A lot of people have this absurd idea that AAA is dying due to "greedy companies" or whatnot. Sure the profits are insane, but it's a lot more complex than people think. So let's break it down.
Gamoore's Law
Let me start with the backdrop of how "modern" AAA started: Assassin's Creed. Not by itself, but it's one of the poster children of early AAA.
AC was a breakthrough in its time because mainly of the scope of its world. It didn't help that the main quality of the game was to be an interactive postcard. Graphics, sound design, atmosphere, all the artistry that went into these defined the term "AAA".
AC1 already had the seeds of the problem of AAA that are blooming into flowers of disappointment today. Its main quality is that it was big, huge, biggerer and betterer than anything before. It wasn't for its exceptional gameplay, or its memorable storyline. AC2 did that a lot better, and then there were the ups and downs. But the part that was unequivocally "new" with every Assassins Creed since the first is that every single one of them needed to go bigger. They needed to have better gfx, more fluff to do, etc.
This led AAA to a development philosophy not too distant from Moore's Law: Every 18 months, the new AAA game must have 2x the size of the previous one. 2x the asset quality, 2x the map size, 2x the amount of assets, 2x the characters to talk to, 2x the minigames, 2x something. Everything has to grow.
Does Not Actually Exist
And the problem? Is that this costs in a very non-compressible amount of development time, particularly in fields that rely on painstaking slow work.
Let me put the numbers out for a midsize/AA game:
Say you have a team of 100 people.
- 10 will be technical (engine, optimisation, scripts, etc)
- 10 will be managerial (your good ole management like most companies)
- 10 will be extras (finances, marketing, the guy that married the coffee machine, etc)
- 10 will be gameplay (mechanics, testing, fine-tuning)
- 60 will be artistic, out of which about 10 in sound, 15 in artworks/design, 35 in 3D modelling, Blender, animation, etc.
The numbers are definitely not accurate, but they give you a broad "30% non game-makers, 60% artists, 10% pure gamification/game design".
Now let's do the same cuts on AAA:
Team of 4000 people:
- 30 technical
- 100 managerial
- 300 extras
- 15 gameplay
- 3555 artistic, out of which about 15 in sound, 1000 in artworks/design, and 2500 in different levels of 3D modelling, animation and artistic tweaking and fixing the game into a coherent, best-possible-looking product
Now this is a problem. A very, very deep problem. Because Moore's Law is an economical law, but AAA law is a runaway cost law.
"Every 18 months, transistors will double in semiconductors at the same cost"
"Every 18 months, the weight of AAA will double at a higher cost"
These two laws do NOT equate, and yet they're seen as almost twins to one another. We've seen computers and consoles grow exponentially, why wouldn't games? Because games require an ever increasing amount of handiwork that a fully mechanized industry doesn't need.
So when a company/corporation wants to do something that's costing more and more, and keeps getting bigger than them, what is the solution?
First you have the obvious ones. You do as Marx says Capitalism does: you cut costs, and raise profits.
Second, you have the more intelligent ones, which are the same as with cars, semiconductors, or any large scale, reproducible product: you industrialise.
Let's look at industrialisation of videogames first.
Industrialisation means you serialize what parts you can, and fill up the rest with handiwork.
First, the games industry has been increasingly serializing the core engine of their games: almost all of them try to have the same engine run their biggest, or all of their franchises. And when owning your own in-house engine started being a higher cost than paying the royalties, they started moving over to Unity or Unreal. And that is an ongoing process that I can safely say isn't slowing down. It's also why I believe strongly in the future of Godot Engine (no costs, highly customisable), but that's out of topic.
When they buy a studio, AAA publishers first fire almost all of the extra personnel that's not needed, finances, payment, marketing, etc, all of that gets centralised in one place.
While reusing visual or audio assets is frowned upon by customers/gamers, so it's seldom done, reusing the same programs, tools, methods, processes, everything is streamlined. This is also one of the reasons why giant AAA publishers and studios try to buy everything and their mother: the more you can serialize/repeat over many studios and games, the more you can compress expenditures by industrialising.
Now, the ugly side of compressing expenses/gaining more.
There's Twenty Waiting To Replace You
When it comes to compressing expenses, let's go straight to the elephant in the room: those 3500+ artists.
I'm going to be very cruel and say it the exact same way a manager/financer of AAA sees it: they're expendable. EXTREMELY expendable.
They have every single stigma:
- non-mandatory to project completion
- easily replaced
- highly willing
- high chance of finding the same for cheaper
Let me say right now that making a game, gameplay-wise, is not done in a committee. Sure there's tons of creatives with back and forth and arguing and everyone wants their mechanic in. But whoever the game director is, that person will have the final say. And whatever things are offered to his office by others are just that: offered.
