Whole industry has been saying that for a while. It’s unsustainable and to a large extend large studios have fallen to the sunk cost fallacy since they are often on 5-10 years development cycles (!), with very rigid schedules (since they rotate development teams).
Now the big studios are going bankrupt/getting sold to MBS while Expedition 33 is doing tricks on their grave (at least relatively, in absolute numbers their sales numbers aren’t high with normies who only play CoD and FIFA).
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.
I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.
I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.
With staying power I thought of games like Factorio.
Bought it once, played it for thousands of hours. A decade later or so it gets an extension which basically quintuples the content, am playing it thousands of hours more.
This is what happens when you chase trends instead of just having a solid idea.
Newsflash: You aren’t going to turn random horror IP into the next Dead By Daylight. DBD is already Dead By Daylight
You aren’t going to make a multi-player online shooter that is the next Fortnite. Fortnite is already Fortnite.
Actually now that I’ve said that aloud it seems like the problem is that they’re trying to be the next big multi-player experience when they should be focused on a solid single player
I wonder if this has an expiration date, though.
For example, as much as I love Broodwar, it would be nice to get “the next RTS” at this point.
Sadly, I think that’s a dead genre, and I don’t even see the Indie Crowd picking it up.
I say this as a big fan of Starcraft and Command & Conquer
Who would have thought that the long years of constantly pushing hard for monetization/profits from leadership while not giving a fuck about making a good game would end up eroding their reputation and choking their golden eggs goose. They released too many AAAs that were really AA$$.
That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!
Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?
and rest of the budget on ads
I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur’s Gate 3.
Pretty good tbh.
I played BG3 and liked it, but stopped because the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right
Huh?
the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right
Oh no, I hadn’t heard about this yet. What’d they do?
BG3 is technically an indie game if you go by the literal definition of the term!
Nightreign pretty damn good too
It’s weird to think of a top-down historically-isometric RPG as “AAA”. We’ve come a long way, baby.
I don’t think the industry has the willpower to spend less money. They’re always going to chase the highest graphical quality.
Sometimes you get both. And then it’s really special (especially 8 years later when you can turn the settings up), see RDR2.
I firmly believe we are entering the dark ages of AAA games, with the cost to make and GenAI they are going to be shit.
Support indie devs.
Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation’s system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.
I don’t know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you’re not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.
Thats why I love the ps1 and og consoles in general. For one. Yes, they had to work their asses off. For two, THE GAMES WERE (usually) FINISHED BY THE TIME YOU PLAYED IT.
The model of make game-test game-release game-DONE was tried and true, and something rarely experienced today.
There are amazing games today of course. But still, we have definitely shifted and I dont prefer it for the most part.
Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.
Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).
Games are ok, meaning there are good ones. Trying to release more and more to get more and more money - that’s going to fail, yup
Also, look out the window: we have so much more to spend time and resources on
We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.
If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!
This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.
Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.
But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.
It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.
Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.
All they care about is the next forknight.
Indeed.
What I’m really tired of is companies getting a random Horror IP and going “Let’s compete against a game that has MULITPLE horror ips”
For the last little while now, I’ve been finding that my most played games have been on my old 360 that I decided to plug in again, and my old old PS2 collection that I ripped and loaded to an emulator because the old hardware broke a long time ago.
Third place is “new to me” games that I finally buy when they go on a good sale years after they were “new” (is. RDR2 and Cyberpunk)
I haven’t bought a new AAA title in years on console because I can’t justify the cost.
PS2 games look and play great on the Steamdeck. Probably my favorite way to play them.
By the way, I have a couple of PS2’s, and I use a harddrive so the hardware just keeps working. Usually it is the laser that fails. There are also options to network and play from NAS, or use a micro SD.
Mine was the laser as well. Unfortunately it was years and years ago and I just tossed it away like an idiot. My collection from then on began collecting dust until last year when I decided to take one of my old Android Phones and a Razer Kishi and turn it into a handheld emulator.
Meanwhile I’m still very happily playing Neverwinter Nights & Civilization 4.
Painkiller wasn’t great either. Just saying.
I have played all the way through all the resident evil series, picking up the last 3 when they came out, which is rare for me. I am usually a patient gamer. I assume RES is a AAA game, but correct me if I am wrong.
Point is each one has been fantastic. Not many games hold my attention like those do. So apparently it can be done. Hoping the next one out soon is just as good.
Oh, and I played all of them on Linux, they worked flawlessly.
Yeah it’s always funny to see these quotes about games being bad, from people who make games of questionable quality
It’s okay, we can just not play AAA games.
Hey, remember when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, was pretty excellent, mostly everyone loved it, and then all the AAA studios started whining that it was an unrealistic standard to be held to?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I remember that.
I really wish society had class conciousness because if we did. That would have been enough to never ever support another AAA dev again
Best early access ever.
Act 1 was released like 18 months before the game actually released, and they legitimately listened to feedback from players.
Early access is pretty much the only way to do it too. If they had gotten investors there would have been pressure to release early or cram in micro transactions to increase return.
When the players are the early investors, they just want a good game.
Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.
I mean sure, there’s bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. “The game runs like shit, we don’t want to play it.” Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn’t fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.
Early access is more about getting revenue during development and some limited QA potential. There shouldn’t be any surprises in the feedback, that would be a sign of major problems. EA also generally comes with a discount for the player which is anathema to the AAA crowd.
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. Just look at Kerbal Space Program, for example. It pretty radically changed a few times through Early Access.
I find the QA potential to be enormous. I’ve seen my share of good EA games and the paper feedback is really what makes the difference. You’ll have devs revisiting assumptions that would be really difficult to challenge if you didn’t have a stream of real reactions to what you’re doing.
That’s not all ea has to be, it can be more than that, all we have to do is make it look like more money can be made that way for AAA and we can have our cake and eat it too.
EA is great for small and medium sized studios to get games out that might be a bit more ambitious than they could manage with traditional models. The point of AAA is that they have the money to do big impressive things. They can already do focus groups and closed betas to get community feedback. The thing that might attract AAA attention is you could make a good amount without actually releasing anything.
Idk, id love to see it properly done from AAA. That would be a great way to prove you right or wrong.
I think their point is AAA studios could already have been doing things to gauge feedback but that they are largely greedy entities which would prioritize the profit that could be extracted from a scenario over the value it could provide to the game.
