When Video Games Become Too Big to Take Risks
There was a time when a great video game could be born in a bedroom, on its creator’s personal computer, after a few months of work and sometimes without that person even knowing exactly what they were inventing. Today, some productions involve several hundred people over five or six years, consume hundreds of millions of dollars before release, and then need to convince millions of players simply to justify their economic existence. Between those two eras, video games have not merely changed in terms of technology, audience, or distribution model. They have undergone a profound industrial transformation.
It would be simplistic to conclude that money has destroyed video games, or that modern large-scale productions are inherently less interesting than older ones. Bigger budgets have made possible worlds of unprecedented scale, sophisticated animation, multilingual voice acting, full orchestral scores, complex engines, and audiovisual experiences that would have seemed like science fiction in the early 1980s. The real problem lies elsewhere: when a game costs hundreds of millions to develop and market, failure is no longer simply the story of a work that failed to find its audience. It becomes a major financial event. And when failure becomes too expensive, the freedom to experiment inevitably begins to shrink.
This is probably one of the great contradictions of contemporary gaming. Never has the industry generated so much money, never has it had access to so much talent, technology, and production power, yet never has part of its most visible output seemed so concerned with reducing uncertainty. The question, then, is not whether today’s developers are less creative than those of the past. There is no reason to believe they are. The real question is whether the economic environment in which they work still gives them the same freedom to take risks.
When a Handful of People Could Invent Entire Worlds
Looking back at the 1980s makes the scale of the change easier to grasp. Commercial video games were already a business. Publishers wanted to sell as much as possible, and developers naturally wanted to make a living from their work. That period was never a pure artistic paradise free from commercial pressure. But the scale of production was radically different. On home computers, one person, or a tiny group of people, could still design an entire game, handling programming, game design, graphics, and sometimes even music.
And it was precisely these tiny teams that established a large part of the vocabulary video games still use today. In 1984, Elite was essentially the work of David Braben and Ian Bell. Two students managed to fit an open space universe, an economy, trade, combat, and vector-based 3D graphics into the limited memory of the BBC Micro. Forty years later, games about space exploration and commerce still rely on principles that Elite had already articulated with extraordinarily modest resources.
A few years earlier, Rogue had demonstrated the power of procedural generation. Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and a small number of collaborators devised a game capable of generating new dungeons for every run. The idea proved so powerful that it did not simply produce a few imitators: it eventually gave birth to an entire genre. Even today, a significant part of independent game development still draws on the procedural logic, unpredictability, and replayability inherited from the roguelike.
Dungeon Master offers another particularly revealing example. Released in 1987 on the Atari ST, the game combined real-time exploration, combat integrated directly into the environment, direct character management, puzzles, magic, and a remarkably coherent graphical interface. At the time, it felt like a genuine breakthrough. Yet behind this highly ambitious game was only a small handful of people. A tiny team managed to create a work that would have a lasting influence on the design of first-person role-playing games.
The story of Vroom illustrates the same phenomenon from a different angle. Daniel Macré began by developing an early version alone on the Sinclair QL before the project evolved on the Atari ST at Lankhor. Even then, the team remained extremely small. Just a few people produced one of the most technically impressive racing games on the machine, particularly in terms of its sense of speed. The Bitmap Brothers, with Xenon and later Xenon 2, also worked with teams that would seem minuscule by modern standards while helping define a strong visual identity for European computer games.
Then came Another World. Éric Chahi spent close to two years working almost entirely alone on what would become one of the most distinctive games of its era. He programmed the engine, created the graphics, designed the animation, and built a form of storytelling that rejected unnecessary explanation, cluttered interfaces, and many of the most obvious conventions of action games. Jean-François Freitas contributed to the sound, but the work was overwhelmingly shaped by the vision of a single individual. Again, the point is not to indulge in nostalgia, but to remember a simple fact: video games have never required hundreds of millions of dollars in order to invent.
