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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Shareholders like CEOs aren’t real people and their opinions should be tossed down the drain.
Oh I keep thinking in the shareholders (Pours querosene in the funnel). I always do…
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.
Almost all AAA games are online live service games. I have absolutely no interest in those games. I have been surviving off of indy or lower budget games pretty well while the big guys are off trying to make all the money doing boring shit.
I’ve been on a spree of buying or buying abandoned games or old console games lately and have been really happy with not being online at all, not updating anything I don’t want updated, and paying a reasonable price for the content I got. I don’t care that the graphics are outdated, if the gameplay works and is fun, its fine looking like almost anything.
Yeah. I guess I’m too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.
To me, you don’t repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.
Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth “movement”. After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I’m playing a game.
That era also has good control schemes. I went to replay Perfect Dark on my analogue 3d and hoooooooo boy, those layouts are like wearing beer goggles or trying to ride a reverse handle bar bike. I’ll need to try the dual controller layout but I am considering butchering a cheap controller to make something that matches modern layouts.
The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.
I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.
The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2…
I didn’t know they made Power over Ethernet into a game, let alone a sequel.
There’s even more than one Power over Ethernet 2s, and both of them are good games, often played by similar groups of people.
(Pillar of Eternity 2 and Path of Exile 2)
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
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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.
I work in embedded my whole life so I’m no stranger of fighting over scraps of resources and spending days trying to squeeze in something that doesn’t fit. It made me better at fighting this specific hardware limitations, and now instead of spending 10 times more time on making something that takes no time at all on a capable hardware, I spend only 5 times more.
I don’t know if for creative work it does something, but for programming it’s like chopping wood with one hand behind your back. Sure you can do it, sure you can get better at it, sure it forces you to adjust your ways, but it doesn’t make the wood better chopped, it just makes you slower and more prone to mistakes for no reason
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.
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.
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.
I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur’s Gate 3.
Pretty good tbh.
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
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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.
In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.
That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!
Bring back games that you’re passionate for and gamers will love instead of designing a gamified soulless money funnel.
There are thousands of amazing indie games created by people who have an idea and a will to make something. I’ll spend my money there instead.
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
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
We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.
If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.