If you don't follow my meaning, if your ideas are good, but aren't the way the GD wants the game, your ideas aren't kept, period. Good GDs will of course listen to their teams and talk all the time it takes, I'm not saying it's a crushing tyranny, but the game is NOT done collectively, it is done with the goal of being coherent. This is because you can't have a FPS that also has a RPG component. Or rather you can, but both parts of the game need to be fully coherent, to mesh with each other. And the one who says "this works, it goes in" is not saying yes or no out of the idea being good or bad, he's saying yes or no out of the idea working for what works for the game.
tl;dr that spoiler: you can make an amazing gameplay mechanic and it gets shut down because it's not meshing with the game's feel.
Now if that's true for gameplay design, how about graphic design?
Well, do you remember that super Laser Mace in Call of Duty? That top tier assault rifle in Assassin's Creed Unity? The best-in-class Fire Sword in Battlefield 5?
No you don't, because they don't exist.
Because they're not graphically or stylistically coherent with the games they would be in.
And now the kicker: same as gameplay design, how many people TRULY matter for a very large, 3500+ artists heavy game?
Enough that can fit in a small meeting room. Five.
Yes, five. You have five people that will coordinate and discuss how the game's supposed to look like. Same as you have 5 people or so that will be the deciders of what gameplay mechanics, what feel, what tweaks, work or don't work for the game.
Out of 3550+ people, to the corporation making the game, FIVE are considered the worthwhile ones. That's not even some terrible management or greedy design, it's just an actual limitation of games. You don't have random stuff pop out of nowhere in a game because some dev decided to be creative that day. It sticks out like a sore thumb, especially in games considered immersive/atmospheric. Breaks everything. So to prevent that breakage, you have a design control/quality control that is done by five or so people. Maybe 10-15 depending on the studio, there's no hard rule. But peanuts compared to the worker mass in AAA.
And so, these workers are very, very non-mandatory. All the more so because the other 3 reasons I cited all come due to one thing: the absolute clout of the games industry. For all the complaining that people give to it, Games make people dream. Millions of gamers, particularly kids/teenagers, come out into the gaming world every year. It is a massive industry, whose financial weight is sometimes underestimated by a lot of people. It's bigger than music and cinema COMBINED. Bobby Kotick can buy Disneyland for his retirement, privatise it and do nothing but take dumps all over the place laughing.
It is an an unbelievably heavy and famous industry that has dozens of thousands of newbies every single year. Including a massive amount of 3D modellers and artists, who come with stars in their eyes dreaming of being part of their favorite series. A lot of people who will read this text will recognise themselves in this description.
Hello Vihaan, I Mean Bogdan
So when you, a manager, more like a shepherd at that point, have a ridiculously large amount of artists at your service, who each, this one on a sword, this one a coat, this one a glove, this one a character's hair, are all there do to what's expected out of them, then it gets shown to the real deciders on top of the food chain, if it's good, next job, if it's bad, redo until the top is satisfied, I wouldn't blame you if all your employees start having blurry faces in your eyes.
Because each and every last one of them can resign at any point, and you just have to open a position online, get 100+ answers, pick, and replace him. Because the new kid will be there with stars in his eyes of working for Blizzard, for EA, for Square Enix, for his favorite series. To Enter the Games Industry and realise his lifelong dream. And 6 months later, he will leave, disgusted, burnt out, absolutely dead inside. And be replaced by the next cross-eyed kid. And so on. Been like that since 10 years at least.
And let's not even talk about the poor fools that went for a "game design degree", where its not 100 for 1 post, but more like 5000 for 1 post. Never heard of a single one that had such a degree and got a job for it that was even remotely what he thought he'd do. They're all doing feeding jobs somewhere.
Good stuff. Thanks for taking the time to write about it in detail.
Anecdotally, my gen Z son and his friends don't play AAA. It is mostly AA or indy stuff. He is obsessed with Manor Lords at the moment. That is like one dude that made it right? I think the younger generation is turning away from these massive budget showcase games. $70 for a half baked game with sweet baby inc. detected isn't attracting them.
AAA games are so expensive that failures can get the whole studio canned. How games like Red Fall and Gollum made it to release are beyond me. Is it corporate sabotage/saboteurs? Honestly, how do they not get axed?
But I haven't even started with the real ugliness. And I won't. It's pointless and won't serve any explanation, but it's every ugly echo you might've heard before.
Contractors being so expendable they're welcomed to the morning meetings with "you're useless and nobody loves you" instead of "hello".
Extreme overtime. Crunch being PLANNED into the development cycle, rather than being an unfortunate necessity. Workers forced to basically do 100+ hours a week.
Pays being roughly 2/3rds of what your skillset would get you into literally any other industry. True for artists, programmers, and a ton of jobs that unfortunately do not have any other outlet than games (again, those poor game design degree victims).
