I agree with your view point - however it’s hard to see any other outcome for the AAA franchises. Player expectations of a modern title are increasing - as are the time, human, and fiscal capital required to ship a modern title - years of engineering, hundreds of people, hundreds of millions of dollars. The risks are huge - missing your date, or game experience can sink a company - consider what Cyberpunk almost did to Projekt CD RED - to ship they cut to the bone very late in the day. The economics of the AAA business is optimizing towards managing and distributing that risk thru supply-chain and scale. I don’t see a better way on this current trajectory.
>Player expectations of a modern title are increasing
Unfortunately this is not true. Modern AAA franchises do not innovate. They are just shinier. You can find the same systems, and often more complex or creative ones, in games from the nineties and 2000's as you can today. Modern gamers either become jaded, seek out indie games, or, more often, simply buy what is offered.
Remember when the big question used to be "are video games art? CAN they ever be art?" I remember publications like PC Gamer spending a lot of time and energy wrestling with these questions. It wasn't lip service; it was a real goal that game creators at the time pushed towards, because gaming was trying to find acceptance and respect alongside other forms of media. I think that has mostly been lost, now. There is and will always be indie creators pushing their own creations that are inspired, but the AAA market is totally lost, imo, if you are interested in games as more than just a mindless bit of fun. That overarching sense of progressing towards something that could be considered true "art", is gone, for the time being.
edit: didn't mean to sound like I wasn't giving credit to all the fine indie games and game creators out there. There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)
AAA games are about art as much as big budget films are… which is to say: not a lot. You’re never going to see as much risk taken when each game costs hundreds of millions of dollars. There are however tons of “mid tier” studio, what some might call “triple I” big indie studios that put out all kinds of innovative games.
Even Minecraft and Fortnite, two of the most popular games in the world, are systemically quite interesting compared to games 20 years ago. (yes really, Fortnite is much more interesting than you might think looking at it superficially)
Defining “art” when it comes to games is of course subjective. Some would say The Witness is much closer to art than The Last of Us 2, while others would say the opposite… but does it matter? Either way they’re both fantastic games. The medium is still being pushed forward, you just have to know where to look.
Like I said, there will always be innovative indie games. But the AAA studios used to be important in driving artistic and systemic innovation in games, because they had the most money and visibility.
Games like: Elite 2: Frontier, Star Control 2, Heroes of Might and Magic, KOTOR 1 and 2, all had strong writing, narrative, complex and difficult systems to manage, and were innovative in their time. And none were "indie" games (though at the time, some of these games could be made by 1 or 2 people). This is a real difference. Just look at the difference in Blizzard. Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo 1 & 2 made them hugely influential and successful because of their commitment to quality. Now, they're a joke. But somehow, still one of the biggest gaming companies in the world!
It's not about defining art. It's about a push to create games that can stand up to works of literature and cinema which are considered to be important artistic achievements. I'm happy to hear that there are titles out their which are striving for that, but AAA studios aren't doing that. In fact they actively push new titles as being cutting edge while they retain or dumb down systems that were created decades ago.
Disagree hard on Fortnite. It is very shallow. The building system seems interesting but is superficial. Yes it's integral to winning the match, but its not very strategic...just like Fortnite's shooting and physics are quite cartoony and not very tactical. It is a VERY poor "shooter," but a fun "battle royale game." There is a difference these days.
Minecraft was not a AAA game, it was just purchased by a AAA studio.
Again, I'm not saying that there aren't any games that are artistic or interesting. In fact that's the opposite of what I said in my original post! I'm saying that "The Industry" (which will ALWAYS have the most market share, visibility, and resources) is not creating those games. They are not interested. And that is a sad change from what used to be.
My point was that the kind of budgets of AAA games have now completely dwarf the “AAA” games from 20 years ago. There are still innovative games being made with the equivalent budgets and team sizes of those older games (2-50 people, $10 million or less).
On top of that, there are still massive budget AAA games that are willing to take risks for artistic integrity. Obvious examples of this are things like Death Stranding or The Last of Us 2.
Blizzard’s quality hasn’t actually fallen. They’ve clearly had some internal culture issues but their games have always been stellar. They just operate on glacial timescales which everyone seems to forget. Their last release was in 2016, which was Overwatch, a fantastic game.
