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.
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.
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.
I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.
I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.
Crazy. I want to play a game with staying power.
I want the game that I look at and go “When did I get 1000 hours on the game?” Because I keep coming back to it.
But this is where we agree. I want to play games that are fun.
Seasons, dailies, battle passes, etc aren’t the things that I see as “staying power”, that’s microtransactions to a sunk cost fallacy.
Staying power to me is like Terraria, where I go in, build a world. Run around. Then wander off to something else… to wander back and play more Terraria.
I mostly agree with you, I feel like most games with staying power, are games that fundamentally will have you playing because you enjoy it.
I don’t think I can write off seasons in multiplayer games though, some games do benefit from having larger changes that happen at the end of these seasons.
Battle passes can at best be fine(if they at least pay for the next one), I don’t think any are particularly good as a metric for staying power, you still need/want to enjoy playing the game to progress the battle pass.
For me the best staying power is a game that has complexity and depth to mechanics. So I have something to improve on and chase(like lap times in sim racing)
With staying power I thought of games like Factorio.
Bought it once, played it for thousands of hours. A decade later or so it gets an extension which basically quintuples the content, am playing it thousands of hours more.
Factorio, rimworld, stardew valley, and project zomboid are the games I’m likely to be playing at any given time of year since they came out and every time there’s an expansion or update.
These weren’t expensive games to develop, I even played them for years when they weren’t yet finished.
I’m still of the opinion that the best games are the ones that are developed in a way is friendly to the mod community.
Mods literally made MechWarrior mercenaries, Minecraft and GTA5 into Great games rather than merely good ones.
This is what happens when you chase trends instead of just having a solid idea.
Newsflash: You aren’t going to turn random horror IP into the next Dead By Daylight. DBD is already Dead By Daylight
You aren’t going to make a multi-player online shooter that is the next Fortnite. Fortnite is already Fortnite.
Actually now that I’ve said that aloud it seems like the problem is that they’re trying to be the next big multi-player experience when they should be focused on a solid single player
Fortnite is a great example. It started as a co-op tower defence game. Then they saw the success of PUBG and borrowed their game mechanic (and some developers too I think).
Then epic coined it in selling skins.
I wonder if this has an expiration date, though.
For example, as much as I love Broodwar, it would be nice to get “the next RTS” at this point.
Sadly, I think that’s a dead genre, and I don’t even see the Indie Crowd picking it up.
I say this as a big fan of Starcraft and Command & Conquer
Combined Arms just got a big update!
If you want something that isn’t trying to be mid-90s and you like rogue-lites, Rogue Command is really good.
Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?
and rest of the budget on ads
That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!
I firmly believe we are entering the dark ages of AAA games, with the cost to make and GenAI they are going to be shit.
Support indie devs.
Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation’s system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.
I don’t know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you’re not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.
Fighting your tool is how you figure how what you actually want to make to a large degree. Limitations is how you are pushed to actually decide what is actually worth it to you. Otherwise you just create endless slop with got bits mixed in cause your never challenged.
Sure after a long enough time you can still get there but it takes so much longer if you have no challenge.
Thats why I love the ps1 and og consoles in general. For one. Yes, they had to work their asses off. For two, THE GAMES WERE (usually) FINISHED BY THE TIME YOU PLAYED IT.
The model of make game-test game-release game-DONE was tried and true, and something rarely experienced today.
There are amazing games today of course. But still, we have definitely shifted and I dont prefer it for the most part.
Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.
Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).
I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur’s Gate 3.
Pretty good tbh.
BG3 is technically an indie game if you go by the literal definition of the term!
About half of every triple A game is actually indie by the strict definition. Look at world of Warcraft for example. But the strict definition it’s indie :P
Self published is a bad metric to go by and means basically nothing. There’s a good reason the term has lost basically all meaningful definition and is just a vibes based measuring stick nowadays.
It’s weird to think of a top-down historically-isometric RPG as “AAA”. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Nightreign pretty damn good too
I played BG3 and liked it, but stopped because the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right
Huh?
the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right
Oh no, I hadn’t heard about this yet. What’d they do?
They played it, probably.
The game had massive success on the entire political spectrum.
Who would have thought that the long years of constantly pushing hard for monetization/profits from leadership while not giving a fuck about making a good game would end up eroding their reputation and choking their golden eggs goose. They released too many AAAs that were really AA$$.
