>>16606441
>How the fuck is nobody able to recreate little shitty games made from 20+ years ago with the same amount of details and depth? SS13 and UO come to mind. Fuck this shitty industry.
Answer is a combination of the following:
1) Due to a variety of factors, programming as a profession used to only attract people who really loved it and were really good at it. Now this is no longer the case.
2) In order to support mediocre programmers as the baseline employee, the software industry (including games) is built around high level languages and middleware which makes it slower for good programmers to make stuff. This reliance also causes a lot of interoperability bugs in general, that programmers have to spend time fixing.
3) OS and hardware are both more bloated, also making everything take longer.
4) Programming conventions have evolved in such a way that values "pretty code" over "functional code," and this sensibility is conferred to students at uni. Quickly hacking something together so it works used to be a virtue, now it's a vice (unless you are "prototyping").
But you're right, if you wanted to clone a game that took 2 years to make in 1992, today it might be double or triple the time.
An unrelated reason is the market has changed. Games used to be made a lot more artistically/playfully, and now the core features are driven or at least approved by marketing and sales teams. But consider that some of the studios that made the best games of the 90s (Black Isle, Bullfrog, Origin, etc) all went out of business in the early 2000s. This might have been due to the publisher/developer relationship and lack of mature digital distribution model at the time, but for whatever reason, as soon as games became big business and mass market the "winners" were the ones caring about ROI above everything else. And the "winners" bought up the "losers" or drove them out of business – losers being those studios who cared slightly less about ROI, just wanted to make good games and pay salaries. And the current economic climate still trends towards market consolidation.