𝔼𝕩𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕒
I’m here for a meme time, up votes to the left thanks
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To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn’t break the company if they didn’t sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.
A great example would be an excerpt from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game “united offensive”, X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.
History Lesson enclosed
Nowadays it’s either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak.
About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big.
And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game “AAAA” to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a “truly AAAA game” to try and set it above games like assassin’s creed and call of duty. And because it’s nothing more than a buzzword to allow a ceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.
And for $70 more you can play it 2 days early! For why? No fucking reason other than to flex! Gotta flex on those poors by getting it earlier than them amirite?? This ensures you will be invested in our product from the very start and you are the type of person who we can do no wrong.
And for $30 there’s 2 extra skins that are just the worst looking piles of shit. But again if you don’t have them how will you flex on the poors? This is lumped in with the earlier assurance that we can do no wrong in your eyes.
And the battle pass is $10 - every 30 days. It has nothing of value except at tier 150, which is a new flagrantly pay to win weapon. This ensures we own your time, every month.
But also we didn’t finish the game, instead we released a roadmap. We will scrap this roadmap a week and a half after the disastrous launch because the game sucks so my donkey dick we cannot possibly add content to the absolute bugfest of a game. This is an abuse of loyalty to our brand, but you’ve stated you don’t care as long as you get to play it.
Now that the game is out for a month, we’ve added a cash shop. This flies in the face of regulation on the box not indicating gambling elements, but fuck those stooges standing in the way of our profits! We can make a new box with the proper markings on them in a month. Surely you would like to buy a sword skin or character skin beyond looking like normal Mario right? Also there will be at least 1 skin that blends in with the background a little too well and attracts p2w allegations for the multiplayer mode. We don’t care and neither do you because you will buy it. You wanna be a winner right?
We noticed you’re already level 8, congratulations! We halved level reward drops, but increased rarity of those items by 30% but from here on we tripled enemy hp at every 10 levels to make sure the game is a slog, so you buy overpowered shit from the shop and battle pass.
You reached level 10 in only 5 hours? That’s amazing! How about a XP Booster? Like the above we actually made progression become ungodly slow after level 10 unless you pay us $35 for an XP booster - in a single player game. We will make sure this pops up every time you level up to remind you we intentionally slowed progression so you make this purchase.
Also we can’t help but notice you picked up a Fancy Locked Box. You can divert from the main quest to grind the crafting materials and it will take 6 hours to craft, OR you can buy a key for ONLY $5! This will pop up EVERY time you pick up a Locked Box with the option to go to the shop, and be SUPER disruptive, to get you to cave.
And lastly, a “donate” button on the main menu where you just give us money for nothing, because at this point why not right?
indulged in. When a company does not lay off people from the upper tier, they are indulging in layoffs.
“Hit with” implies an unavoidable, tragic, and forced event. They knew this would happen months ago when KTJL face planted. Videogame companies complain about the “cost of making games” but they’re the fucks what spent the money. Maybe spend less on your marketing and budget, and when a game doesn’t sell well it isn’t a cataclysmic event that sinks the whole company.
But really, if game companies weren’t constantly at risk to have implosions from bad decisions, the board wouldn’t get their “please don’t leave us” money. So really this always comes back to - fuck the management, and the board. Videogames are treated as products so here we are.
Not surprising, Journey to the West is really popular, and even western societies like Ancient Chinese mythos stories. Wukong and Nezha are probably the 2 most popular, if I had to guess. On top of this not surprising a Chinese publisher making a game about a Chinese mythos is doing well in China, when almost no one is competing in that regard so the market is hype for representation and seeing “their” story made into a playable game.
This has been disproven and was called out at the time of the increase. Games cost less to develop now than ever. Microtransactions and recurrent subscription transaction1s like battlepasses mean a shit game gets to live longer than it would deserve. People have careers in the field and languages common to the industry - this isn’t a “new and groundbreaking” industry - its one of the largest on the planet.
Studios are absolutely not passing any of that $10 to lower level staff. It was to see if the market would bear it, and no other reason - and corporate defenders came out of the woodwork to pretend BILLION dollar corporations need more money. If videogames were too expensive to make, they’d not be spending so much, now would they?
It makes total sense. Both companies existing in a pseudo-merger makes a lot of advantage sense. Disney gets to keep its image clean of the anti-consumer practices of epic these past few years, while epic sharks its way around Steam and corners small devs, bullying them into exclusivity. (Were they bought out, “Disney subsidiary” might be a dirty word)
Epic gets to make games-as-services with ever more integration, with fortnite, league, and car soccer. This begins also the availability of Disney exclusive GAAS, but also with tie ins to epic titles.
