Posting this in the lounge instead of the business forum because this is about more than just business. It's also about speculation of what future technology might be like.
Here's something I've been thinking about lately. A lot of people are concerned about the exploding costs of AAA game development. Modern games like Destiny and GTA V cost over $100 million to create, and future generations of games may become even more expensive because of things like increased resolutions and polygon counts. But what if this trend of rising costs is only temporary? Do you think advancements in technology and improved tools could eventually bring game development costs back down again?
Now I don't have much experience with software development beyond writing a few simple programs, but I thought I'd throw some ideas out here anyway to see what the gamedev community thinks. Here are some ways I can imagine this trend of rising costs reversing:
Advancements in procedural generation. As more research is put in and better algorithms are discovered, procedurally generated content becomes increasingly diverse, and the cost of content creation goes down, until eventually, we're be able to make billions of procedurally generated worlds that actually are unique and not just variations of each other like in No Man's Sky and other existing proc-gen games. From the Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon, our planet is full of awesome, unique, interesting, and beautiful places to explore, and it wasn't made by hand, so who says we won't eventually achieve a comparable level of diversity with procedural generation?
Better engines and libraries. Over time, engines and libraries become able to do more stuff that companies currently have to do manually, and make the remaining tasks faster, cheaper, and easier.
Artificial superintelligence. This sounds farfetched, but if Ray Kurzweil's predictions of an ASI are correct, gamedev costs would be reduced to almost nothing, assuming the AI doesn't kill us all first. Not only would an ASI be capable of creating entire games for us, but those games would put even the world's greatest human-created games to shame.
So, what do you think, could future gamedev technology bring the massive costs of AAA game development back down to a more acceptable level, or at the very least, lower the costs of what constitutes a AAA game by 2017 standards?
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