The Video Game Math Doesn't Add Up

Game development costs have risen by orders of magnitude, but the same cannot be said about game quality.

December 09, 2025

I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid recently. As is to be expected, it is quite an enjoyable tactical espionage action adventure. The sealth gameplay is a little basic, but it’s compelling enough that a lack of mechanical nuance doesn’t bother me. The action is a little simpler compared to other Metal Gear games, but that is to be expected when working with a 2D handheld.

If you’re confused, it’s because I’m not playing 1997’s Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation. I’m playing its 2000 counterpart on Game Boy, which in Japan was known as Metal Gear: Ghost Babel (Metal Gear: GB, for Game Boy).

There’s little I could say about this game that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. It has everything you would expect to find from an early Metal Gear game, and it even twists the formula and story expectations in ways that one would genuinely not expect from a conventional Metal Gear, let alone a side game.

Isn’t the idea of a “side game” odd, though? This title—despite its overall excellence and how well it translates the PS1 title’s gameplay innovations back into 2D—is considered a side game to the Metal Gear series presumably because it was developed for a less powerful platform (and, well, its development didn’t directly involve Hideo Kojima).

No voice acting? Fewer buttons than the PlayStation controller? 2D graphics? None of these things are enough to meaningfully bring down the experience, and yet a certain contingent of gamers viewed this entry as somehow lesser than its console counterpart. This is, of course, from the same crowd of enthusiasts who claimed that the Super Mario series had been “plagued” by 2D despite no good 3D platform games having existed prior to Super Mario 64.

There is a technological elitism that runs deep within the hearts of core video game enthusiasts. A game must make use of every single button a controller has (preferably also implementing contextual button combos to enable a greater number of actions!), and games should output at 8K resolutions with 144Hz frame rates. Voice acting is a must and games without it are lazy, but also too many games have cringe voice acting so you better supply an option to turn it off or allow players to switch to Japanese voices. Games also better provide lots of other options, such as to modify the control scheme, decrease graphical fidelity (to improve performance, you see), and heaven forbid if a game doesn’t provide discrete sliders to adjust audio volume for music, sound effects, background effects, voices, footsteps, or the woodwind section.

Options alone do not come cheap—serious time and effort needs to be dedicated to making sure these options are correctly implemented and work in all cases. They are also just a tiny component of the changed video game landscape. The labour that goes into visuals alone was nothing 20 years ago compared to what is done now. Texture resolutions have increased by an order of magnitude, shaders are now responsible for the majority of graphical effects, 3D models have many more animations that need to be made, and each of these tasks are done by increasing amounts of workers who are more specialized than before. More labourers means more time spent coordinating everyone, which means paying more money for everyone to work harder while also producing fewer tangible assets per person.

I previously wrote that the game industry’s problems are self-inflicted, but that’s not strictly true. The woes are imposed at least in part by an audience that demands of their games things which degrade the experience for everyone.

I bought Monster Hunter: World on Steam a few years ago, and so did my spouse. You can think of this game as Monster Hunter 5. We’d previously played some Monster Hunter Freedom Unite together (which you can think of as Monster Hunter 2G, an enhanced version of MH2), slowly making our way through its multiplayer content, and thought it might be nice to play something newer. What we found instead was a game that was so frustrating to play that we stopped after the first few hours.

MH5 has automatic crafting of general-purpose healing items, which is touted as a quality of life thing, but in practice feels like a confusing mess because half of what you pick up is automatically consumed to make other items. You need to pay attention to on-screen notifications to see there this happening, which is a visual distraction from the action that is ocurring at the same time. The feature exists to prevent the distraction of needing to occasionally stop and craft items between missions (or even during a mission’s downtime), which ostensibly allows players to spend more time in the action, but in practice it just feels like noise. The downside is having less downtime to unwind between bouts of action, which is tiring. The inexcusable part is needing to have yet another configuration menu to toggle which crafting recipes are performed automatically, and which aren’t.

