Do games really need visuals beyond what the PS3 offers?

Layoffs and the rising cost of looking real

Microsoft has carried out yet another massive round of layoffs at Xbox—a cycle so routine that pinning down the exact date or number of jobs affected feels almost pointless, because the pattern repeats. A reason frequently cited is the soaring cost of AAA development, which is tied directly to the industry-wide push for maximum realism. Better graphics naturally cost more. Though it's worth noting that the layoffs may have more to do with megacorps' inability to manage their talent than with rendering budgets alone, the debate raises a question worth putting to consumers directly: would you accept games that look technically worse?

When realism makes games less fun, and less realistic

For players who grew up seeing mind-blowing releases nearly every month—at far lower production costs—today's landscape feels oddly flat. The prevailing belief that every AAA title must look photorealistic has two downsides: games increasingly resemble one another, and they resemble our boring daily lives, undermining the escapism that drew many of us to the medium in the first place.

There's also a gameplay cost. Realistic visuals demand realistic interactions with environments, objects, and characters. Red Dead Redemption 2, a game routinely held up as a benchmark against newer releases, actually plays in a way that is both less fun and less convincing than the original Red Dead Redemption. A social media comment that stuck with the author captured it well: discussions of modern Rockstar games are always about how realistic they are, never about how much fun they are—and even that realism is often only surface-deep. Many players would take the original's blend of realism with a stylized, almost painted look over the sequel's full-on fidelity.

The benchmarks we already have

Consider what's already been achieved. Halo 4, though not as fun as Halo 3—and therefore the inferior game by that measure—still holds up visually, and it ran on the Xbox 360. Go further back and Silent Hill 3, a PlayStation 2 title, remains visually striking: as Masahiro Ito noted in a July 8, 2024 post on X, the blinds shadow overlay effect came from lead programmer Norihito Hatakeda and Fukushima. And that was the PS2 era.

No wonder Raph Koster, creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, recently remarked that the next big platform "needs to have shitty graphics."

A low-budget counterexample

The strongest evidence that fidelity and artistry aren't enemies comes from Sandfall Interactive. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 achieved high graphical fidelity without sacrificing a distinct artistic vision—all on a relatively tiny budget of just $10 million. It's the rare title that proves the tradeoff isn't inevitable.

Where things stand

The industry is at a crossroads: AAA budgets and the layoffs that follow them are driven partly by a graphics arms race that players may not actually want to win. If more studios take note of what Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 accomplished for $10 million, the "sweet spot" of graphics—somewhere around PS3-era fidelity, deployed with a strong artistic hand—may be rediscoverable. The technology to make great-looking games cheaply has existed for years. What's missing is the will to use it.