If you want an extremely well documented case from a famous name, look no further than Mick Gordon's legendary public statement against Id Software.
This statement is issued in response to id Software Studio Director Marty Stratton’s “DOOM Eternal OST Open Letter”, published on Reddit.
medium.com
It has everything. Contractor bullying, theft (yes, they stole more than a third of the music they didn't pay for), absurd overtime, general mistreatment, lies, slander, payment retention, threat of no payment at all, and cherry on top, fabricating a story to put the blame on Mick Gordon rather than on the studio's criminal manager.
I'm not exploring this side because this isn't serving any point, except that the pressure on a ton of the games industry is a lot bigger than one thinks, and I think the point is made.
From Weeks to Years
Besides the simple "look at the amount of people they pay", let's also put down that a game in the 80s took weeks of development. In the 90s it became months. Years (1-2) in the 2000s. We're now looking at a median of 5 years for AAA games in the 2010s.
Try to imagine the amount of funds required to pay 4000+ people, even if you underpay them, for five years.
Let's do a ballpark estimate:
4000 x median salary of $4000/month over 60 months =960,000,000$. Just shy of a billion. That's just human resources costs per AAA game.
So of course, they compress the salaries, hire Indians, Indonesians, Malays, Ukrainians, Romanians, basically anything to go cheaper. Especially for expendable roles, which are plenty.
But it's not enough.
Creativity and Risk
And now I can get into one of the most silly opinions people have: that AAA games aren't creative, and just repeat the same patterns, are the same game, same Battlefield/CoD/AC/Far Cry every time.
Oh you're entirely correct, they are. But what people don't understand is why. Highly creative patterns are, by design, risky. Again, from the POV of the investors footing the bill, who see games as products, risk is not a word you like to hear when you're planning for a billion dollar investment.
And another element to consider is that creativity is quite simply not well understood. What makes CoD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Dark Souls, better than their clones? What made Dark Souls so special, yet absolutely none of its clones had nearly the same success? Can anyone put the magic that made it work on an easy and digestible Powerpoint that you can show investors? Can you explain what makes gut feelings and "just feels good" tweaks make a game great or forgettable?
Nobody really can. And so, when investors and giant AAA studios have the IP of a CoD, they assume that they have a golden goose, and they just do nothing but coo it and gently stroke it and beg it to put out another golden egg. They don't change the gameplay. They don't change the style. They don't change anything, if they can. The safest bet is to just do what worked before, but slightly more beautiful, slightly more advanced, slightly more of an eye candy when the big BOOM comes in the interactive cutscene.
But of course, that makes for a boring and uninventive AAA industry, and they know that. So they try to find a balance: how to create more original stuff, while retaining what actually works to bring back the mandatory 20M buyers to make the game profitable?
If you look at the design patterns, that's all they've been doing since about 2015. For the last 10 years, most of the balancing act of AAA has been entirely between these two lines: how do you not break the core formula that guarantees 20M sales and justifies the investment? But how do you also not bore out gamers with the exact same thing? This is what AAA is in, creatively speaking. Not a total black hole, but so, so, so uninteresting.
The AA Problem
Now this is a totally personal observation I'm putting out, but it's a thing that matters a lot here: a good economical system requires a "middle class". In every single form of economy.
Obviously not going to make a lesson in economics here, but games can apply that principle well:
- A games, aka indie/small studio games, take little financial effort. You can start one off with a friend or just by yourself and work on it for a year, and make a great game. Slay the Spire is a testament to that, Undertale, I could probably squeeze Stardew Valley in there, despite the 5 year development time.
- AA games, so mid-sized to relatively large studio games take a pretty serious financial effort and require fundraising, investors, promises of returns, etc, but they are not crushingly expensive. A daring venture capitalist, game fan, Kickstarter-backed game can still be made with these studios. Those range from No Man's Sky to Factorio, and probably climb to something the size of Persona 5.
- AAA games require a massive amount of initial financing and the risks in case of failure are extremely heavy, but they can literally move mountains, create whole new engines, advance the technology, revolutionise the expectations we have of games.
As a simple rule, it's "the smaller you are, the less risk averse, more creative you can be, but the least impact you can have, the bigger you are, the more safe, non-creative you have to be, but your impact is massive".
Now why is this a AA problem?
Because from what I'm seeing, AA is far, far, faaaaaaaar from where AAA is. It barely exists in the same world anymore. As a matter of fact, I've heard many times that the biggest publishers outright reject the idea of doing AA games even as side hustles. Why? There's a few reasons, but mainly, with the infrastructure and finances they have expended, the returns from a AA game isn't interesting to them. It's quite a typical pattern of what I personally always identify as a sick economic system, and in this case, it means that the little image above is actually false. It's not "from Indie to AA to AAA", it's more "from Indie to AA....and far away in a different world, with completely different constraints, AAA exists".
