Not to mention until it’s actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It’s better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.

This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.

In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.

I am ranting now.

Yeah they always ask “Why won’t people pay $100 for our video game?” and not “How about we DON’T spend $100,000,000 making ONE video game?”