For me it’s a lack of creativity and innovation when it comes to gameplay. Indies or just smaller studio productions take more risks and that’s a lot more exciting.
Must be multiplayer, ostensibly because people ‘demand’ it, but a narrative easy to believe when you know players are stuck with your servers and you can effectively shut down the game when it no longer makes money for you.
Relatively fewer games to be made, no chances may be taken. Conventional wisdom tells them that people got over turn-based in the 90s, so even the FFVII remake refused to do real turn-based, while Clair Obscur showed that it was still absolutely welcome gameplay.
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time right now. I’m not particularly a fan of turn-based games, but I’m digging there interpretation of the genre. I like how each character has a limited amount of movement per turn and the ability to navigate through the entire environment. I’m surprised more developers don’t use a similar model.
In the final fantasy and Pokemon games I played when I was younger -and more recently Expedition 33-there wasn’t any movement. My team was standing static on the left and the enemy team was on the right. BG3 is the first turn based game I played where I can strategically move around a 3D environment.
Ah I see. Neat, im glad you like it. Xcom 2 is a really great turn based with movement game too. It’s not an RPG, and it’s crazy difficult, but its one of the best.
I admit I was thinking about E33 as well, but my niche is narratively strong games or puzzle games. Too many AAA games are narratively disjointed open world messes and when it comes to puzzles indies are just king. Animal Well, Blue Prince, The Witness etc.
Zero creativity, zero innovation, zero passion. Too many AAA games feel like all of the design and decision making happened in a boardroom full of executives and market researchers, then the actual designers and developers just churn out whatever the higher-ups have decided the product will be.
Who can afford £70? Especially given the price increase consoles and PC components are seeing. Like many people, I wait a few years until it’s on sale.
I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:
Don’t go outside
Don’t read billboards, bus wrap advertisements, bus stop advertisements, ignore advertisements in sporting arenas and uniforms, etc
Use adblockers online/ignore online advertisements
Mute the television when ads are on
Don’t have television subscriptions
Pay for streaming services at a level that removes ads
Watch like no advertising shows like award shows or late night/daytime talking head interview shows
only watches TV for the finals of a sporting league championship and when advertisements comes on mutes the TV or focuses on their friends or phones
Don’t discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
Show up to the movies late to avoid advertisements
Generally have an anti-consumption/anti-advertisement attitude even if they are consumerist. Being advertised to is an annoyance enough to buy something else
Throw away mailers immediately without reading
Ignore people trying to advertise on the street/passing out flyers
Don’t answer the door
Don’t answer the phone
Generally has no idea when anything new is coming out and mostly exists in a social bubble
Practically no monoculture
Doesn’t read emails unless they specifically searched/expected it
Etc
Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it’s all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It’s not a big deal.
“OMG it was advertised all over time square.” Responded with: “I live in Wichita.” “I live in India.” “I’m from NYC and tourist just look at them, they don’t read them. Fuck no I don’t read them. I don’t fuck with times square.”
It’s actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted
Still feels crazy though how aware you’re forced to be about ads lurking in every corner. I check many of these boxes plus some others, use independent OSs, 3rd party apps etc. And still, although I hardly see any ads, they are so present just lurking under the surface.
Good example are sponsor comments in yt videos/podcasts. Some I can filter out with Sponsorblock, but the little video glitch reminds you every time that you have to stay safe. Podcast ads can easily be slipped with the fast forward button, but if you’re washing the dishes etc., sometimes you can’t react directly.
It’s really insane how ads are just everywhere these days.
Don’t discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
This one is big and I never noticed it until a few years ago. My wife and I never got cable when we moved into our own place. One time my mother in law was talking to my wife about some commercial and my wife just said she hadn’t seen it. My mother in law got really weirdly upset or something, like my wife was trying to be condescending or something. But she was talking about it the same way people might talk about a funny skit from a show. It wasn’t until being away from it for years that I realized how odd it is.