The natural course of a functioning creative industry would be: truly original things come out with indies and inspire game designers, AA games translate these designs into bigger, more ambitious games, and AAA takes the best parts of these designs and make crazy money off of it. The money is repurposed towards engines and investments benefitting games, and everyone profits. A virtuous circle of the games economy.
But the current course is: indies create original things, AAs translate or outright create things, and AAA is completely unable to refine more interesting new mechanics into themselves. The slow refining from bottom to top, with the top making massive profits and reinvesting into gaming, simply does not happen.
To me, the fact that this circle is broken is the telltale sign of how sick AAA really is.
Let's also not forget the other side of the coin: it's not just about losing money, it's about making it too.
So they tried making games $70. Tough sell. $80. Even tougher. It quickly dawned on
Clearly, just raising the prices were just going to lose them sales. If the price is too high, people will pirate it and that's all the money lost.
So they found METHODS.
"Micro"transactions in the size of $20 for a skin. I've been an Overwatch fan and suffered through the indignity that is Overwatch 2, trust me I've seen those.
DLCs galore. Micro extensions for Mega Pay.
Gacha games and gambling mechanics designed to keep you addicted and ignoring how much money you waste.
Ultra addictive mobile games that live off ads, next to the ultra addictive games that generate revenue from Esports (hello, LoL players).
"Free to play" that goad you into buying a lil' cheap thing ON SALE for only $5, and really it's just $5 and everyone else bought it already and you look like a bum with your base game skin, have some shame. And surprisingly the ON SALE thing is always at the same price whether it's ON SALE or not. And after you buy one, you can buy two, or three, or five, or just more, and it's always in a pseudo in-game currency that's not 1:1 to your local currency, so you don't bother doing the maths and just pay.
You have bought the game? But did you buy the game and the special Plastic Toy Edition for only twice the price? Did you buy the DLCs? All $800 worth of them? Are you not a true fan? And so on.
That's Just Greed
"But that's just greed, all you proved is that the AAA industry is squeezing its workers hard and making gamers pay crazy money. You didn't prove that they're doomed, just greedy".
If you're thinking that at this point, fair. I haven't proven anything yet. So let's talk about the why all of this. Not "why is it so expensive" or "why are they so greedy".
Let's talk the real reason things are so bad. And the key word is Demand.
I didn't compare with Moore's Law idly earlier. Demand is the key problem with AAA.
I'm not going to roll back all the way to the 90s, but to very quickly throw that out, the games industry has grown exponentially in both size and complexity since then. AAA is sort of the "direct descendant" of the early companies that industrialised vidya in the late 90s. Most of the big AAA franchises actually date back to then, like CoD, Final Fantasy, or Warcraft. Indie was reborn out of the great wave launched by Binding of Isaac in the early 2010s, on the top tier infrastructure of Steam and Gaben's brilliance. AA sort of wallows inbetween, it's sometimes studios that never reached AAA size (Atlus), sometimes new studios formed from veterans of AAA or rarely indies that grow big (Hello Games).
In other words, the current AAA studios and publishers essentially do nothing more or less than what they've been doing since the 1990s. Nothing has fundamentally changed since 1997.
But for all the pulling of customer money and the pushing down on employees and costs, it's not enough anymore.
Constant Fear of Downturn
Let's say that tomorrow, a new CoD comes out. And people say: "it's disappointing". Graphics are not much better than before, art is not revolutionary, gameplay is just tweaks, etc.
Just a detail, but that won't kill its sales, because people buy before having an opinion, but it will seriously damage the sales of the next game over. If you don't believe me, check what happened with the duo of REDACTEDs called "The Last Jedi" and "The Rise of Skywalker".
This means that any game coming out can damage the long-term prospects of the franchise. Which is really what you're selling after all. The fact that the backlash can be felt years later also frightens investors. Nobody likes starting a BBQ and seeing the bears come to see what smells so good even hours after the meat's been eaten.
So the franchise took a hit from a bad title. That means guaranteed less returns on next game. Less investment/trust in the company.
If that happens time and again, it will kill the franchise. Because it's a full circle: less buyers, less money, less investment, less effort towards pushing the game next time.
And again, pushing the game with original gameplay is even riskier. So what do they do?
They push the safe bets, the technicals, the look of the game, the graphics. For Ubisoft, who loooooooooooves infinity fluff, it's more micro missions, more extra things, more copypasted tasks. For CoD more cutscenes (I haven't looked at a CoD in years), for all of Bethesda's stuff, it's JUST MORE SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE. 16x the detail? More like 16x the copypasting.
But all of these things bring us back to square one: this costs developer time. A lot of developer time. A gigantic amount of 3D modeling and a gigantic amount of mostly trying to make the game look bigger or fuller. And again, for all the penny pinching or abusive practices that they have, it gets harder every year to guarantee the mad revenue to actually take that level higher for the next game.
