We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.
If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.
Basically every ue5 game will happily devour upwards of 16-21 gigs of ram if you have it. And if you don’t will just slam the fuck out of your hard drive like there’s no tomorrow.
It’s really easy to think games need less ram then they actually do when you don’t have enough to go around and shits just swaps more killing performance. But the ram number is lower!
Yes, many apps will use a lot of RAM if it’s available, that’s how RAM is supposed to be used. If you have 16GB and a game is actually causing swapping I’d be surprised. An app that can use 20GB isn’t necessarily going to consume all the RAM on a system with under 20GB. Higher memory pressure statistics will mean more aggressive evictions but not necessarily swapping.
I have 64GB so the “you don’t have enough to go around” bit doesn’t apply to me.
How about you stop releasing unfinished live service shit and put out something that is genuinely fun to play and not just another money trap for unsupervised children.
The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.
It’s interesting because the live-service formula is kind of antithetical to what they want. They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine. They really should just invest in actual money printing machines and churn out fake money, because that’d be a more successful endeavour.
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
It’s just so bizarre to me that they want people to invest time and more importantly, money into the game, when they themselves aren’t willing to do so.
They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine
Problem is that they can’t micromanage that into existence, ConcernedApe more or less created a money printing machine with Stardew Valley all by himself, at least at first. It would be so much cheaper for studios to find like 15 inspired independent devs/designers that need money to make their dream a reality, give them just a lil equity and room/time to cook and they might actually get something amazing. But ain’t no way execs and shareholders would let that happen, they’d yank the plug after year one of a three year contract.
This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.
I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later
It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).
The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.
These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.
I think Digital Extremes, at least currently, is still very aware of what made them successful.
John Bain for example spoke out about the games potential very early, earning them a big influx of players, and they’ve previously stated that Warframe wouldn’t have been a thing if not for him. I guess it can be particularly contrasted with the fact that Warframe was kind of a Hail Mary project for the studio. They’d pitched it around for a while but no publisher responded positively. When they were running out of money they just said “fuck it” and went to work on it, publisher be damned.
I’ve been playing on and off for years now, since around the release of The Second Dream. It makes me really happy to see that they’re doing well. I hope they’ll continue to do well, and do well by the community.
Wholeheartedly agree. Games these past few years have been big letdowns for the most part. There’s been a couple exceptions, but for the most part it’s been disappointing.
I blame botw, everyone thinks they can squeeze out more play time for less effort with it’s open world/collection/crafting model. In reality it just makes the game slow, boring and unrewarding by introducing a shit load of pointless travel and breaking rewards in to shards
I think game designers and studios have to realize that there is a big market they arent serving as much. I’m not a basement dwelling teenager anymore, I’m in my 40s, I’ve got basically no time, I can’t spend 100 hours locked in on something anymore. Take Kingdom Come Deliverance II for instance, like it’s clearly a banger of a game, but I was like 15 hours in and it still hasn’t really started. I just don’t have the attention span for that kind of stuff anymore. I guess I’m desiring more casual like gaming.
The gaming scene outside of AAA studios has been about as vibrant as it’s ever been.
Most of the nominees for GOTY have been AA studios at best and this was a stellar year imo with titles like Silksong, Hades 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and The Alters to name a few!
And all of those games (other than Dispatch and Thealters, which I haven’t played yet) are absolute bangers with hundreds of hours of content for the price of 1/7th a stick of RAM.
“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.
I am screaming internally.
We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.
Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.
At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.
That is exactly how being things and not being things are.
If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.
I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.
If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.
On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It’s been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it’s nowhere close to the same amount as with games – and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.
Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren’t allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won’t happen to the same extent for movies.
“Popcorn movies” are a big thing, and most of those big investments are these. They’re “turn off you brain for two hours and chill” events. A game, even the most chill ones, almost always last much longer and require more engagement. That is the defining trait of the medium. If you can totally turn your brain off then you didn’t make a game, you made an expensive movie. Games, for players, are an investment. Movies often aren’t.
Even then, turn your brain off and chill only fits a certain market segment. Sure, it’s a large market segment, just look at how popular the Marvel films are, but it’s not the entire market, and just like with gaming when something truly compelling comes along it tends to shake things up a bit.
Movies have a bigger audience, require less time commitment, are heavily marketed, and cost less to see. Easier to convince people to see a so-so movie as long as it has a couple of good scenes. Harder to do with games, and gamers are usually at least somewhat more aware of games before they buy them.