The Cost of an Idea and the Cost of Production
This is perhaps where one of the greatest misunderstandings of modern gaming can be found. Budgets have exploded, but ideas themselves have not become more expensive. The fundamental principle behind Tetris requires no spectacular technology. Neither does that of Rogue. Imagining a real-time dungeon like Dungeon Master, a city simulation like SimCity, an open space universe like Elite, or the compulsive gameplay loop of Vampire Survivors does not, in itself, require an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.
What costs money today is largely scale. Thousands of animations have to be produced. Vast environments have to be modeled in minute detail. Hundreds of hours of dialogue need to be recorded. Games are localized into numerous languages. Complex cinematics are produced. Internal tools are developed. Huge numbers of situations must be tested. Multiple teams, sometimes spread across several continents, have to be coordinated. On top of all this, there is often a global marketing campaign whose cost can itself be enormous.
All of that can result in remarkable games, and it would be absurd to deny their value. But this growth raises an uncomfortable question: have we made games a hundred times more interesting, or have we mainly made them a hundred times more difficult and expensive to produce? When a title such as The Last of Us Part II or Horizon Forbidden West reaches a development budget above $200 million, it is no longer simply a game that its publisher hopes will sell well. It becomes a strategic corporate investment.
That inevitably changes the way decisions are made about what should be produced. The more expensive a project becomes, the larger its potential audience must be. The larger that audience must be, the more dangerous it becomes to offer something too strange, too demanding, or too difficult to explain. The problem is not that developers have stopped having ideas, but that some ideas become much harder to defend once they have to justify enormous financial commitments.
When Failure Becomes an Industrial Problem
This is where the weight of money begins to shape creation directly. A company investing $200 or $300 million in a game cannot approach experimentation in the same way as a small studio capable of spending two years on an unusual idea without knowing exactly what kind of audience it will attract. At that level of expenditure, risk-taking becomes less an artistic question than a matter of financial governance.
That helps explain why established franchises, familiar licenses, sequels, remakes, and proven genres occupy such an important place at the top of the market. A known license comes with an identifiable audience. A sequel comes with previous sales data. An annual sports title already has a customer base. A genuinely new concept, by contrast, arrives without sales history, without an established community, and without any guarantee that audiences will understand it immediately. It arrives with little more than an idea, and that can seem like very little when set against an investment worth hundreds of millions.
It would, however, be deeply unfair to place the blame on development teams. Large studios often bring together some of the most talented artists, programmers, designers, and technicians in the industry. The issue is structural. The more expensive a project becomes, the more necessary it is to reassure those financing it. And reassurance usually means demonstrating that something similar has already worked before. At that point, financial caution and creative freedom can begin to pull in opposite directions.
The result is a paradox. A very rich industry can become culturally cautious precisely because it invests too much money in each individual project. The huge budgets that are supposed to enable unlimited ambition can end up restricting certain forms of freedom. When a $10 million game fails, the studio may still have a chance to survive and try something else. When a project costing several hundred million dollars fails, the consequences may include restructuring, studio closures, or hundreds of layoffs. Fear of failure is no longer theoretical.
The comparison with cinema is difficult to avoid. As budgets for major Hollywood productions have increased, franchises, shared universes, remakes, and established intellectual properties have taken on an ever larger role. This does not mean that contemporary cinema no longer produces interesting films, any more than AAA games have become incapable of surprise. It simply means that the most expensive part of a cultural industry naturally tends to seek greater predictability.
The Blockbuster Does Not Represent All of Gaming
This evolution can create the impression that video games have now been reduced to the same major franchises, the same global marketing campaigns, and the same large productions designed to occupy hundreds of hours of a player’s life. Yet that would be to confuse the most visible part of the market with the medium as a whole. While blockbuster budgets continue to rise, another part of gaming still operates according to an almost opposite logic.
The success of Stardew Valley is one of the clearest examples. Eric Barone worked alone for years, handling programming, graphics, design, and music. He had no army of artists and no worldwide marketing campaign. His game was built first and foremost around a coherent vision, patiently developed over time, which eventually found an enormous audience.