Contrast this with MH2G, where all crafting recipes are just a combination of two items, and crafting is always done manually. From a usability standpoint, it’s simple and consistent. The complexity arises from the sheer number of recipes that there are, but there are only two relevant ones for players who otherwise don’t care to engage with the system, so it’s only as complex as players want it to be. Crafting in this game might be more time consuming, but as hinted at earlier, this isn’t strictly a downside. Quiet time means more time to mentally recover after failing a difficult mission. It also means your anticipation for the next mission can build up for longer before you undertake it, which makes it all the more satisfying to get back into the action. There is an ebb and flow to the older game which its supposed successor sorely lacks.

This singular example is a microcosm of why I think MH5 is worse than MH2G. The newer game has more detailed environments, which while gorgeous are also much more difficult to navigate. The newer game has a streamlined story mode, which supposedly “respects player time” but also has its own problems. You’ll have barely explored any single level by the time you’re told to move to the next one unless you engage in rather boring optional missions. You’ll undertake a dozen missions on MH2G’s first level before you get a chance to move on. You’ll fight the same monsters several times before you get a chance to move on. Where the newer game concerns itself with always dazzling the player with new things, the older game would rather push players into becoming familiar with the game so they take the time to master the game’s mechanics. I never felt like I was getting better at playing Monster Hunter World as I played, because I would be asked to move on long before I could master anything other than the most basic controls. The result is a game that leaves an impression instead of delivering a compelling experience.

The Monster Hunter example is itself a microcosm of the wider state of video games in 2025. Everything is more complex, user interfaces are noisier, games have more moving parts to keep track of, option menus are overwhelming, the pace is all over the place. Every time I’m looped into what the gamers are salivating over, I ask myself “Am I supposed to be impressed?” because I rarely am.

Skyrim is a rare example of a series moving in the opposite direction compared to the rest of the industry, having simplified nearly everything from its predecessors so it could focus on delivering the core adventuring experience it wants to instead of complicating it with meaningless nonsense that doesn’t add to the experience. It was also the third game that Bethesda Game Studios developed during the Xbox 360 generation. They would go on to only develop 2 during the following generation, and at their current pace the only game they’ll have put out during the current generation is the critically-panned Starfield, as the next generation of consoles is likely to land before the Skyrim’s sequel. Advances in technology have made games more expensive and time-consuming to make, all for them to end up as inferior experiences.

The status quo is why I am quite happy that Metal Gear has experienced a lengthy hiatus, as there has not been a new one in 10 years. Yet, that series' approach to technology also stands in contrast to the rest of the industry. Instead of simply bolting additional mechanics onto the existing gameplay, Metal Gear preferred to use technology to enhance existing gameplay mechanics. Early games would have new enemy solders continuously enter the current room to replace ones you’d defeated, with no end. Later entries use the increased processing power not only to have more detailed AI routines for enemies, but also to simulate the movement of enemy soldiers in the entirety of the active game space. Get rid of too many enemies, and they will radio to nearby bases and request backup, who must then move from one place to another in real time. The way you interact with the game is the same, but the metagame around it has been enhanced. The game has an extra level of depth, instead of an extra layer of incongruent mechanics tacked onto it.

Lately, I’ve come to seriously appreciate retro 2D games for their simplicity. Without the ability to wow audiences using technology, games would live or die by how well they played. Studios that treated handhelds like afterthoughts to simply have a market presence tended to do much more poorly compared to those willing to put real effort into adapting existing experiences into forms which were suitable for the platform they were working on. Where for most series I would assume that newer entries are cruftier and focused more on delivering an impression, Ghost Babel feels right at home, standing equal with its Metal Gear peers. It’s no wonder it was the single highest-rated Game Boy game on GameRankings (now part of MetaCritic), despite gaming audiences of the time—and still today—clamouring for more technologically advanced experiences.

Before I close out this article, I did want to make one quick response to a rebuttal I expect to receive. It’s tempting to think that I like older games because they are what I grew up with, but that doesn’t apply here. I had never played Ghost Babel before a few weeks ago, but I have played every other Metal Gear Solid game. I am evaluating the game in comparison to those, not on the merits of being a handheld take on the series. This isn’t the first time this has happened, either. I fell in love with Harvest Moon (the very first Story of Seasons game) when I played it for the first time just last year, after growing up with many of its supposedly superior sequels.

I wish more games learned from what made retro experiences so good. While I wait though, there will still be plenty of new old games for me to discover and admire.