I almost fell off my chair.
The artistic intent of a videogame creator is "I have this vision!" and the engineering team says "You can't have that." and then you release whatever. It's usually ruined anyway by people playing "the artistic vision of the creator" on a badly calibrated Walmart TV in "Vivid" mode.
This is more common than people realize, especially with older games where there wasn't the same level of production sophistication.
Whenever I have spoken to developers, the HDR is primarily being handled by engineers, despite it being a artist driven thing.
Right now for many studios either the tooling or the hardware to handle HDR in a straightforward way for countless artists doesn't exist or the processes to get it setup are unknown or don't exist. It's kind of like the IT and infrastructure issues that any business has.
Colour science is a huge topic and whilst super clever people can crunch numbers and write the code, you still need a degree of human validation and sanity checking against how users might actually utilise said content.
There are a number of games that actually have faulty brightness adjustments in SDR, let alone HDR.
There is no way that anybody who understood what they were doing or what they were looking at would sign off some of those options - and that in itself suggests that there are aspects of videogames that simply do not have a considered end result.
Lots of games don't have a reference setup for end output and there is no colourist role defined in most productions, as you would see in TV or Movie content, so ultimately who is responsible and are they qualified to decide?
I think that's before you even consider games with configuration options. Is the creators intent that I put my PC game on all low settings and the game looks like ass?