A few years later, Vampire Survivors repeated the phenomenon in an almost provocative form. Luca Galante created a visually modest game built around an immediately understandable mechanic and inexpensive assets. It became a huge success and triggered a wave of imitators. What mattered was not the sophistication of the production, but the effectiveness of the gameplay loop.
Balatro takes the argument even further. A solo developer known as LocalThunk took a card game familiar to almost everyone and transformed it into a system of combinations, probabilities, and multipliers powerful enough to become one of the major independent hits of recent years. Animal Well, developed largely by Billy Basso, shows in a different way that a game can create mystery, depth, and a strong visual identity without photorealism or hours of cinematic sequences.
These games do not prove that expensive productions are useless. They simply demonstrate that innovation in games remains largely independent of the amount of money invested. Video games retain this fascinating characteristic: an idea created by a single person can still disrupt conventions that enormous organizations had begun to regard as established.
New Games on Dead Machines
The homebrew scene pushes this logic even further. Every year, new games continue to appear for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Amiga, Atari ST, and many other machines whose commercial production ended decades ago. Some of these games are sold for a few euros, others use a pay-what-you-want model, and others are entirely free.
From a purely economic perspective, the phenomenon can seem almost irrational. Why spend hundreds of hours developing a game for a machine released in 1982? Why choose to work within a few dozen kilobytes of memory when a modern computer contains billions? Why aim for a few hundred or a few thousand players when the dominant language of the industry revolves around millions of users, retention, engagement, and growth?
The most convincing answer is probably that video games also exist outside their industry. Creating a game can be an intellectual, artistic, and technical activity whose value lies somewhere other than financial return. Solving a programming problem, inventing a mechanic, fitting a complex system into a tiny amount of memory, drawing a handful of sprites, or simply knowing that a stranger has completed your game can be enough to make the work meaningful.
This scene reminds us of something that industrial gigantism sometimes obscures: video games are not only a market. They are also a practice, a culture, a language, and in many cases a form of craftsmanship. That dimension existed at the beginning of the home computer era, and it has never truly disappeared.
Money Is Not the Enemy, but Gigantism Can Be
It would be tempting to draw a simple moral conclusion and claim that money has corrupted video games. That would miss the point. Without funding, many extraordinary games could never exist. Some experiences genuinely require large teams, expensive technology, and years of development. There is nothing wrong with wanting to sell a game, make a living from it, or build a profitable company.
The real problem begins when financial logic stops being a means that enables creation and becomes the framework that determines what can safely be created. A relatively inexpensive game can afford to be strange, short, difficult, confusing, or aimed at a narrow audience. A production involving several hundred million dollars has far less freedom. What initially looks like a simple difference in budget eventually becomes an artistic difference.
Every form of creation needs the right to fail. Trying something new necessarily means accepting that it may not work, that audiences may not understand it immediately, or that the idea may simply remain too unusual to achieve mass success. When that possibility becomes economically intolerable, experimentation itself becomes harder to defend.
That may be the deepest danger of video games becoming a form of heavy industry. The problem is not that expensive games exist, but that we gradually begin to assume that an important game must necessarily be enormous, photorealistic, long, costly, and designed to reach the broadest possible audience.
The entire history of the medium suggests otherwise. Two students created Elite. A handful of people designed Dungeon Master. Éric Chahi made Another World almost alone. Decades later, a single developer can still create Stardew Valley, Vampire Survivors, or Balatro and influence the wider industry in turn. At the same time, enthusiasts continue to make games for computers that are more than forty years old, sometimes for only a few hundred players.
The part of gaming that generates the most money is simply the part we see most often. It does not define the medium, and it does not define its creativity.
Money has not killed video games. It has allowed them to become larger, more spectacular, and more ambitious. But when the sums involved become so great that failure is no longer acceptable, money can take away something more essential than graphical fidelity or the size of an open world: the right to try without any guarantee of success.
And without that right, invention becomes much harder.