less dysfunctional than Blizzard at the moment. Still it might have been premature to announce it at this stage.
I just started playing with building a game in Godot with Fable 5.1 last weekend and the pace is crazy. Obviously there's a world of difference between what looks playable on my machine and what a AAA studio with the best human artists and developers can put out, and I appreciate that they still exist and put in the first class effort, but... yeah. A 3-year timeline while this is going on seems out of touch with what's going on in the world.
I'm not a gamedev so I might be wrong, but my friend showed me in 2020 a quick 30 minute tutorial in unity. In this time he made a basic 3d shooter game. The first video is the type of game a teenager would have made 20 years ago and the second one is of course a lot more impressive, but I believe the game engine is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.
I just read the book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier (without having played any of their game or being aware that BlizzCon is around the corner). It seems they'll repeat their own mistakes.
I am getting more and more pessimistic about these studios and their AAA works. Every game is now a gamble with multi year effort with hundreds if not thousands of staff behind it. If a game doesn't sell, and that happens more than once, layoffs are coming. And for Blizzard specifically, it'd better be an online game that's going to be a multi billion dollar cash cow they can keep milking for years. If not, they would not work on the game in the first place.
Of course they have released many great games, but as the history has proven, you can't just keep coming up with new games that are original, fun if not addictive and also make money, especially with the fierce competition today.
Which makes me think I should spend more money/time on indie games than the action/adventure game from big studios that are increasingly repetitive and boring. We need more, smaller studios to give us something new.