Hey, remember when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, was pretty excellent, mostly everyone loved it, and then all the AAA studios started whining that it was an unrealistic standard to be held to?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I remember that.
I really wish society had class conciousness because if we did. That would have been enough to never ever support another AAA dev again
Best early access ever.
Act 1 was released like 18 months before the game actually released, and they legitimately listened to feedback from players.
Early access is pretty much the only way to do it too. If they had gotten investors there would have been pressure to release early or cram in micro transactions to increase return.
When the players are the early investors, they just want a good game.
Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.
I mean sure, there’s bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. “The game runs like shit, we don’t want to play it.” Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn’t fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.
Early access is more about getting revenue during development and some limited QA potential. There shouldn’t be any surprises in the feedback, that would be a sign of major problems. EA also generally comes with a discount for the player which is anathema to the AAA crowd.
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. Just look at Kerbal Space Program, for example. It pretty radically changed a few times through Early Access.
I find the QA potential to be enormous. I’ve seen my share of good EA games and the paper feedback is really what makes the difference. You’ll have devs revisiting assumptions that would be really difficult to challenge if you didn’t have a stream of real reactions to what you’re doing.
That’s not all ea has to be, it can be more than that, all we have to do is make it look like more money can be made that way for AAA and we can have our cake and eat it too.
EA is great for small and medium sized studios to get games out that might be a bit more ambitious than they could manage with traditional models. The point of AAA is that they have the money to do big impressive things. They can already do focus groups and closed betas to get community feedback. The thing that might attract AAA attention is you could make a good amount without actually releasing anything.
Idk, id love to see it properly done from AAA. That would be a great way to prove you right or wrong.
I think their point is AAA studios could already have been doing things to gauge feedback but that they are largely greedy entities which would prioritize the profit that could be extracted from a scenario over the value it could provide to the game.
We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.
If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!
This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.
Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.
But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.
It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.
Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.
All they care about is the next forknight.
Indeed.
What I’m really tired of is companies getting a random Horror IP and going “Let’s compete against a game that has MULITPLE horror ips”
For the last little while now, I’ve been finding that my most played games have been on my old 360 that I decided to plug in again, and my old old PS2 collection that I ripped and loaded to an emulator because the old hardware broke a long time ago.
Third place is “new to me” games that I finally buy when they go on a good sale years after they were “new” (is. RDR2 and Cyberpunk)
I haven’t bought a new AAA title in years on console because I can’t justify the cost.
PS2 games look and play great on the Steamdeck. Probably my favorite way to play them.
By the way, I have a couple of PS2’s, and I use a harddrive so the hardware just keeps working. Usually it is the laser that fails. There are also options to network and play from NAS, or use a micro SD.
Mine was the laser as well. Unfortunately it was years and years ago and I just tossed it away like an idiot. My collection from then on began collecting dust until last year when I decided to take one of my old Android Phones and a Razer Kishi and turn it into a handheld emulator.
Games are ok, meaning there are good ones. Trying to release more and more to get more and more money - that’s going to fail, yup
Also, look out the window: we have so much more to spend time and resources on
It’s okay, we can just not play AAA games.
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.
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.
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.
Like a gambling addiction if you think about it. “No no no, THIS will be THE game that will make us Fortnite money!!!”
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?
“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.
Capitalism has always been that way. Might be more accurate to say it gets worse when hobby becomes mainstream enough for more money to start flowing into it. Best balance seems to be when something is profitable but niche so corporations consider it not big enough for them to go all in on with their wealth.
Gaming was better when it was some loser hobby in the eyes of society than accepted like it is now causing it to grow to bring in more revenue than movies and music combined. That drew the attention of the vultures.
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
Nevermind, I just remembered Call of Duty exists
It is less of an effort and time commitment to passively consume tv shows or movies. You can zombie out while watching it before going to sleep or fall asleep to it.
Games are an active medium in comparison with progression gated behind level of skill, so that makes it less accessible than something like movies or tv shows that is the equivalent of an auto clicker game.
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.
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.
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.
Might be because you’re not just spending 2-3 hours with games, but >30h, often hundreds or even thousands of hours. Making that a compelling experience that people don’t quickly get tired of is much harder.
It’s not. Plenty of game franchises are similarly profitable.