And re: Fortnite, if you don’t think the building is strategic, you need to watch some high end competitive matches. It’s incredibly tactical. Each player acts like a real time map designer trying to give themselves the biggest positional advantage (while balancing resource usage etc). I would argue that it uses the full 3-dimensions more than any other competitive game out there.
> Modern AAA franchises do not innovate. They are just shinier.
> There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)
I guess that's my point and I didn't write it very well. AAA publishing/production has become a low-risk money-machine that feeds a very large audience occasionally surprising but increasingly bland content, while making small formulaic incremental changes year-on-year e.g. next-gen textures, bigger maps, more multiplayer servers and modes. Unfortunately a large proportion of players are happy with just that model as evidenced by the revenue derived from it.
Do players really prefer the current AAA space right now though? There are many indie games out there made by a small team (or even one person) that are very popular and successful (e.g. Stardew Valley, Outer Wilds). For me personally, I haven't really enjoyed a AAA game in years. I tend to stick to indie or more niche experiences. I think AAA studios might do well if they split up their massive teams to create many, more focused games instead of one big blockbuster that primarily serve as a vehicle for microtransactions.
If you look at best-selling console games by year, [0, only goes up to 2019] you can see that the list since about 2001 is dominated by sports games and Call of Duty, with the odd exception (usually a Rockstar game).
While the gaming discourse has turned against these titles, they are consistently the most popular. If anything, I’m actually flabbergasted that Rockstar was able to turn a Wild West drama into the best selling game of 2018, as it feels so different (that is, less cartoonish) to anything else on the list.
The fact of the matter is that the people who talk about games make up a small portion of the total group of people who play games. AAA still exists because it still rakes in cash, year over year.
The success of Red Dead Redemption, and Rockstar in general, is proof that you gamers will appreciate more substantial than sports games (which barely update between editions, and sometimes actually have LESS content than previous editions), and shooters, which have rapidly turned into Skinner's Boxes themselves with all the unlockables and achievements (which hijack the whole point of a shooter from competition between individuals' skill, into a competition between the player and a list of arbitrary "achievements").
But clearly the AAA studios have the market figured out, it's just easier, less risky, and more profitable to make shallow "product" than a rewarding and interesting "game."
I guess my point, and my issue with this take, is that "you gamers" is kind of a useless identifier. Most people who play games are going to stick to the blockbusters, like most people who go to the movies stick to the blockbusters.
And the same complaints hold true in film, where people argue that studios are just taking the safer, more profitable path. But the people who make those complaints aren't the audience that the studios/publishers are targeting, and they are a minority in the larger market as a whole.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there are indie games or whatever that break out or break the mold; Stardew Valley has sold 15 million copies since it launched in early access in 2016, and though I think the CoD game from that year sold more, I guarantee you there are more people still playing SV than CoD: Infinite Warfare. But Activision made their buck and moved on, and that strategy continues to work for them.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the consumer. I'm just saying that AAA studios have "the market" figured out. They know how to, forgive the use of the phrase, "game the system," to make profit at the expense of quality. They didn't invent it and they sure as hell won't be the last to use it, but they certainly got good at it.
I'm just saying that there is definitely an appetite among the general game consumer for a more complex and cerebral type of game! And that it's sad to see such few of those titles come from the big studios (while at the same time they nickel-and-dime everyone with their dlc's and other schemes).
I don't know what the 5th highest reviewed title of all time that was made available on a popular platform selling well tells me about the state of AAA as a whole to be honest. One data point, for a game considered a masterpiece of the last generation (so the decade), doesn't say a whole lot.
The Avengers was a large AAA game from the world's most popular media franchise and it recently tanked. "That should tell you everything you need to know..."
In general people don't care whether a game is a "AAA" or "indie" when they buy it, they look at reviews and whether their friends are playing it.
There are good AAA games and bad AAA games. The good ones do very well, the bad ones don't do as well. If we move the goalposts to say that the high-grossing/well-reviewed AAA games don't count then of course we're going to end up with a skewed picture of what the market looks like.
Because the Avengers game wasn't very good. On the other hand the recent Guardians of the Galaxy game sold much better and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews.