People forget what gaming was like before the consoles went mental. It’s just returning to it’s roots. Greatest pc games have always been small teams of passionate developers.
It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.
More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.
I mean, it’s ok I guess, but as a musician myself that’s not helping much either. Buy some stuff on bandcamp (85% goes to the artists, cheap and often pay what you want) or if you need streaming get Tidal, they give 3x than spotify and didn’t give 100 millions to joe rogan.
Musicians aren’t making much on any streaming platform. I wish I could afford to purchase more music on bandcamp but it’s been years since I’ve been able to.
If you don’t care too much how the music is used, music licensing can bring in money, it doesn’t necessarily have to be used in Ads.
Huh. Just found out that Bandcamp isn’t owned by Epic Games anymore. It was sold off to someone else back in 2023. Guess I don’t have a reason to boycott it now
I’m not gonna get started on this, but Epic or not, this is and was one of the only way to give money directly to artists. If you boycott Epic I really hope you boycott steam also cause they’re no better.
EGS has used anticompetitive and anti consumer practices from day one, all because Tim Swiney is a petty asshole that wants to be at the top of the pile.
Meanwhile Valve has generally been pro-consumer and built a relatively good service
Lol, another steam sucker ready to die for billionaire Gabe. They basically invented gambling for chlidren, they actually are the one that have anticompetitive practice lmfao, they dont let you own your games, they take a huge cut of 30% (epic take 12%, but you dont care about game devs right), they make billions in profit but employ less than 300 people.
But I’ve met enough of your kind to know your cognitive dissonance to know that no amount of proofs that steam suck would make you stop kissing their ass. You guys are the maga of gaming lol.
So yeah, the hard truth is you don’t like games you like steam, and you dont like music, you like yourself. Now fuck off yourself, you are the problem.
There wasn’t really a reason to boycott it anyway. Epic just wanted “free” access to a massive library for their games, like how EA Trax used to be a thing. Nothing changed about bandcamp in the meantime.
Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you’ve bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.
Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.
I got into music piracy back in the day because it used to be that record companies paid artists badly so I spent money on concerts and merch, now Spotify pays artists badly for the record companies. Anyway, if used at all piracy is best used to find artists you really love and then spend your money on legitimately purchasing their music.
Can I suggest occasionally buying stuff through something like Bandcamp? You get digital music and support the artist. Or, just buy some merch I guess.
Yeah, except now we would have the capacity to give money directly to artists. Platforms like shittyfy have shown people are willing to pay a couple of bucks a months to get access to music, we need to redirect the money to the artists and not some greedy ceo. Bandcamp is a start, we can do better.
Sounds like you’re someone who thought a little about pricing.
Why should anyone get a royalty for a listen?
There’s a club in my town with a dj who plays each week. Club gets paid, dj gets paid. His sets are like ads for his work in the club. Why would I have to pay for each listen? Why would he has to earn for each listen?
Especially if that DJ is residing somewhere else and won’t ever come to my town because it’s too small for him.
Why do we create superstars? Why does “superstar S” have to be paid millions because millions come to their show. Even though I stand 500 m away, I can’t see them, I can’t hear them properly. Why can’t it be that there is a cover band covering those songs. Maybe even doing a better job. On a loval concert, with great sound, a good stage, less crowd, less people, more fun.
Why do we cheer a dj with electronic music, who just plays one song after the other, with a little bit of mixing now and then and choosing the next track based on the crowd? Why aren’t people in the center of the music (anymore)?
This article seems to be lumping mobile and PC into the same bucket which is probably more of a red flag for the analysis they are doing here. Of course revenue is going to be more split when you add in tons of mobile games that are very effective at taking lots of money with minimal interaction.
Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.
And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.
The industry only has themselves to blame for this.
The $70 is the introductory price, like the first dose of a drug that you get for cheaper to get you hooked. The actual price has been tabulated by a department with psychologist support to ensure it’s into the four digit range.
