#im not saying there arent issues with art and labor in games but its exhausting to see people who arent even into like

[autosadist]

hot take that @teanne could articulate better than me but uh, the problem with AAA games and labor is NOT the art or graphics. crunch is not about finalizing art assets. the art assets for games are literally some of the first things that are completed

the problems with AAA releases are related to optimization and debugging, and optimization isn't an art-related issue in and of itself. two games can have identical visual fidelity, and one of them can be perfectly optimized for most GPUs while the other one runs like garbage on the same hardware

the problems people have with cyberpunk 2077 don't stem from its visual fidelity, they overwhelmingly stem from the bugs and shitty last gen console optimization. these have literally nothing to do with the game's graphics. the months of pre-launch crunch that AAA studios torture their employees through deal with trying to iron out tens of thousands of game-breaking bugs in a fraction of the time needed to get a game launch-ready

it hardly has anything to do with graphics. perfecfing graphics REALLY isn't the reason cdpr treats its employees like slaves. the more people talk about the graphics being what holds the game back, the less people pay attention to the actual reasons that so many AAA games are unplayable products of human torture at launch

as time goes on, the hardware needed to develop games with beautiful graphics becomes more and more accessible to independent developers, and many tools to create beautiful 3d art assets and games are either free or affordable to small teams with the money to put in - you don't need 100k dollars to set up an indie team with industry standard software and hardware. the bulk of the labor put into a game is NOT in concept art or 3d modeling or meticulously adjusting ass hair shaders, and to act like it is really distracts from the real problems with AAA games development