Suppose this is why Marvel films just don’t work for me. Like, I can appreciate the artistic talent that went into things, I can appreciate that they’ve got impressive budgets and teams working on it, but narratively they kind of suck.
Sat down and watched Antman with a friend recently. I liked the moments the main character had with his kid. I liked it when the step-dad showed equal care for the kid as the father, and them sort of resolving some of their differences in that moment. That was nice.
I’m still bothered by the whole “when you shrink you retain your mass, so you’re essentially like a bullet” part, and how that concept got completely shit-canned for the rest of the film. You can’t just punt an ant-sized object weighing 90 kg, yet I think there was a moment where he literally got flicked away. Why even bother with some scientific-sounding BS if you’re not going to adhere to it?
Guess you’re just not supposed to think about it. But then, what is the point? I don’t read books to not think, I read books to experience something new, and have something to think about. Film works the same way for me.
Almost all AAA games are online live service games. I have absolutely no interest in those games. I have been surviving off of indy or lower budget games pretty well while the big guys are off trying to make all the money doing boring shit.
The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.
I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.
I’ve been on a spree of buying or buying abandoned games or old console games lately and have been really happy with not being online at all, not updating anything I don’t want updated, and paying a reasonable price for the content I got. I don’t care that the graphics are outdated, if the gameplay works and is fun, its fine looking like almost anything.
Yeah. I guess I’m too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.
To me, you don’t repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.
Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth “movement”. After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I’m playing a game.
That era also has good control schemes. I went to replay Perfect Dark on my analogue 3d and hoooooooo boy, those layouts are like wearing beer goggles or trying to ride a reverse handle bar bike. I’ll need to try the dual controller layout but I am considering butchering a cheap controller to make something that matches modern layouts.
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?
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.
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.
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.
People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.
In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.
Constraints have always led to increased creativity, and now that there basically aren’t any limits with current tech and ballooning budgets in AAA there’s also basically no creativity.
And also spent by utterly incompetent management whose prime qualification is fluency in corpospeak and AAA tier ass-kissing…
… as opposed to, you know, any kind of actual project management skills.
They’re all self important, self righteous idiots, in leadership roles in AAA.
… The goddamned AAAA pirate game that Ubisoft took 10 years to rework 3 or 4 times, and then shit out as basically a demo of a mobile style gacha game, that requires a fairly high end PC to run.
How is that not just like, money laundering / tax evasion / tax fraud, with extra steps?
I dunno about anyone else. I don’t wanna pay 100 for a half finished buggy as fuck game. Wait a year for bugs to maybe be fixed. Only to then pay another 50 to get the 3 dlc’s to make it the complete game. So I can finally buy the same game the for 67th time as cause it’s got a new skin or some shit this year. All while the dev calls it staying power.
Some dude pushed himself to finish it all in a weekend because he had a busy week ahead and was in shambles. Man was not made to handle that much feels in such a short period 🥲
They aren’t bad, they just aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is… EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won’t leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.
It’s no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony’s been doing well because the games they’re publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that’s only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.
Everything’s turned into a live-service game because they’re the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.
Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap. I’m thinking of Frontier’s “Planet” games, or some of Paradox’s stuff.
I’m confused at some games not taking the DLC happy route, TBH. 2077, for instance, feels like it’s finally fixed up, and they could make a killing selling side quests smaller in scope than the one they have.
How does Paradox DLC work at all? The EU4 bundle with all the DLCs is on a 50% discount right now and still costs $142 CAD. Crusader Kings 2 is also over a hundred bucks at half off for all DLCs. And these are their old games that they already have sequels for. I’d literally play these games all day every day if I could but the price is prohibitively expensive and prevents me from doing so.
The starter edition bundle is 11.99 us and the ultimate is 104.80 in USD. There’s basically 2 different types of DLCs in the paradox model. The core expansion type that is released every year or so and adds or fleshes out an area of the game, these are generally must haves and reasonably priced if you have played the game for a year(s) to mix it up. The second is smaller focused packs that add a faction or some extra flavor to a more minor mechanic. These are relatively expensive for what they offer, but aren’t always intended for everyone to buy.
If you are a hardcore completionist this model is bad for you, but if you can live with not having everything then it’s not terrible.
The answer is “you play at release and buy them over time, like a crab in slowly boiling water,” though the absolutely incredible rate they introduce bugs into the games kinda knocks you out of the habit.
Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap
Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.
Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!
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).
