Everquest 2's former creative director has a bleak vision of gaming's future
In the recent 30th anniversary issue of Edge, various developers shared their thoughts on the future of gaming, with particular emphasis placed on the role of AI. But they also shared more general thoughts on where gaming is at right now, and where it'll be in the next 30 years. One developer, former Everquest 2 creative director Raph Koster, painted a particularly bleak picture of gaming's future.
His opinions are based upon an experiment he ran in 2018. «I asked everybody I knew in the industry to secretly tell me their game development budget,» he says. «And I gathered all of the data together, inflation adjusted all of it, and put it on a graph.» Through this, he discovered that game development budgets are growing exponentially by ten times a decade.
In short, games are in an expensive period right now, and that affects the likelihood of developers taking chances on new ideas. «During those expensive periods, innovation tends to go away, because the return on investment for innovation on game mechanics is terrible. I'm hopeful that in the next ten years we'll see a platform break of some sort that resets things.» It’s not entirely clear what Koster means by «platform break» but since the latest generation of consoles is only a few years old, he presumably means an entirely new entrant into the market that disrupts the current status quo.
Alongside this, Koster also predicts that the service-model of game design isn’t going away anytime soon, and this will have a negative impact on narrative-driven games. «I prefer playing narrative games—despite what I make,» he says, which is surprising to hear given the ambitious sandbox nature of previous projects he's worked on, like Star Wars: Galaxies and Ultima Online. «But
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