AIAS DICE 2023: The negative space

    The 2023 DICE awards, an industry award show where developers judge each other, had a grim message about the future of mainstream video games and it can all be summed up in one award:

"Outstanding Technical Achievement"

A Plague Tale: Requiem?

Elden Ring?

God of War: Ragnarok?

Horizon Forbidden West?

Teardown

    This list of games features four 3rd person action adventure games with simple gameplay and very little actual interactive systems. Contrasting to Zelda: Breath of the Wild where fire spreads, rain reduces your ability to climb, and lightning in the atmosphere could strike an aloof adventurer, four of these games are practically still-life. Less interactivity on more powerful hardware must mean that the panelists are narrowing Outstanding Technical Achievement down to pure, total rendering power. It is an odd way to look at the video game industry since video games have always lagged behind the movie industry when it comes to rendering technology. To this day the most impressive real-time rendering that has been done was in Unity as a demo for what movie studios could do in a digital space. As far as pre-rendered, what we are used to seeing as cutscenes, that honor belongs to Jibaro. In all honesty Santa Monica and Guerilla, as amazing as they are, haven't caught up with the environmental details we see in Pixar's 2015 feature The Good Dinosaur.

    Yes, these movie features were made on more powerful equipment, but that is why the console space has not traditionally been a haven for technical artists. It seems more and more that the mainstream video game industry talent is aspiring to be a farm-system league for movie studios. While the hardware will continue to hold technical artists back these same technical artists will continue to hold the industry back. The issue here is that developers are high-fiving each other out of an industry. Sales matter in a commercial industry because investors don't care about awards, nor do consumers. 

    This major misalignment between industry professionals and consumers will have a similar misalignment between developers, the people that need to be paid for their work, and investors, the people that finance that work.  We are already seeing this misalignment as investors change their mind about the video game industry being recession proof. These 200 million dollar investments are a big risk for investors and we see that risk being abated as game prices rise to $70, inspite the fact that software isn't impacted by inflation, in fact it is the opposite. God Of War Ragnarok is an 11 million seller, putting it 3 million copies behind the Nintendo Switch title Ring Fit Adventure. A game that the industry of developers feel is some type of Outstanding Technical Achievement has sold less than a game that demands people exercise. 

    The only bit of solace that can be taken is knowing there are developers that celebrate video games like a playground equipment designer celebrates a field of wood chips. Developers that push the limits of hardware to deliver more than a visual experience, but also an interactive experience. Developers that don't stop because of the hardware. A developer that looks at the buttons before the pipelines. A developer that takes joy in a single pixel instead of thousands. These are the developers worth celebrating. In an industry with growing negative space, we need more award shows to bring the real subjects into focus.