Now, if that mad race to "always go bigger despite it being constantly more expensive" had an end, maybe it wouldn't doom AAA.
But it doesn't, yet again due to a simple economical rule: competition.
Competition and X
Let's again say that the next CoD is disappointing. Or the next AC, whichever you dislike the most.
Now imagine a world where some big manager comes out and says out loud to everyone "we can't do it. I have 21000 guys who worked on it, we've lost 15000 during the 5 years to make the game, overtime is crazy, the game just costs too much to make, that's it, that's the best we'll get to".
Do you think the competition is going to come out and agree and say "yes, this is madness, we can't keep pushing costs and investments up like this forever, it's insane"?
Do you think everyone will have a grand flash of enlightenment and go
?
Even if they did, all it would take is one to point and laugh and go "HAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA, look at these weaklings, come to MEEE for the last true AAA gaming there is!!!".
As long as competition is in place, nobody can put a lid on this. It's just going to keep growing more and more pressurized until it explodes. Yes, literally explodes. As in, this industry will be so toxic to work with, so expensive to invest in, so greedy with its DLCs, it will literally fall apart.
Not that competition is driving the pressure, competition is merely forcing the system to stay pressurized, but the source of it isn't the publisher across the street. What could that X factor be?
DEMAND!
Demand of course!! It's demand!
Past all the greed from the companies themselves, they wouldn't even exist without the people paying for the games. And that's where the real problem lies. Because our REDACTED gamers, whom I've grown in many ways to despise in the past years, don't even begin to understand any of this, or care about it at all.
What the typical gamer brain thinks is:
Me game
Me want better game
Better game same price
Give game better
Same price
Want game me like
Not different
Not same either
And other such complex thoughts.
The Games Industry's Nagging Wife, Gamers, are the problem.
They're the problem when they don't want to understand that the growth they've seen since the 90s is long gone, and that the industry is running on fumes, crushed employees and scummy DLC pay traps.
They're the problem when they never express clearly what they want, and if they did, they'd probably all want a different thing.
They're the problem when they expect to pay roughly the same to game at 4K60 in 2024 as they paid to play at 1080p60 in 2016, and think that since the GPUs can handle it, the game studio surely can make 4K textures as fast as 1080p textures.
They're the problem when games get increasingly more demanding graphically and "upscaling is cheating to not optimise the game", without having a speck of an idea of what optimising a game really is.
They're the problem when the growth in graphics is fairly easy to take from the GPUs and CPUs, especially CPUs, but when the massive amount of devs needed to texture, design, tweak, and retouch things is only increasing with the size of games.
They're the problem when they don't want to pay more, but want better, and think that because it was more or less doable up until 2012-2014, it should be doable forever. And nobody in games will tell them off of course.
They're the problem when, despite all the greedy DLCs, skins, scams, and zillion techniques to part them with their money, they STILL PAY. And thus still justify that this industry goes on, and thus begin the circle all over again.
Gamers want the AAA experience, pay for the AAA experience, no matter how greedy it is, AAA sees the money, says "we NEED to make another game that will make us this much money or more again", the devs get crushed, the creativity is thrown out the window, the cycle begins again.
The reason as to why AAA is going so poorly is gamers. Their expectations, the money they pour into it, and the absurdity of the actual situation all comes from them. You can blame the financers, managers, and a ton of horrid people in what is an incredibly sharky industry. I won't defend the REDACTED that scammed Mick Gordon out of his peace of mind or money. But it's not "incompetent managers" or "scummy managers". It's an entire economic cycle where no matter how much you pour into, the demand is still absurdly crushingly high. Demand of better AAA games has never gone down. Yet.
Conclusion
My personal expectation is that the madness will go on, of course. But it is not viable. Every year, it's worse. If you don't pay much attention to the industry, you don't see them, but I see them, the poor sods on r/gamedev, who routinely, every 3-4 months, roll out half crying as they write, saying "I was part of X project at Activision, worked on it 18 months, they canceled it, all my work was for nothing, nobody will ever see what we did", who are the very unwilling victims of a mad system that expects absurd amounts of initial investment and absurd amount of returns. And when it looks like the crazy high potential for a game, even if it could still be a decent game, isn't there, it's not worth the dev time, so they burn it all.
There's a lot more to say about the games industry, but to me, finding these poor sacks every few months back when I used Plebbit has been illuminating. If this industry really was "just greedy and profit obsessed", they'd release those games, mediocre or not. But it's not just that the greed is high or the business insanely big. It's just that the level of demand has gone beyond what the industry can realistically provide. So it does as the economy commands when the demand is insane: unrealistically provide. Get fatter and greedier and less worth the effort every year. Until eventually, everyone gets a bit sick of it, then more, then more. Until even the biggest buyers say "enough", "I'd rather never have another AAA game than keep feeding these disappointments".