I think the big studios lost reality with what the gaming market is. It’s a hit based business, you need a level of volume that they’ve been backing off on. It’s not that the expedition 33 devs were so much better, they just happened to be the lucky ones that put out a solid game that got traction.
E33 did not just get lucky. They used a completely different formula.
~10M€ development cycle with 30 full-time devs + outsourcing is one order of magnitude smaller than what the big studios consider to be the “standard”. AA vs AAA.
30-40 hours of main story and no open world keeps the development resources focused and gameplay/story loops tight in a way that can’t be achieved in an “expansive” open world without unfathomable resource expenditure. But modern games from major studios literally cannot get greenlit if “open world” is not in the feature list because execs see it as “standard”.
Smaller budget also means that they did not pour 50 %+ of their capital into marketing, which allows mores resources to be put into the game and lowers the barrier to profitability. That’s an understated issue; AAA games can’t afford to fail, which is why they all end up bland design-by-committee.
Those parts above were not risks Sandfall took, they were actually basic risk mitigation for an indie studio that big studios aren’t doing based on the overstatement that bigger = more chances for “THE hit game” = better.
Where E33 took some risks was with the strong creative vision and willingness to ignore genre trends and focus group feedback (going turn-based and not lowering the difficulty to “baby’s first video game”). But for the cost of 1 Concord a big studio could afford to make 10 E33s at which point it’s really not a matter of “luck” for at least one to be (very) good. E33 would have been profitable with 1 million units sold, it did not even have to be that good.
The industry has absolutely noticed that E33 wiped the floor with their sorry asses, and I predict that in ~5 years we’ll see many more AAs popping up.
There’s plenty of games that you could say the same about that didn’t get the traction. It’s still a hit based industry. It’s not a knock against the game, it’s a reality of the industry.
They were always going to receive at least some critical acclaim. This is a AA game from a well-known and respected publisher (Kepler Interactive), so it couldn’t have gone entirely under the radar. They had a decent enough marketing budget and initially were included in the Microsoft Gamepass specifically to secure the studio’s financial future in an uncertain market. The game was objectively good so with all that help, by release day there was no way that the game was going to be a complete dud à la Concord, and I recall Broche saying in interviews that profitability was essentially expected even though the stratospheric success was not.
Also they did get “unlucky” because the Oblivion remaster not-so-coincidentally shadow-dropped a couple days before E33’s release. It’s not much of a stretch to say that Microsoft knew the game was good and (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to drown it out.
If E33 was going to truly flop, it would have been earlier in the development process IMO. They could have relinquished voting shares to investors and been forced to “ubisoftify” the game into bland nothingness. Key creatives could have left. Going all-in on UE5 might have been a technical quagmire. But when the game went Gold, there was very little that could have impeded an at least modest amount of success.
Where the industry is truly unforgiving is single A games. There’s too much to keep track and it’s entirely possible for the “media” (journalists, youtubers, streamers, etc.) to miss a very good game. Single A doesn’t pack enough of a punch to force enough eyeballs on trailers to get a critical mass of fan following, and in that context I fully agree that even a perfect game can still be a complete flop.
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We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.
If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.
Can’t think of a game that really needed more than like 10GB of RAM. It’s all VRAM for textures and even then 8GB is enough
Basically every ue5 game will happily devour upwards of 16-21 gigs of ram if you have it. And if you don’t will just slam the fuck out of your hard drive like there’s no tomorrow.
It’s really easy to think games need less ram then they actually do when you don’t have enough to go around and shits just swaps more killing performance. But the ram number is lower!
Yes, many apps will use a lot of RAM if it’s available, that’s how RAM is supposed to be used. If you have 16GB and a game is actually causing swapping I’d be surprised. An app that can use 20GB isn’t necessarily going to consume all the RAM on a system with under 20GB. Higher memory pressure statistics will mean more aggressive evictions but not necessarily swapping.
I have 64GB so the “you don’t have enough to go around” bit doesn’t apply to me.
How about you stop releasing unfinished live service shit and put out something that is genuinely fun to play and not just another money trap for unsupervised children.
The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.
Like a gambling addiction if you think about it. “No no no, THIS will be THE game that will make us Fortnite money!!!”
It’s interesting because the live-service formula is kind of antithetical to what they want. They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine. They really should just invest in actual money printing machines and churn out fake money, because that’d be a more successful endeavour.
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
It’s just so bizarre to me that they want people to invest time and more importantly, money into the game, when they themselves aren’t willing to do so.
