The pressure applied by the need for video games to act as investments is not aligned with artistic expressiveness, innovation or quality.
This is why games from smaller Companies or indie developers continue to be the huge, genre-changing breakout hits. They’re still being made with the intention of making a game that’s fun, weird, or interesting as a primary concern, rather than just being a vehicle for profit.
This trend will continue.
This might come off as being a old gamer, but I feel like they’ve been saying this about AAA games since 2000s.
Sure, 90% of them will play it super safe. But there’s always 1 AAA game that breaks the mold and suddenly, the AAA games will follow that. Or imitate whatever indie game is doing with a higher budget.
Sam Lake is still out there fighting the good fight. Kojima too - whether you think he’s a genius or think he produces incomprehensible nonsense you can’t deny he is at least flying the flag for the weird.
I respect that he burned a giant hole in Konami’s pocket and tried his best to block them off at each turn.
Then they fired him before the game was finished and released Metal Gear Survive lol.
Also respect that he made a fucking AAA hiking delivery game, with fucking jar-babies, and Princess Beach.
Sure, but look at the PS2 catalog, for example—way more weird games with relatively high production for the time.
It costs so much to make an AAA game these days that it must earn an enormous amount of money to be profitable, which means it needs to appeal to as broad a market as possible, which means nothing niche or unusual. I think movies are having the same problem.
This is why you support indies
The problem is that it’s actually not as expensive to make a triple ehh game as people are led to believe. What’s expensive is overpaying all the greedy executives and their unearned bonuses. More people need to be aware of this.
Don’t forget marketing: be it movies or games, marketing likes to cost as much as the production of the media itself.
Sadly it seems to be necessary as many people just won’t know about some piece of media without it. Streamers play games they are paid to play, “reviewers” cover games they are paid to cover or know about through the hype generated by ads.
True though I can’t even begin to understand how marketing justifies its proce when a common “fact” that goes around is that the marketing step accounts for 50% of the total game’s budget. Like, how does it cost that much?
Billboard ads can cost hundreds of thousands depending on the location and duration (e.g. Times Square, NY). TV ads, YT ads, streaming services ads, and search engine ads likely add up too. Big streamers will likely take quite a bit too. Maybe they’ll do a press conference to promote their game, which can be incredibly expensive location-wise.
But I agree, I can’t comprehend how it can be that expensive either.
If it isn’t ridiculously expensive and inefficient, it doesn’t really fit the definition of a triple-a game, because it specifically is the term for games with the highest production values and costs.
