Star Wars Jedi: Survivor artist explains why the industry is making original games less and less often

Feb 25, 2026

Recently, Del Walker, a character artist, wrote a post on social network X. He notes that publishers have stopped investing huge amounts of money in games with original ideas, preferring cautious sequels and profitable “service games” with manipulative mechanics to keep the player’s attention.

Del emphasizes that video game development has become extremely expensive these days: “GTA 3 cost about $5 million. Nowadays, for “triple-A” projects, the budget of less than 100 million is “tiny”. According to him, if mid-budget games disappear, the industry will stop developing.

Walker points out that although thousands of games are released on Steam every year, players do not buy them en masse because users' attention is limited and it is too difficult to find an interesting game.