I’d pay the $70 or even $100 for a AAA title…if it released complete, relatively bug-free, and didn’t try to soak me with microtransactions and subscriptions.
idiots being too eager to throw ever increasing amounts of money at companies, to get what they used to get for 50, with zero self awareness that they are the cancer thats killing everything.
Counterpoint: games were more expensive in the past, sometimes even before adjusting for inflation. Goldeneye was $70 new.
The problem is that back then you bought a complete game to play forever. Now you buy an unfinished mess that despite costing as much, makes it abundantly clear that the game isn’t yours through DRM and in your face micro transactions.
True, but it’s at least a rough indicator, and having intact concrete pricing from back then was a bit challenging, and sears catalog came to me as a very well preserved source of vaguely appropriate pricing.
EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
Yeah, that’s what I hate about Genshin Impact most - the predatory gacha and FOMO-exploiting business model ruining what would otherwise be a peak game I could recommend to basically anyone.
Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.
It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and similar felt more like mini games.
For free and in browser with some actual progression, I can think of RuneScape and those Artix Adventure Quest series games. I played both, but Runescape definitely felt like more of a complete game with 3D models and all.
God, I had forgotten how bad those Artix games were til I remembered them just now.
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.
(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw) Already fixed, never mind!
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.
That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLCduring Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.
Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
The only AAA game that I have legitimately enjoyed and played more than once is Red Dead Redemption II. Other AAA games are okay, but they feel a bit hollow and lack the immersion that RDR2 has. Then again, RDR2 was showing off a bit with what the industry can do.
No I’m not I’m just realistic. The games suck and that’s why they flop. Financial statements talk. The slop is not selling and that forces studios to shut down.
Good, nearly all AAA games provide is pretty graphics and little to no substance. Those that do are the very rare exclusions. Like CyberPunk2077, its story was good, graphics if you could run them good, but the gameplay was hollow until a lot of reworking.
I wouldn’t even consider Cyberpunk AAA. AAA to me is like. Ubisoft. Ea. Activision/blizzard. Those kinds of people. AA are games with decent funding but made to be good rather than a live service microtransaction slop. They’re your rockstars, atlus, segas, those kinds of studios.c
AAA isnt inherently synonymous with bad games that nobody wants to play. Its about the budget and size of the game/studio. Rockstar games are firmly AAA.
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to me, aaa = mark of inferior quality, barring some exceptions
To me, AAA means but it in 6-12 months for $10-20
For me it’s a lack of creativity and innovation when it comes to gameplay. Indies or just smaller studio productions take more risks and that’s a lot more exciting.
that is my point exactly. doesnt matter how nice the game looks, if its uncreative crap nothing will save that.
Yeah, AAA productions:
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time right now. I’m not particularly a fan of turn-based games, but I’m digging there interpretation of the genre. I like how each character has a limited amount of movement per turn and the ability to navigate through the entire environment. I’m surprised more developers don’t use a similar model.
That’s just how turn based movement works
In the final fantasy and Pokemon games I played when I was younger -and more recently Expedition 33-there wasn’t any movement. My team was standing static on the left and the enemy team was on the right. BG3 is the first turn based game I played where I can strategically move around a 3D environment.
Ah I see. Neat, im glad you like it. Xcom 2 is a really great turn based with movement game too. It’s not an RPG, and it’s crazy difficult, but its one of the best.
I admit I was thinking about E33 as well, but my niche is narratively strong games or puzzle games. Too many AAA games are narratively disjointed open world messes and when it comes to puzzles indies are just king. Animal Well, Blue Prince, The Witness etc.
Zero creativity, zero innovation, zero passion. Too many AAA games feel like all of the design and decision making happened in a boardroom full of executives and market researchers, then the actual designers and developers just churn out whatever the higher-ups have decided the product will be.
Who can afford £70? Especially given the price increase consoles and PC components are seeing. Like many people, I wait a few years until it’s on sale.
Not only that, buying £70 of a broken game on initial release.