Problem is that they can’t micromanage that into existence, ConcernedApe more or less created a money printing machine with Stardew Valley all by himself, at least at first. It would be so much cheaper for studios to find like 15 inspired independent devs/designers that need money to make their dream a reality, give them just a lil equity and room/time to cook and they might actually get something amazing. But ain’t no way execs and shareholders would let that happen, they’d yank the plug after year one of a three year contract.
This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.
I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later
It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it
This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).
The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.
These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.
I think Digital Extremes, at least currently, is still very aware of what made them successful.
John Bain for example spoke out about the games potential very early, earning them a big influx of players, and they’ve previously stated that Warframe wouldn’t have been a thing if not for him. I guess it can be particularly contrasted with the fact that Warframe was kind of a Hail Mary project for the studio. They’d pitched it around for a while but no publisher responded positively. When they were running out of money they just said “fuck it” and went to work on it, publisher be damned.
I’ve been playing on and off for years now, since around the release of The Second Dream. It makes me really happy to see that they’re doing well. I hope they’ll continue to do well, and do well by the community.
But how will they make quarterly targets without them?
It’s like you aren’t even thinking of the shareholders.
Oh I keep thinking in the shareholders (Pours querosene in the funnel). I always do…
Shareholders like CEOs aren’t real people and their opinions should be tossed down the drain.
Wholeheartedly agree. Games these past few years have been big letdowns for the most part. There’s been a couple exceptions, but for the most part it’s been disappointing.
I blame botw, everyone thinks they can squeeze out more play time for less effort with it’s open world/collection/crafting model. In reality it just makes the game slow, boring and unrewarding by introducing a shit load of pointless travel and breaking rewards in to shards
I think game designers and studios have to realize that there is a big market they arent serving as much. I’m not a basement dwelling teenager anymore, I’m in my 40s, I’ve got basically no time, I can’t spend 100 hours locked in on something anymore. Take Kingdom Come Deliverance II for instance, like it’s clearly a banger of a game, but I was like 15 hours in and it still hasn’t really started. I just don’t have the attention span for that kind of stuff anymore. I guess I’m desiring more casual like gaming.
“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?
What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.
The gaming scene outside of AAA studios has been about as vibrant as it’s ever been.
Most of the nominees for GOTY have been AA studios at best and this was a stellar year imo with titles like Silksong, Hades 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and The Alters to name a few!
And all of those games (other than Dispatch and Thealters, which I haven’t played yet) are absolute bangers with hundreds of hours of content for the price of 1/7th a stick of RAM.
I am screaming internally.
We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.
Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.
At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.
“Almost like” and “behaving like an independent studio” is vastly different from being one.
Well, yes it is.
That is exactly how being things and not being things are.
If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.
I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.
If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.
So copy what Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Baldur’s Gate did and make good replayable games.
Also stop listening to the C suite and start listening to the gamers.
I’m curious though, viewing movies as investments has made a some studios filthy rich. Why does that seem to be different for games?
On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It’s been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it’s nowhere close to the same amount as with games – and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.
Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren’t allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won’t happen to the same extent for movies.
It’s not. Plenty of game franchises are similarly profitable.
“Popcorn movies” are a big thing, and most of those big investments are these. They’re “turn off you brain for two hours and chill” events. A game, even the most chill ones, almost always last much longer and require more engagement. That is the defining trait of the medium. If you can totally turn your brain off then you didn’t make a game, you made an expensive movie. Games, for players, are an investment. Movies often aren’t.
Even then, turn your brain off and chill only fits a certain market segment. Sure, it’s a large market segment, just look at how popular the Marvel films are, but it’s not the entire market, and just like with gaming when something truly compelling comes along it tends to shake things up a bit.
Why do they need to get filthy rich? Why not settle for rich and having a good game?
This is the problem with capitalism now. No one is happy making a good profit. They have to extract maximum profit by cutting everything else.
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Because filthy rich is more attractive for capital.
They absolutely don’t. I’m just wondering why it works out financially for Marvel and Mission Impossible movies but not for games
Movies have a bigger audience, require less time commitment, are heavily marketed, and cost less to see. Easier to convince people to see a so-so movie as long as it has a couple of good scenes. Harder to do with games, and gamers are usually at least somewhat more aware of games before they buy them.
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Suppose this is why Marvel films just don’t work for me. Like, I can appreciate the artistic talent that went into things, I can appreciate that they’ve got impressive budgets and teams working on it, but narratively they kind of suck.
