Nobody is forcing them to spend a shitzillion dollars and ten years on this stuff, we were doing year long development times on far lower budgets back in the late 2000s and there’s some real gold in there.
The stock market is. They’re legally required to do everything they can to make more money every quarter than the last to please investors.
It’s the primary reason why AAA is the way it is.
It was, back then. Companies hadn’t become the behemoths they are today, technology was moving too fast to take a long time on your game. You’d have 3 game full franchises that took maybe 3-5 years to come out as the regular thing.
Back then is back then; the world is, as they say, changed.
More gamers, different standards. If you re-released a 2007 masterpiece today with no updates to its graphics it wouldn’t do AAA sales. Today’s AAA games are more like films, with blockbuster film budgets and timelines.
It’s perfectly true that no-one is forcing them to spend such a huge amount of money. But in another sense, economics strongly strongly encourages someone to do that, because doing so is profitable compared to not doing that.
But on the flipside of that, you’ve got the indie scene that can pull off multimillion dollar hits with simplistic art style and next to no budget. Not always, but the point I’m going for here is merit does not always equate to scale.
I’m not saying it’s necessarly bad to go big on projects, but there really has been stagnation in the triple a gaming space because they literally can never take risks at this scale, or at least risks as far as they can tell internally. It takes literal years to pop out something, and from most big studios you get something nearly identical to what came before.
I guess I’m speaking from a place of frustration because a lot of these studios rose from innovation, and to see them chained to the same process of letting the money lead, churning out half done products that run like garbage, and never taking a chance, it’s a bummer.
Like I get why, we’re being pushed along by the ghost of Moore’s law, but given the amount of difficulty and abuse the Devs go through to get some of this done, only for a lot of these projects to fail anyway, it makes me feel like it’s not worth it sometimes.
I see it more positively: there are more games than ever. I can play loads of amazing indie games, and I can also play the blockbusters; nothing seems to be holding back my enjoyment. I don’t really give a shit if an individual studio collapses under the weight of its own need for ever-greater sales, since I’m still going to get new stuff to play. If a big game is more-of-the-same and runs poorly, I won’t play it. So what if it’s the sequel to a really good game? If anything that sets the bar higher for me - a new game is more interesting and exciting so I’d rather play something completely new than a sequel. If a sequel is shit, then it’s time to abandon that series.
Oh I’m right there with you. It’s perplexing to me, like watching someone you used to respect repeatedly punch themselves in the face. They don’t need to do it, they don’t like it, but they won’t stop either. It’s bizarre.
Nobody is forcing them to spend a shitzillion dollars and ten years on this stuff, we were doing year long development times on far lower budgets back in the late 2000s and there’s some real gold in there.
The stock market is. They’re legally required to do everything they can to make more money every quarter than the last to please investors. It’s the primary reason why AAA is the way it is.
As far as I can tell that’s a very popular myth. If you can point at an actual law then sure.
That market segment is not the triple A segment though.
It was, back then. Companies hadn’t become the behemoths they are today, technology was moving too fast to take a long time on your game. You’d have 3 game full franchises that took maybe 3-5 years to come out as the regular thing.
Back then is back then; the world is, as they say, changed.
More gamers, different standards. If you re-released a 2007 masterpiece today with no updates to its graphics it wouldn’t do AAA sales. Today’s AAA games are more like films, with blockbuster film budgets and timelines.
It’s perfectly true that no-one is forcing them to spend such a huge amount of money. But in another sense, economics strongly strongly encourages someone to do that, because doing so is profitable compared to not doing that.
But on the flipside of that, you’ve got the indie scene that can pull off multimillion dollar hits with simplistic art style and next to no budget. Not always, but the point I’m going for here is merit does not always equate to scale.
I’m not saying it’s necessarly bad to go big on projects, but there really has been stagnation in the triple a gaming space because they literally can never take risks at this scale, or at least risks as far as they can tell internally. It takes literal years to pop out something, and from most big studios you get something nearly identical to what came before.
I guess I’m speaking from a place of frustration because a lot of these studios rose from innovation, and to see them chained to the same process of letting the money lead, churning out half done products that run like garbage, and never taking a chance, it’s a bummer.
Like I get why, we’re being pushed along by the ghost of Moore’s law, but given the amount of difficulty and abuse the Devs go through to get some of this done, only for a lot of these projects to fail anyway, it makes me feel like it’s not worth it sometimes.
I see it more positively: there are more games than ever. I can play loads of amazing indie games, and I can also play the blockbusters; nothing seems to be holding back my enjoyment. I don’t really give a shit if an individual studio collapses under the weight of its own need for ever-greater sales, since I’m still going to get new stuff to play. If a big game is more-of-the-same and runs poorly, I won’t play it. So what if it’s the sequel to a really good game? If anything that sets the bar higher for me - a new game is more interesting and exciting so I’d rather play something completely new than a sequel. If a sequel is shit, then it’s time to abandon that series.
Oh I’m right there with you. It’s perplexing to me, like watching someone you used to respect repeatedly punch themselves in the face. They don’t need to do it, they don’t like it, but they won’t stop either. It’s bizarre.
I think they do like it - they get loadsa money for it!