I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:
Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it’s all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It’s not a big deal.
“OMG it was advertised all over time square.” Responded with: “I live in Wichita.” “I live in India.” “I’m from NYC and tourist just look at them, they don’t read them. Fuck no I don’t read them. I don’t fuck with times square.”
It’s actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted
You forgot
When you’re not allowed to own anything, piracy isn’t theft.
Piracy in general shouldn’t be equated to theft.
I already have, and printed several for my nephews.
Still feels crazy though how aware you’re forced to be about ads lurking in every corner. I check many of these boxes plus some others, use independent OSs, 3rd party apps etc. And still, although I hardly see any ads, they are so present just lurking under the surface.
Good example are sponsor comments in yt videos/podcasts. Some I can filter out with Sponsorblock, but the little video glitch reminds you every time that you have to stay safe. Podcast ads can easily be slipped with the fast forward button, but if you’re washing the dishes etc., sometimes you can’t react directly.
It’s really insane how ads are just everywhere these days.
This is the way.
This one is big and I never noticed it until a few years ago. My wife and I never got cable when we moved into our own place. One time my mother in law was talking to my wife about some commercial and my wife just said she hadn’t seen it. My mother in law got really weirdly upset or something, like my wife was trying to be condescending or something. But she was talking about it the same way people might talk about a funny skit from a show. It wasn’t until being away from it for years that I realized how odd it is.
Yould think the ad companies would get the message…
They do, just interpretation is different with their smooth brains.
Google bad record profits last quarter, so it can’t be that bad.
Some of the most wildly out of touch professors and students I’ve shared space with were business peeps.
I think it’s more companies should question whether the advertisement they pay for is actually effective or if they’re just told it’s more effective
People forget what gaming was like before the consoles went mental. It’s just returning to it’s roots. Greatest pc games have always been small teams of passionate developers.
The making of Goldeneye is a great documentary.
Same thing happened with music.
It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.
More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.
Except almost no one can live with music now, with the spotify model.
It’s funny, I recall Benn Jordan saying in multiple videos of his that his profits went up when he removed all his music from spotify.
I pirate my music and keep it in my local storage.
I mean, it’s ok I guess, but as a musician myself that’s not helping much either. Buy some stuff on bandcamp (85% goes to the artists, cheap and often pay what you want) or if you need streaming get Tidal, they give 3x than spotify and didn’t give 100 millions to joe rogan.
Musicians aren’t making much on any streaming platform. I wish I could afford to purchase more music on bandcamp but it’s been years since I’ve been able to.
If you don’t care too much how the music is used, music licensing can bring in money, it doesn’t necessarily have to be used in Ads.
I love Bandcamp. It does not have much of a filter so I get to find small and under the radar artists.
Personally I buy 90% of my music either on Bandcamp or as a CD in my local store… rip it… throw it on Jellyfin for easy streamikg
Huh. Just found out that Bandcamp isn’t owned by Epic Games anymore. It was sold off to someone else back in 2023. Guess I don’t have a reason to boycott it now
I’m not gonna get started on this, but Epic or not, this is and was one of the only way to give money directly to artists. If you boycott Epic I really hope you boycott steam also cause they’re no better.
Fuck off with your false equivalence bullshit.
EGS has used anticompetitive and anti consumer practices from day one, all because Tim Swiney is a petty asshole that wants to be at the top of the pile.
Meanwhile Valve has generally been pro-consumer and built a relatively good service
Lol, another steam sucker ready to die for billionaire Gabe. They basically invented gambling for chlidren, they actually are the one that have anticompetitive practice lmfao, they dont let you own your games, they take a huge cut of 30% (epic take 12%, but you dont care about game devs right), they make billions in profit but employ less than 300 people.
But I’ve met enough of your kind to know your cognitive dissonance to know that no amount of proofs that steam suck would make you stop kissing their ass. You guys are the maga of gaming lol. So yeah, the hard truth is you don’t like games you like steam, and you dont like music, you like yourself. Now fuck off yourself, you are the problem.