Sat down and watched Antman with a friend recently. I liked the moments the main character had with his kid. I liked it when the step-dad showed equal care for the kid as the father, and them sort of resolving some of their differences in that moment. That was nice.
I’m still bothered by the whole “when you shrink you retain your mass, so you’re essentially like a bullet” part, and how that concept got completely shit-canned for the rest of the film. You can’t just punt an ant-sized object weighing 90 kg, yet I think there was a moment where he literally got flicked away. Why even bother with some scientific-sounding BS if you’re not going to adhere to it?
Guess you’re just not supposed to think about it. But then, what is the point? I don’t read books to not think, I read books to experience something new, and have something to think about. Film works the same way for me.
Nevermind, I just remembered Call of Duty exists
Almost all AAA games are online live service games. I have absolutely no interest in those games. I have been surviving off of indy or lower budget games pretty well while the big guys are off trying to make all the money doing boring shit.
The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.
I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.
I didn’t know they made Power over Ethernet into a game, let alone a sequel.
There’s even more than one Power over Ethernet 2s, and both of them are good games, often played by similar groups of people.
(Pillar of Eternity 2 and Path of Exile 2)
I’ve been on a spree of buying or buying abandoned games or old console games lately and have been really happy with not being online at all, not updating anything I don’t want updated, and paying a reasonable price for the content I got. I don’t care that the graphics are outdated, if the gameplay works and is fun, its fine looking like almost anything.
Yeah. I guess I’m too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.
To me, you don’t repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.
Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth “movement”. After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I’m playing a game.
That era also has good control schemes. I went to replay Perfect Dark on my analogue 3d and hoooooooo boy, those layouts are like wearing beer goggles or trying to ride a reverse handle bar bike. I’ll need to try the dual controller layout but I am considering butchering a cheap controller to make something that matches modern layouts.
Bring back games that you’re passionate for and gamers will love instead of designing a gamified soulless money funnel.
There are thousands of amazing indie games created by people who have an idea and a will to make something. I’ll spend my money there instead.
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.
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.
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. Just look at Kerbal Space Program, for example. It pretty radically changed a few times through Early Access.
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.
People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.
In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.
The budgets are too big
Constraints have always led to increased creativity, and now that there basically aren’t any limits with current tech and ballooning budgets in AAA there’s also basically no creativity.
There’s plenty of constraints still, they aren’t technical though. It’s about making a game good despite the monetization requirements.
Lol
Yeah, that’s totally the problems and not vertical integration being used to churn money as a gift…
And misspent.
And also spent by utterly incompetent management whose prime qualification is fluency in corpospeak and AAA tier ass-kissing…
… as opposed to, you know, any kind of actual project management skills.
They’re all self important, self righteous idiots, in leadership roles in AAA.
… The goddamned AAAA pirate game that Ubisoft took 10 years to rework 3 or 4 times, and then shit out as basically a demo of a mobile style gacha game, that requires a fairly high end PC to run.
How is that not just like, money laundering / tax evasion / tax fraud, with extra steps?
I dunno about anyone else. I don’t wanna pay 100 for a half finished buggy as fuck game. Wait a year for bugs to maybe be fixed. Only to then pay another 50 to get the 3 dlc’s to make it the complete game. So I can finally buy the same game the for 67th time as cause it’s got a new skin or some shit this year. All while the dev calls it staying power.
And then you have Clair Obscur schooling studios on how it should be done.
I just started playing this game. I cried at the end of the fucking prologue. What amazing writing and voice acting.
Some dude pushed himself to finish it all in a weekend because he had a busy week ahead and was in shambles. Man was not made to handle that much feels in such a short period 🥲
Buckle up, mate.
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Uh oh. I’m starting it tonight.
This is… but the prologue. Steel yourself. You’ll need it.
spoiler
<e: apparently spoilers don’t work for some users>
I’ve already beaten the game so idm but at least on the app I’m using, there is no censor bar effect on your comment.
thanks, I just edited it out
They aren’t bad, they just aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is… EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won’t leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.
It’s no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony’s been doing well because the games they’re publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that’s only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.
Everything’s turned into a live-service game because they’re the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.
Right? After AC3 i stopped caring.
Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap. I’m thinking of Frontier’s “Planet” games, or some of Paradox’s stuff.
I’m confused at some games not taking the DLC happy route, TBH. 2077, for instance, feels like it’s finally fixed up, and they could make a killing selling side quests smaller in scope than the one they have.
