What most of the developer arguments around this fail to mention is that it costs a lot to make AAA games, but the entry point to making an indie game is much lower than it used to be, and many of those are better ‘games’ than the expensive to produce stuff.
And the reason AAA games cost that much is that big studios locked themselves into a scope creep driven industry wide death spiral. Most of the extra cost does nothing to improve the game.
Sometimes the big trees need to burn so the forest can thrive.
Scope creep is one thing. Absurd dead lines cost alot too. Marketing cries for a release date so they can put it in their pr articles.
Indie games just slap early access on it and go by its done when its done. Plus continouous features etc years after initial release. The success formula Blizzard once had.
Turns out putting more stressed devs onto a project, more micromanaging bosses does not increase development speed.
CEOs aren’t interested in making and selling things that people actually want. They’re just parasites trying to pump and dump the stock. Every decision makes sense when you see it as just trying to impress investors.
Much of the money spent goes into marketing, not even development.
Now Indies don’t even come close to that with their marketing spending. To be fair the overall majority of Indies disappears into obscurity and never makes it to the top.
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.
And no one is arguing that one shouldn’t buy Indie games and that there aren’t incredibly fun and well made indie games.
But people also like to pretend that every big studio just makes expensive shite. There are also a lot of huge scale games that are still made with the same amount of passion, at least on dev side. Warhorse Studio, the ones behind the Kingdom Come series are a very passionate studio that make extensive games that are years in development. It’s absolutely fair for them to want adequate payment.
Even Rockstar Games, who are criticised a lot for the scope of their games, usually does deliver games that were crafted with an incredible love for detail and storytelling. There are a lot of very valid reasons to criticise them but let’s not pretend they underdeliver.
I’d rather have big games be more expensive than smaller. I also want smaller games to thrive. And I also like that there are devs trying to fit in the AA area in between. Those are not mutually exclusive.
And if a big game is shite or overpriced or simply something I don’t like, I won’t buy it. Or on sale, a year later.
Also how gaming is so massive now that numbers we consider pathetic and failures used to be what the blockbusters sold. The issue, as always, is mismanagement…like this shit new standard of half the budget being purely for marketing (or even worse splitting 80%+ of the budget across marketing and celebrity actors), or exclusively attempting to copy already saturated markets like BR/extraction/generic live service time sinks and pointless giant open worlds.
What most of the developer arguments around this fail to mention is that it costs a lot to make AAA games, but the entry point to making an indie game is much lower than it used to be, and many of those are better ‘games’ than the expensive to produce stuff.
And the reason AAA games cost that much is that big studios locked themselves into a scope creep driven industry wide death spiral. Most of the extra cost does nothing to improve the game.
Sometimes the big trees need to burn so the forest can thrive.
Scope creep is one thing. Absurd dead lines cost alot too. Marketing cries for a release date so they can put it in their pr articles.
Indie games just slap early access on it and go by its done when its done. Plus continouous features etc years after initial release. The success formula Blizzard once had.
Turns out putting more stressed devs onto a project, more micromanaging bosses does not increase development speed.
CEOs aren’t interested in making and selling things that people actually want. They’re just parasites trying to pump and dump the stock. Every decision makes sense when you see it as just trying to impress investors.
It’s like nobody is reading The Mythical Man-Month anymore…
Absurd dead lines are partially a result of scope creep. Games that are well planned and focused don’t need 10 years to make right.
Or thirteen…
Well you only need to rush it, and suddenly the third rewrite (under insane pressure ofc) might bring you to 10 years…
Much of the money spent goes into marketing, not even development.
Now Indies don’t even come close to that with their marketing spending. To be fair the overall majority of Indies disappears into obscurity and never makes it to the top.
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.
And no one is arguing that one shouldn’t buy Indie games and that there aren’t incredibly fun and well made indie games.
But people also like to pretend that every big studio just makes expensive shite. There are also a lot of huge scale games that are still made with the same amount of passion, at least on dev side. Warhorse Studio, the ones behind the Kingdom Come series are a very passionate studio that make extensive games that are years in development. It’s absolutely fair for them to want adequate payment.
Even Rockstar Games, who are criticised a lot for the scope of their games, usually does deliver games that were crafted with an incredible love for detail and storytelling. There are a lot of very valid reasons to criticise them but let’s not pretend they underdeliver.
I’d rather have big games be more expensive than smaller. I also want smaller games to thrive. And I also like that there are devs trying to fit in the AA area in between. Those are not mutually exclusive.
And if a big game is shite or overpriced or simply something I don’t like, I won’t buy it. Or on sale, a year later.
Also how gaming is so massive now that numbers we consider pathetic and failures used to be what the blockbusters sold. The issue, as always, is mismanagement…like this shit new standard of half the budget being purely for marketing (or even worse splitting 80%+ of the budget across marketing and celebrity actors), or exclusively attempting to copy already saturated markets like BR/extraction/generic live service time sinks and pointless giant open worlds.
I.e. higher prices are justified in cost, but not product quality.