It's not happening tomorrow. But bad economy helping, it may happen sooner than some may think. And in my opinion it needs to happen. Reset the clock, rebuild a full A->AA->AAA industry that produces games organically. Several tools already are giving me a great amount of faith in the rebirth of top tier gaming, Godot Engine being one of the foremost pieces of a new age.
AAA is doomed, it has to fall. But gaming isn't done, it will be reborn in a better, saner way.
That is like one dude that made it right? I think the younger generation is turning away from these massive budget showcase games. $70 for a half baked game with sweet baby inc. detected isn't attracting them.
Yeah the fumes get more visible each year. People turn away increasingly, but we're still not there, especially with all the PCMR cancer and the absurd notion that "games must do better" as if screaming at the devs is going to get a better result.
AAA games are so expensive that failures can get the whole studio canned. How games like Red Fall and Gollum made it to release are beyond me. Is it corporate sabotage/saboteurs? Honestly, how do they not get axed?
Honestly same with Gollum. It's not technically AAA, too small, but how did they release that? It's just bad, and obviously so!
RedFall IIRC wasn't necessarily doomed but they had development problems and just threw it out the door to recoup some of the losses. It was just a failure, plain and simple. And the studio that made it typically has a great rep, at least their Lyon one, no word on Austin, but people mostly accepted it as a bad hiccup for this time.
Although I think Arkane Austin just got axed...yeah, it was just murdered in the recent MS slaughter at Bethesda.
In return for your afternoon, I can offer you one free Steam key from my collection of unused keys. PM me if you are interested and I'll share the names and you can pick one.
My rebuttal? How do I even begin to read what you have written???
Might take weeks considering how bad I am at understanding concepts I don't have a clue about and I'm in the middle of a stupid project I didn't ask to be made Technical PM for (I had no choice. It was either accept or get lost into the world, searching for a job with desirable pay that does not simply exist for someone like me).
Nicely put together. Lots of very good points, generally well researched.
But I noticed two points I'd like to put my cent on (two cents nowadays is getting too expensive, gotta save where we can).
First AAA Game
To say that "Modern AAA" started with Assassin's Creed is debatable (unless of course you'd want to emphasis that 'modern' completely excludes anything that is remotely considered 'old'). Not that the first AC is exactly a bad choice, it's a commendable one. I wouldn't fully disagree with it, really; it's a decent pick, but there's a bunch more we could look at predating it by several years, very easily; the first Metal Gear Solid (or MGS2), or Final Fantasy 7 for example, or Perfect Dark, or why not going as far back as Super Mario Bros. 3, we could keep going like this. However, I have to say from the start about this one that I'm not a youngster anymore and I've seen a lot in my 30+ years of playing video games. The term "AAA" itself is still relatively new when sitting right next to the actual age of the gaming industry. The thing about "AAA" is that it's simply a game that was basically made with a big budget (or "bigger than the average"), and a big team (again, "bigger team than the average"), for their respective time (essentially, "AAA" as the result of a product of its time, with the standards of that time period, etc).
However, "big budget with a big team" existed with each of the video gaming's recognized 'generations' ("generations" itself being a term that we can debate on for weeks, and I have no intention to do so; let's keep it simple for the sake of conversation). The point is that each generations as far back as you'd want to think of, without any specific time period, or without pointing at a specific game, had 'its "AAA" game' equivalents, if that term existed during those times. If, for example, in the 70s, most video games were developed by a maximum of 2 or 3 guys in their garage, with a grocery store errand weekly budget, then the equivalent of an "AAA" game during that time would have been a classroom full of innocently enthusiastic students with "a great idea", and their collective budget to pay their rent maybe even two times over in the same month. I'm sure we could come up with an actual list of comparatives, but the point being - again - that 'each generations had their AAA games'.
But if we really have to 'put the finger on' one specific title and collectively recognize that it might have been the first "modern AAA" game (when the term still didn't quite exist yet), then I'd say it has to be the first Shenmue. Now I'm not going to type in the entire stats and story about that game here, but with a minimal amount of research I think you'd see what I mean. Then again, sure, we could still argue that Shenmue was an AAA game "for its time", but Shenmue's development process had all the hallmarks of what you'd see happening in the current industry (without sexual harassement cases, and breast milk bottles theft stories of modern times) with the sole exception of the sheer numbers involved (numbers of people involved, and obviously money; which only keeps going up as the years and decades pass).
