IMO AVIF works really well at making convincing looking results at really high compression ratios, it’s worse at pretty much everything else.

And occasionally the ‘convincing looking’ results aren’t actually very accurate to the original image…

But those results really do look very convincing.

And IMO one of the most compelling features of JPEG-XL is its’ great lossless compression, although it is generally good all-around. AVIF is pretty terrible at lossless compression, usually well-behind WebP and only a bit better than PNG.

Anyways, for photos, if you want to compress them a ton then maybe AVIF is best, but if you want high quality JXL is probably best.

I think https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front is a good comparison

It’s not just risk, you also can’t really target a narrow audience. Indies can afford to make a game that only 1/100th of people will be interested in. Even if the AAA studio was 100% sure they would succeed and gain a loyal fanbase, they won’t do that if the potential fanbase is pulled from too small of a group.

the other thing is that you don’t actually need to rise the video game hierarchy to get an executive position like you might expect. You just need a business degree and some examples of successful leadership at other companies, even ones totally unrelated to video gaming

Yeah. AAA higher-ups are very rarely gamers or actually interested in playing video games. They’re just business people who I think mostly want to chase the profitable trends and recreate whatever successes they had in the past under projects with actually decent leadership.

Indie devs also generally aren’t concerned with stretching the runtime out over return limits or in a way that will prevent people from reselling the game.