Posting this in the lounge instead of the business forum because this is about more than just business. It's also about speculation of what future technology might be like.

Here's something I've been thinking about lately. A lot of people are concerned about the exploding costs of AAA game development. Modern games like Destiny and GTA V cost over $100 million to create, and future generations of games may become even more expensive because of things like increased resolutions and polygon counts. But what if this trend of rising costs is only temporary? Do you think advancements in technology and improved tools could eventually bring game development costs back down again?

Now I don't have much experience with software development beyond writing a few simple programs, but I thought I'd throw some ideas out here anyway to see what the gamedev community thinks. Here are some ways I can imagine this trend of rising costs reversing:

Advancements in procedural generation. As more research is put in and better algorithms are discovered, procedurally generated content becomes increasingly diverse, and the cost of content creation goes down, until eventually, we're be able to make billions of procedurally generated worlds that actually are unique and not just variations of each other like in No Man's Sky and other existing proc-gen games. From the Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon, our planet is full of awesome, unique, interesting, and beautiful places to explore, and it wasn't made by hand, so who says we won't eventually achieve a comparable level of diversity with procedural generation?

Better engines and libraries. Over time, engines and libraries become able to do more stuff that companies currently have to do manually, and make the remaining tasks faster, cheaper, and easier.

Artificial superintelligence. This sounds farfetched, but if Ray Kurzweil's predictions of an ASI are correct, gamedev costs would be reduced to almost nothing, assuming the AI doesn't kill us all first. Not only would an ASI be capable of creating entire games for us, but those games would put even the world's greatest human-created games to shame.

So, what do you think, could future gamedev technology bring the massive costs of AAA game development back down to a more acceptable level, or at the very least, lower the costs of what constitutes a AAA game by 2017 standards?

I dont see the cost of AAA games going down.   Visual fidelity will only keep increasing, which means higher costs.  And unless there's some major changes in the way the game market works, then the current pattern of higher and higher budget games will probably continue, especially if the numbers of players keeps growing. 

Trying to compete with low-budget games now means having to compete with the sheer numbers of crap games and Chinese clones that flood the market.

If you think about it cost of games has gone down a lot. You can make Pack Man for the fraction of the cost when it was first released. A small home team could make a full GTA 1 clone for much less than it first cost to make.

The problem is that the ambitions of developers and the expectation of players is always driving up cost. So I think making games will always be expensive. No matter how good we get at it.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

If you think about it cost of games has gone down a lot. You can make Pack Man for the fraction of the cost when it was first released. A small home team could make a full GTA 1 clone for much less than it first cost to make.

The problem is that the ambitions of developers and the expectation of players is always driving up cost. So I think making games will always be expensive. No matter how good we get at it.

Making games is certainly much easier and cheaper now.  But making AAA games just gets more expensive, same as with making tent-pole studio movies.  Not sure what conditions would have to arise in the industry for that to change.

Aside from time (depending on whether you take this into account. i.e Hobby, Pro, etc..), it is hard to get cheaper than it is right now to develop games. You can easily get away with spending zero these days with all of these free IDE's that are out there now.

Thanks everyone for the input. This all makes more sense to me now.

Not forgetting the raising costs for a single one to live. Rent is increasing from year to year and living expenses like paying for food up to ensurances raise too while people will have less and less money for there pensions. This is not a game development related problem only but also for the whole industry level and costs raise in the private section, costs will also raise in the human resources section too. People are always anxious to keep there living standard, giving each employee a salary increase of lets say 50$ a year means in a company like EA (with lets assume round about 9000 employees) a cost increase of 450.000$ a year in this hypothetical example. This should not be reliable counts but an aspect of the social component of game development costs