From Weeks to Years
It's not completely false of course, to say that big 'AAA' games went from a development time of a few weeks, to months, and then years. We could find a good bunch of examples like that, absolutely. But it's not that simple and straightforward. Again, taking Shenmue as an example (because, in my book anyway, it truly is the 'first modern AAA game' the way we like to think of them nowadays... then again, that's debatable even for myself; I just want to focus on the "Modern" prefix, which is why I nominate Shenmue here, otherwise it could be a number of other games preceding it), is a game 'idea' / concept that popped in Yu Suzuki's head in the mid 90s. In terms of actual development with a real team, we have to start looking at 1996 as the clear start line, along with the Sega Saturn for the initially-chosen platform with actual development time put on to that system (comparable, in fact, to what happened with Final Fantasy 7 initially being planned for, and worked on as a Nintendo 64 game; only to then be made for the PS1).
The first Shenmue wasn't made in a few weeks, or months; it took nearly 3 years to make from concept art to final product, passing from one system to another. If we take say, Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64 (which was a big project for its time... then again many Rareware games were big projects) then we're talking about 2 and a half years (from about January '95, to its release in August '97; since Rare started actual development before they even received an N64 Dev Kit). And why not going with Super Mario Bros. 3 for the sake of conversation, because that one took about 2 years to complete (development started shortly after the release of SMB2, and was released in '88). The thing with SMB3 is that it may well be the first 'Million Dollars' budget game, or if not, among the very first ones (estimated costs of development in late 80s money value is $800K to $1.3M, not adjusted for inflation by the way), and that's "just an NES game from the 80s" we're talking about here.
The idea that a popular game was usually made by 4 or 5 guys (and that's a generous number) and took maybe a year max to make was popularized by the development story of DOOM, for the most part (which indeed took about a year to make). Then again, even that example doesn't exclude a high cost for its time. Believe it or not, but the original DOOM cost about $500,000 to make, which is a number that has been confirmed by John Romero. So the idea that "Modern AAA" is, indeed, "modern" is very much up in the air for interpretation (it's "modern" whenever it comes out as a "big budget game" for its respetive time period). Even if your team is actually small, it may well cost you a house to make. But again - I know - the whole idea of "AAA" studios is a combination of a big team and a big budget, rather than just one or the other. And yes, of course, many... many games were developed by "a few guys in their garage" (both manner of speech, and I'm sure most likely literal in many cases) and "AAA" games were for the most part 1) very rare the more you'd go back in time and 2) reserved for well-established big companies to undertake in the first place. I just wanted to add some nuance to the general idea that the older the games are, the faster they must have been worked on, and the less costly they must have been; which is the point I want to reiterate on: that it wasn't that simple even if we're going as far back as the 80s.
But, generally-speaking, very good post sir ("AAA gaming" is indeed a pretty complex subject, with a long history).
Fantastic thread. A lot great content by all of you!
Grand Theft Auto IV is probably the first true modern day "AAA" game. Halo 3 the year before also had a lot of AAA elements in its production. Metal Gear Solid had one specific aspect of AAA and that was a more cinematic direction compared to the games at the time.
I think a distinction needs to be made between AAA "big budget big team" games and AAA "big budget small team" games.
Examples of AAA "big budget big team" games:
Destiny
Call of Duty series
Assassin's Creed series
Halo etc.
AAA "big budget small team" games:
Doom 3
Max Payne
Tomb Raider
Resident Evil etc.
Games with smaller teams may be more fun to play and offer a tight, cohesive experience. These games are also the ones you may feel more tempted to revisit. The big team games may offer more content, more explosive cinematics and more hours of gameplay but their gameplay experience somehow feels more "hollow". It's like fast food. Yummy but less fulfilling and less "food orgasm" inducing.
Because I wanted to get my thesis double checked, I asked an actual games industry pro to look it over.
Basically, I'm not wrong, but there were corrections:
- game design degrees aren't useless, he got in the industry from one, but the degrees' quality vary wildly
- I ignored an important part of investor mentality, which is "copying what seems to work". This led to a ton of WoW clones back in the day, a lot of Dark Souls clones for a few years, a lot of MOBAs, and a lot of Destiny/Gacha clones today. Most of these produced inferior or pointless clones that didn't pay back and were just shows of extreme incompetence from managers at understanding that you can't copy the next guy over in a market about creativity. So a lot more money was lost there too, accelerating the problems.
- overall, nothing to change much, but there's a lot more "scratching up the walls to try to get growth again" that is almost always wasted, and the downfall seems quite as inevitable as I wrote it
Basically MS did what MS does, buy everything to create a defacto monopoly that would allow them to force everyone into Game Pass as a semi-obligatory subscription model. They spent a lot hoping for returns, but they reached their ceiling quicker than expected, and now have to squash almost all expenses and some of the best studios that produced games under Bethesda or other MS buyouts are thrown out with the bathwater.
