Most people know by now that game development is pretty rough. Even without taking into account the challenges faced over the past few years, developers constantly have to keep on top of the latest technology to ensure their games are breaking new grounds in terms of visuals. As a result, games are steadily taking longer and longer to make, as blockbuster titles like Final Fantasy 16 and The Elder Scrolls 6 are trying their best to look better than anything that came before them.
While I'm sure no one is complaining about these efforts, it seems like a large majority of gamers out there would prefer developers to either scale back the visuals or keep them where they are to ensure dev cycles don't spiral out of control. This was made evident by a new poll on ResetEra, in which over half of voters stated that they'd prefer to sacrfiice a game's visual fidelity if it meant we got shorter dev cycles.
If you want to exact numbers, 55.7 percent of voters are willing to sacrifice visual fidelity while 23.8 percent are fine with how long games take to make at the moment. Only 20.5 percent of voters want developers to take longer making their games, meaning the vast majority don't want longer dev cycles.
As for the reasons why, several users put their arguments forward, including cvbas who states that the games industry would be "a much healthier place for everyone" if it wasn't so obsessed with a game's visuals. This is likely in reference to the rise of crunch culture in the industry as a whole, as publishers wanting a game to look as good as possible is likely a contributing factor in long dev cycles and strict deadlines.
Some people take the opposite stance though, such as TheCthultist, in that giving developers longer dev cycles would take the pressure off and allow them to work on games without the need for crunch. There's a range of arguments in the thread, although the majority hopes that games don't take much longer to make in the future. If they have to look a little worse for that to happen without crunch, then so be it.
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