The Obsession With Video Game Graphics Must Stop!

I was perusing the news recently when I saw a headline from PC Gamer called “Oof: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League lost Warner Bros. $200 million—which is $25 million more than the original 2016 movie cost to make“. This didn’t really surprise me as I could tell player enthusiasm was poor and that the game felt like a malicious attempt to milk consumers for money but there was one particular quote that stood out to me as being particularly infuriating. In the last paragraph, it notes “Despite the internal concerns among frontline workers, executives from Warner Bros. kept reviewing demonstrations of the game and sending laudatory feedback, praising the graphics and saying they expected Suicide Squad to become a billion-dollar franchise.” While I’ve touched on the topic in the past, I’ve felt compelled to write about how I feel the video game industry has an unhealthy obsession with video game graphics and why they need to stop!

Let me start with my personal issue with this quote and what it represents. I’ve found that when it comes to video game criticism, one of the easiest topics to discuss is the visual presentation. Ask nearly anyone who has only a passing interest in video games about their thoughts on a particular title and, in all likelihood, the first thing they’ll bring up will be the graphics. To some degree, this is understandable. You don’t even need to play the game in order to comment about its visuals and there exists an unfortunate tendency to break the old proverb “don’t judge a book by its cover” by judging games purely by graphics. If the biggest takeaway that these executives had was that they liked the graphics then it signals to me that they don’t have any clue when it comes to game design or what people look for in games.

This attitude is, unfortunately, not restricted to Warner Bros. I had a suspicion that Sony was taking a similar approach when it came to which video games were to be ported to PC but it wasn’t until the Uncharted 4 fiasco that I had this confirmed. In an unexpectedly straightforward and candid manner, Naughty Dog answered the question of why the first three Uncharted games weren’t released on PC before the fourth entry and spin-off. In their own words, they said “We felt that, while Nathan Drake’s first three adventures from the PlayStation 3 console still stand the test of time narratively, they would require a major overhaul visually to stand-up to modern PC releases and the expectations players may have.” This, I think, is completely ludicrous!

Taking a look at some of the biggest gaming hits of the past few years, you’ll see that many of them don’t rely on their graphics to appeal to audiences. Vampire Survivors, a game that I played recently and was very impressed with, was an unexpected hit despite the fact that it had a relatively simple pixel art style that hearkened back to the early 90s. This also applies, albeit in different ways, to other surprise success stories such as Among Us, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Palworld etc. Even outside of that indie market, we’ve seen numerous games that have doubled down on their focus on gameplay such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Baldur’s Gate 3, Monster Hunter: World etc. achieve sales and mainstream recognition that would make numerous publishers green with envy.

I’m not saying that graphical presentation isn’t important at all. When done correctly, graphics can truly enhance an experience with stunning visuals bringing the world to life. However, people ultimately come to games to play them and the focus on graphics has resulted in too many companies investing disgustingly large budgets into games with too little substance behind their visuals. We need to start developing a culture which prioritises the important aspects of games and disavows judging games based purely on visuals. Otherwise, we’re no better than those executives who only evaluated Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League on its graphics, unaware until it was too late that they were sinking money into a project nobody wanted.

Let me know your thoughts on the industry’s obsession with video game graphics, whether you agree that it must come to a stop, whether you yourself ever judge games purely on their visuals, what the most important aspects of games are to you, what you think about those executives inability to properly judge what they were seeing and any additional information you might have on the topic.

Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.