How does Paradox DLC work at all? The EU4 bundle with all the DLCs is on a 50% discount right now and still costs $142 CAD. Crusader Kings 2 is also over a hundred bucks at half off for all DLCs. And these are their old games that they already have sequels for. I’d literally play these games all day every day if I could but the price is prohibitively expensive and prevents me from doing so.
The starter edition bundle is 11.99 us and the ultimate is 104.80 in USD. There’s basically 2 different types of DLCs in the paradox model. The core expansion type that is released every year or so and adds or fleshes out an area of the game, these are generally must haves and reasonably priced if you have played the game for a year(s) to mix it up. The second is smaller focused packs that add a faction or some extra flavor to a more minor mechanic. These are relatively expensive for what they offer, but aren’t always intended for everyone to buy.
If you are a hardcore completionist this model is bad for you, but if you can live with not having everything then it’s not terrible.
Heh, that’s correct.
This meme video about sums it up:
https://youtu.be/n42JQr_p8Ao
The answer is “you play at release and buy them over time, like a crab in slowly boiling water,” though the absolutely incredible rate they introduce bugs into the games kinda knocks you out of the habit.
Speaking of DLC happy, hi, I’m the blood DLC for Total War games!
Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.
Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!
It’s okay, we can just not play AAA games.
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).
I think the big studios lost reality with what the gaming market is. It’s a hit based business, you need a level of volume that they’ve been backing off on. It’s not that the expedition 33 devs were so much better, they just happened to be the lucky ones that put out a solid game that got traction.
E33 did not just get lucky. They used a completely different formula.
~10M€ development cycle with 30 full-time devs + outsourcing is one order of magnitude smaller than what the big studios consider to be the “standard”. AA vs AAA.
30-40 hours of main story and no open world keeps the development resources focused and gameplay/story loops tight in a way that can’t be achieved in an “expansive” open world without unfathomable resource expenditure. But modern games from major studios literally cannot get greenlit if “open world” is not in the feature list because execs see it as “standard”.
Smaller budget also means that they did not pour 50 %+ of their capital into marketing, which allows mores resources to be put into the game and lowers the barrier to profitability. That’s an understated issue; AAA games can’t afford to fail, which is why they all end up bland design-by-committee.
Those parts above were not risks Sandfall took, they were actually basic risk mitigation for an indie studio that big studios aren’t doing based on the overstatement that bigger = more chances for “THE hit game” = better.
Where E33 took some risks was with the strong creative vision and willingness to ignore genre trends and focus group feedback (going turn-based and not lowering the difficulty to “baby’s first video game”). But for the cost of 1 Concord a big studio could afford to make 10 E33s at which point it’s really not a matter of “luck” for at least one to be (very) good. E33 would have been profitable with 1 million units sold, it did not even have to be that good.
The industry has absolutely noticed that E33 wiped the floor with their sorry asses, and I predict that in ~5 years we’ll see many more AAs popping up.
There’s plenty of games that you could say the same about that didn’t get the traction. It’s still a hit based industry. It’s not a knock against the game, it’s a reality of the industry.
They also just got lucky. No matter how you cut it, you could do everything right and still have a flop.
They were always going to receive at least some critical acclaim. This is a AA game from a well-known and respected publisher (Kepler Interactive), so it couldn’t have gone entirely under the radar. They had a decent enough marketing budget and initially were included in the Microsoft Gamepass specifically to secure the studio’s financial future in an uncertain market. The game was objectively good so with all that help, by release day there was no way that the game was going to be a complete dud à la Concord, and I recall Broche saying in interviews that profitability was essentially expected even though the stratospheric success was not.
Also they did get “unlucky” because the Oblivion remaster not-so-coincidentally shadow-dropped a couple days before E33’s release. It’s not much of a stretch to say that Microsoft knew the game was good and (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to drown it out.
If E33 was going to truly flop, it would have been earlier in the development process IMO. They could have relinquished voting shares to investors and been forced to “ubisoftify” the game into bland nothingness. Key creatives could have left. Going all-in on UE5 might have been a technical quagmire. But when the game went Gold, there was very little that could have impeded an at least modest amount of success.
Where the industry is truly unforgiving is single A games. There’s too much to keep track and it’s entirely possible for the “media” (journalists, youtubers, streamers, etc.) to miss a very good game. Single A doesn’t pack enough of a punch to force enough eyeballs on trailers to get a critical mass of fan following, and in that context I fully agree that even a perfect game can still be a complete flop.