There wasn’t really a reason to boycott it anyway. Epic just wanted “free” access to a massive library for their games, like how EA Trax used to be a thing. Nothing changed about bandcamp in the meantime.
Yes there was. It’s called “fuck those monopolistic cunts at EGS, they don’t get my money”
The reason would be fuck Epic.
Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you’ve bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.
Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.
I got into music piracy back in the day because it used to be that record companies paid artists badly so I spent money on concerts and merch, now Spotify pays artists badly for the record companies. Anyway, if used at all piracy is best used to find artists you really love and then spend your money on legitimately purchasing their music.
Hell you can still buy CDs direct (rarely) do that too. Great for display if nothing else.
Can I suggest occasionally buying stuff through something like Bandcamp? You get digital music and support the artist. Or, just buy some merch I guess.
Live shows and merch have been the way artists make money since before streaming was a thing
Yeah, except now we would have the capacity to give money directly to artists. Platforms like shittyfy have shown people are willing to pay a couple of bucks a months to get access to music, we need to redirect the money to the artists and not some greedy ceo. Bandcamp is a start, we can do better.
What I’m saying is that record sales have been unprofitable for artists for a long time, so Spotify hasn’t really moved the needle on that point
Sounds like you’re someone who thought a little about pricing.
Why should anyone get a royalty for a listen?
There’s a club in my town with a dj who plays each week. Club gets paid, dj gets paid. His sets are like ads for his work in the club. Why would I have to pay for each listen? Why would he has to earn for each listen?
Especially if that DJ is residing somewhere else and won’t ever come to my town because it’s too small for him.
Why do we create superstars? Why does “superstar S” have to be paid millions because millions come to their show. Even though I stand 500 m away, I can’t see them, I can’t hear them properly. Why can’t it be that there is a cover band covering those songs. Maybe even doing a better job. On a loval concert, with great sound, a good stage, less crowd, less people, more fun.
Why do we cheer a dj with electronic music, who just plays one song after the other, with a little bit of mixing now and then and choosing the next track based on the crowd? Why aren’t people in the center of the music (anymore)?
Why is our system so fucked up?
EA: hold my A key.
Other than cyberpunk, armored core, and elden ring I can’t remember buying a new aaa game. Usually humble bundle keeps me busy enough.
Is RE Requiem considered AAA?
Yes. Emphatically. Although Capcom has been doing pretty good with RE since the piles of crap known as 5 & 6.
This article seems to be lumping mobile and PC into the same bucket which is probably more of a red flag for the analysis they are doing here. Of course revenue is going to be more split when you add in tons of mobile games that are very effective at taking lots of money with minimal interaction.
All the games I see are PC/console. A few happen to be on mobile too, but that shouldn’t exclude them from the list.
TBH mobile revenue probably dwarfs these games, and must have a very different looking chart.
What about the AAAA games, like those that Ubislop put out?
Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.
And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.
The industry only has themselves to blame for this.
The $70 is the introductory price, like the first dose of a drug that you get for cheaper to get you hooked. The actual price has been tabulated by a department with psychologist support to ensure it’s into the four digit range.
I’d pay the $70 or even $100 for a AAA title…if it released complete, relatively bug-free, and didn’t try to soak me with microtransactions and subscriptions.
But that’s not what’s they’re selling.
This is whats wrong with gaming.
idiots being too eager to throw ever increasing amounts of money at companies, to get what they used to get for 50, with zero self awareness that they are the cancer thats killing everything.
Counterpoint: games were more expensive in the past, sometimes even before adjusting for inflation. Goldeneye was $70 new.
The problem is that back then you bought a complete game to play forever. Now you buy an unfinished mess that despite costing as much, makes it abundantly clear that the game isn’t yours through DRM and in your face micro transactions.
