Industry vet who worked on Ultima Online says the next big thing needs to have 'sh*tty graphics' to escape the doom of rising development costs

The industry obsession with high-resolution graphics has haunted it for years, but given the dire state of things in regards to both layoffs and hardware prices? It's now starting to be downright incompatible.

Raph Koster, a veteran developer who worked on Ultima Online and was the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies—and is now making another MMO, Stars Reach—has been banging that particular drum for years.

"I think the first time I spoke about, ‘Hey, cost is going to kill us’ was 2005," he tells our friends at Edge Magazine in a massive interview inside Issue 428. "Myhrvold’s Law says that software is a gas—it expands to fill whatever computer you have … The place that shows up the most in games, for better or worse, is in content costs."

Reiterating similar thoughts spoken to me when I chatted to him back in June, Koster says that "what used to be a single 128x128 texture is now multiple 4K textures with shaders and all this stuff. And, yes, tools have improved along the way. You don’t handpaint that texture pixel by pixel any more—you can use procedural tools like Substance, or just purchase it from a texture library or whatever.

"But there’s still [a] downstream cost, even if it’s just testing how those umpteen textures and shaders interact. It all adds up." Combine that with the fact that game prices haven't gone up in parallel to these ballooning development costs, thanks to constant deals—"who buys something at $60, even, today?"—and you've got a recipe for disaster.

A cyclical one, mind. "Unless we hit the singularity," Koster says, "a platform will come along that changes things." Koster lays out a few key qualities this hypothetical platform would require in order to save the industry (or at least, the developers working within it) from this steadily-approaching iceberg:

"It needs to provide a new affordance, meaning there has to be gameplay you cannot get except on that platform … [it needs to be] worse for making traditional games—because that means the big incumbents cannot just transfer their expertise, come in and dominate.

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And to top it all off? "The number-one biggest thing this new platform needs is to have shitty graphics." Referring to a few historical examples, like Flash games, social games on Facebook, the Wii, and mobile. That's not to say these platforms'll be immune to those problems, though.

"They eventually catch up, and then the costs rise in exactly the same way. But we haven’t had a new platform come along to reset that cost curve in a long time. Like, a long time."

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.