AAA Games Unsustainability

So called AAA games are reaching a point of saturation, probably. They are spending simply too much money for what thy can get back. This is similar to movie studios. There is a limited number of "Dark Knight rises" movies you can do, because you need a HUGE number of viewers to just not loose money. Of course, a good franchise is the best way to secure players (CoD, for example)But the industry is not just those games. Right now there are tools to make a fantastic game with a rather limited

Wait, this article thinks that Enterprise-y game development is a GOOD thing?

The "AAA" gaming industry seems unsustainable. Big budget games are getting more uninspired by the year and are mostly the same old games with identical game-play and mechanics with shinier graphics on top. They have become passionless assembly lines following a formula.You'd think at some point people would stop caring so much about graphics. It's also such a huge portion of the cost. Smaller studios and indie developers can make nearly identical games without bleeding ed

The best example is gaming, imagine no-indies, you would have to chose between an NBA Game, the latest Quake and a Driving game each year, the next year, same thing but with more polygons, that is "safe" AAA games that publishers bet on, they do not create games like Fes, DwarfFortress or EvE.

Games are not food. We can live without them.AAA studios driven by shareholders are just stupid. There is a cap of consumer spending in the gaming industry, can't get more as people simply will not spend more. Spending has already plateaued.Games like factorio/satisfactory/dyson sphere program/witcher/cyberpunk/etc are new era and are great. Factorio will definitely stand the test of time.Maybe people should look more into non-competetive games before makin

Most game studios from that time wouldn't qualify as AAA today.There are new indie gems all the time. Tunic, Hades, Hollow knight, Risk of Rain, Overgrowth, Return of the Obra Dinn, Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, and the list goes on. Innovative gameplay, music, visuals are everywhere. Often indie games cater to niches. They don't appeal to everybody, which is part of their charm.Just like blockbusters are usually average in most respects other than their budget. That makes for

Virtually everything cited in this thread boils down to simple economics. The production costs for "AAA" titles have skyrocketed, driven by consumer demand for more content and better graphics. The game industry has the economics of the blockbuster-driven entertainment industry—massive capital expenditure in the hopes of eking out some kind of a profit, with flops easily leading to financial ruin. This is in contrast to the tech industry, which yields enormous profits on very little in

Between the fact that I'm on the "no time" part of the "time to play but no money, money to buy but no time, pick one" saying, indies, some still-functioning Japanese studios, and the burgeoning "AA" segment of the market, where people in the 2020s use 2020s technology with a team of maybe a dozen or two to put out what would have been AAA games produced by hundreds of people in the 2010s, I've had no use for the AAA space for a while. Or the gacha space;

This fundamentally misunderstands why modern AAA games are expensive.A single person can make an game. In fact, there's a chance a single person can make a good game. The problem is that the correlation between good and successful is very weak. You basically need a massive marketing machine to break a new IP. Games cost a lot to make but that's by design.The strategy that AAA studios apply is to go as big as possible and cast a wide net because you can't put a dozen smal

Development of AAA games != good tooling.