To provide a relatively decent source: https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1997-Sears-Christmas-Book
Around page 286. So 1997 christmas season, Starfox and Goldeneye going for $80… FFVII for $60…
N64 had the challenge that every single game was a circuitboard, so that inflated costs. Nowadays the price is for just the right to download a copy.
i mean, its also sears, premium store premium pricing.
I bought FFVII on launch day from Best Buy for 49.99.
True, but it’s at least a rough indicator, and having intact concrete pricing from back then was a bit challenging, and sears catalog came to me as a very well preserved source of vaguely appropriate pricing.
Exactly. AAA is supposed to be pushing the standard forward and compete for my attention by making a better product.
If i can get an equally good or better game for less money i will obviously go for that.
All those stakeholders be like
I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.
EDIT: Added release year after @[email protected] mentioned age.
EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it.
EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
Shouldn’t the sims 4 be considered free to play? The base game is free, only the dlc is paid.
Way too many American games in there :(
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Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones, even if they have an upfront cost.
And it’s not even counting mobile.
I hear a lot about the resurgance of honest, pay-upfront games, but revenue sure isn’t supporting that.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
Yeah, that’s what I hate about Genshin Impact most - the predatory gacha and FOMO-exploiting business model ruining what would otherwise be a peak game I could recommend to basically anyone.
Regardless of whatever fraction most of the revenue comes from, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.
And Roblox does it by exploiting kids.
Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.
Not to mention that in one country the game is being allegedly used as a platform for spreading edgelordism.
https://www.onenews.ph/articles/pnp-terrorists-grooming-kids-through-roblox
It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.
Runescape also was a free game at a time when those weren’t really common. I honestly can’t think of any others with the scope of RS.
Not only was it free, it ran entirely in a browser window.
That’s how it managed to build its player base, and it coasts on that nostalgia to this day.
There were loads of free browser games back then
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and similar felt more like mini games.
For free and in browser with some actual progression, I can think of RuneScape and those Artix Adventure Quest series games. I played both, but Runescape definitely felt like more of a complete game with 3D models and all.
God, I had forgotten how bad those Artix games were til I remembered them just now.
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
I appreciate the nicely formatted table. :)
Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.
Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.
(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw)Already fixed, never mind!Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!
One minor correction, I believe The Sims 4 went F2P at some point. They’re funded entirely by expansion packs now.
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.
That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.
Yeah, expensive but high-quality add-ons are the norm for flight sims.
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.
Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
The only AAA game that I have legitimately enjoyed and played more than once is Red Dead Redemption II. Other AAA games are okay, but they feel a bit hollow and lack the immersion that RDR2 has. Then again, RDR2 was showing off a bit with what the industry can do.
RDR2 is a fucking masterpiece.
Good. I pray by the day triple A dies. You can fuck off with your DEI, boss girl, slop games.
What?
Are you always this bigoted? What tf is a girl boss game? The bosses are women in the game, who cares?
No I’m not I’m just realistic. The games suck and that’s why they flop. Financial statements talk. The slop is not selling and that forces studios to shut down.
See you just used actual words to describe what you mean, not stupid catch phrases that have no meaning. Proud of you
Someone’s got dirt in their coochie. Bunch of snowflakes.
Oh damn, there you go agian not thinking for yourself. That’s a shame.
Good, nearly all AAA games provide is pretty graphics and little to no substance. Those that do are the very rare exclusions. Like CyberPunk2077, its story was good, graphics if you could run them good, but the gameplay was hollow until a lot of reworking.
I wouldn’t even consider Cyberpunk AAA. AAA to me is like. Ubisoft. Ea. Activision/blizzard. Those kinds of people. AA are games with decent funding but made to be good rather than a live service microtransaction slop. They’re your rockstars, atlus, segas, those kinds of studios.c
Rockstar is absolutely AAA.
Yeah I suppose. Can I at least call them 2.5 A? because they have AAA budgets but generally make good games that people want to play
AAA isnt inherently synonymous with bad games that nobody wants to play. Its about the budget and size of the game/studio. Rockstar games are firmly AAA.