Realism

The gap between triple-A and indie is widening. Dice' fourth take on Counter Strike kick up realism another notch, and it makes things better:



There's also single player story, sound and characters, but the major differences lie the in rendering, the environment modelling and the realistically destructable environment. There is no way indie will ever be doing this; Moore's law used to apply to hardware, and still does to some extent, but man hours invested per product has been going, and is still going, in the opposite direction.

In the long run this has three implications:

1. Fewer companies can manage fewer triple-A titles, with less subtotal revenue.
2. Fewer people can work with the dragons, so they'll have to do indie work if they want to produce games at all.
3. More indie developers is yet another catalyst in the downwards spiral of casual gaming. Not that it needs one, it's going through the roof, and all people are doing on their ever-more sought-after pads, me included, is playing casual games.

To me that's generally a bad thing because I think casual games suck. They are just time-thieves, and what they add to society as a whole is just trading people's life (yes, life is time passing while you live) for nothing; they give nothing in return. Immersiveness, on the other hand, is a Good thing, like a Good Movie. It gives you something to take away when you're done. So why am I working on casual games? Well, I wish I wasn't, but I'm still trying to get my platform mature enough so I can start making immersive games. This is by no means a small feat, and almost impossible on a mobile platform.

One game that shook me a little is another EA subsidiary game, Real Racing 3 by Firemonkeys. It is both casual and pretty immersive, mainly because you face other players seamlessly in their Time Shifted Multiplayer. When you look up how they implemented their time shift some of the magic is lost, but to me it shows that perhaps casual and immersive aren't parallel; not that I'd ever think they are orthogonal either.

So in some distant future, I'll make a living off of immersive games. How I'll manage that in the ever-widening gap to the hifi titles I don't know.