In return Disney gets, for no effort, access to the market American companies can not tread - China. Tencent comes with Chinese party seal of approval built in. Marketing into the country nets Disney the market saturation and brand recognition they’ve been wanting in a new audience, and all they’d have to do is have epic make a game and sell it with their IP. Disney doesn’t have to ask the cccp for marketing permission because it’s a Chinese company product trying to make Chinese people sales.
The whole thing is so…dystopia that it just fits so well with the Disney that Walt built, and expanded as a cutthroat businessman.
Just a shout out to Stephanie Sterling for covering Koticks fuckery since the beginning (on youtube) And Jason Schrier for publishing it (kotaku, now bloomberg, and freelance), even as it has fallen on deaf ears for the better part of a decade. Activision Blizzard has been rife with frat boy culture that kotick promotes would have been a bloody nose on the new face Microsoft wants to put on the company.
4 years ago- that hong kong scandal
2 years ago - blizzcon glossing over their hong kong bullshit
It all looks great. That’s kinda the expectation tbh. It does look good, but all games “look good” at this stage. This gives rise to the other question about can it look good and be stable, even on lower end hardware (ps4/x1 and mid/low pcs) for release.
But a video is a video. I realize it’s so early and am not knocking it for lacking gameplay footage, just that generating a video in-engine is not representative of gameplay, or gameplay elements.
You can generate anything in-engine, it’s not representative of gameplay. Everyone does it and it’s equally shitty. It looks like a minute and a half of cutscenes and, other than character reveals it looks like a normal release. It just looks like smoothed out gta5, so like…gta5 on pc. The achievement wouldn’t be the graphics, it would be “can it maintain the graphics steadily and not drop frames”
Timeline is irrelevant, agreed. it will come out when it comes out.
Top 3 lifetime?
Majesty the Kingdom Sim My first real game that I got any good at. From the era of top down builders like simcity and such. It’s probably not as robust as many other games buy it was by far the most influential game that taught resource management t
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time The n64 was the first home console I got, and this was, as probably many people, first foray into an “open world” other than Mario 64. It was also harder than any other game I’d played before and in retrospective I greatly enjoyed platformers later.
Ratchet: Deadlocked I love the series, I have almost all of them. But this was the culmination of the combat and Upgrade systems and mods that 2 introduced. The black sheep failure of the series, remains probably my most played and most devoted to getting Platinum for.
True games that game complete, without fucking bullshit transactions of cut content designed to suck my wallet dry.
Honorable mentions: Monster Hunter World and Elden Ring Feature rich and challenging. I had never played a Souls game and these 2 were perfect first games for it. I would not have liked these games when I was younger, but now that I’m older and able to plan builds and map progressions, these are great games.
Horizon The Forbidden West I really like the robot dinos. The story’s fine but man the time that went into coming up with “what animals would make great machones” is a creative meeting I’d loved to have been part of. FW builds on its source material in a way most sequels fail. The changing of machines to the “I’m tired of being everyone’s savior but noone else can do it” should resonate with most adults I think.
Slowly just buying games on pc so I can cut my dependence on the Playstation. Paying twice for internet is so dumb. The ps5 and switch will likely be my last consoles.
I refuse to accept $70 as the new norm as companies boast about record profits, while indulging in layoffs. All while the average consumer has less money than ever before to even buy them.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
For mobile- Poweramp - let’s me view and play music by Folder. Google and Samsungs built in player suuuucks. You can’t build a Playlist with Poweramp, but if you have lots of your “own music” .mp3s, I highly recommend it.
And SimpleGallery. Infinitely better than whatever the fuck “Google photos” puts together. It lets you sort and view by, you guessed it, FOLDER NAME rather than “most recent” always at the top. It also let’s you Hide folders too for all those cute cat photos. Also allows Excluding folders, so that game thumbnail folder doesn’t show up too.
An argument I heard, and adopted is that it’s never “just” cosmetic. Your enjoyment of the game is impacted by how you perceive your avatar. This is why fortnite skins sell so well to new players. It’s not just cosmetic to drop $20 on Cuddle Team Leader. It makes a user feel silly and increases enjoyment running around as an obvious pink mascot costume. It prolongs how long you play both by increased enjoyment, and sunk cost fallacy. In any game with cosmetics, purchases drive playtime.