Considering the $70B investment, this won't be enough, more sacrifices will be necessary. @Kepler_L2 put it rather nicely:
Same as him, I think they should get out, but not because they don't know the business. They should because they'll never make their money back and will absolutely end up fire selling everything, possibly including killing the XBOX brand after this gen or the next. MS won't help gaming, it'll accelerate its downfall.
Gaming will be fine. What happened in the 80s can't happen again. It has evolved, it's ubiquitous, so many devices can be gamed on. Hell, you can play on your refrigerator now LOLZ. AAA may hit the skids, and the number of titles dwindle greatly due to the outrageous development costs, but the Indy scene is thriving and growing. Linux gaming is also gaining momentum; the Steam Deck IMO was a watershed moment.
And thanks again for the excellent reading material, insights, and updates.
Would he be willing to share anecdotes? Things we wouldn't know in a million years or things we could never imagine? Of course, he can obviously change names and even add some embellishments, to keep the guilty safe.
Would he be willing to share anecdotes? Things we wouldn't know in a million years or things we could never imagine? Of course, he can obviously change names and even add some embellishments, to keep the guilty safe.
I have to ask. You joined these forums recently. How did you come upon here? Any interesting story? Do you aspire to be a lifer here or will you get fed up one day or just not care anymore and disappear on us?
Pretty sure finding the place was someone on Twitter linking here.
Then I saw adroc_thurston write and recognised his very recognisable writing pattern.
Not really, I hold an intellectual interest in the semiconductor industry, it's a very interesting industry, that's it. I'm not technically inclined enough to try working in it, but the forums are as good a spot to learn and talk about it.
My favorite Doom is classic Doom. The Cacodemons looked the best then, and there are so many cool mods/projects for classic Doom. Next would probably be Doom 3. Mod and custom map support was decent, and I enjoyed the campaigns. I remember it came out when I was in High School, and I had to get a new PC just to play it.
I enjoy Act Man's style. His videos are entertaining, funny, and informative for my old damaged brain. He recently did a vid about why AAA games are getting worse. The OG Fallout creator talks about how when working on Outer Worlds; 10 lines of SUDO code would take 4 weeks to do according to the devs, while he could bang it out himself by lunch. Crazy stuff. I don't see how that level of inefficiency is sustainable.
I can attest that some people are code crunching machines. Two examples from the 42 bootcamp I attended. One was a 10 year younger American school teacher. She had no prior programming experience. I got 60 in the final exam. She got 42. The final exam was 8 hours long. She spent 6 of those hours waiting because the system locked her out due to too many wrong submissions. So she got 42 in about two hours. Whereas my 60 was coding frantically for more than 7 hours straight. The other guy was Mr. Robot. Turkish, 9 years younger than me. I believe his final exam score was 94. He even finished the 665 days long intensive 42 program and now looking to found a startup in Canada. By the way, both of them called themselves lazy because they would take long periods of time off from working, just to chillax.
People like those two, were about 5% of the bootcamp participants. It's very, very hard to find talented developers. Some of them might not even be working in the field because coding "bores" them, despite their ability to do it with one hand tied behind their back.
They're the problem when they expect to pay roughly the same to game at 4K60 in 2024 as they paid to play at 1080p60 in 2016, and think that since the GPUs can handle it, the game studio surely can make 4K textures as fast as 1080p textures.
No, just no. Utterly silly. 4k has been pushed by the hardware industry first and foremost to sell new gpu's and monitors. Second, if I'm going to have to pay more for 4k textures etc., can I get a game that actually runs well or isn't a buggy mess for the first 6-12 months of its retail life. A over-saturated game market where even a AA strategy/city builder game demands $60 with a "season pass" that actually fixes the games problems both bugs and design flaws, almost a year later. Oh, and if I waited it would have cost me $20. The season pass alone was $22. It was $2 cheaper to re-buy the base game in the "gold edition". Bloody Paradox dev/publishers. The big problem is not gamers being fickle, cheap, not knowing what, FOMO, or buying pre-orders... is publically traded companies worrying about the stock market and short term profits than long term ones and a good product.
A over-saturated game market where even a AA strategy/city builder game demands $60 with a "season pass" that actually fixes the games problems both bugs and design flaws, almost a year later.
Again, basic economics.
If the market is over-saturated, the prices should go down, not stay.
If demand isn't there, you don't sell.
What do you think it means when prices stay up? Demand is still responding positively to the price.
"I'm a victim"
Then don't buy? 1080p is as good as 10 years ago. How is MSI/ASUS/Nvidia FORCING you to take 4K exactly? Does a gruff man with a leather jacket stalk you from the other side of the street and cough "BUY 4090" as soon as you walk out your house?
where even a AA strategy/city builder game demands $60 with a "season pass" that actually fixes the games problems both bugs and design flaws, almost a year later. Oh, and if I waited it would have cost me $20. The season pass alone was $22. It was $2 cheaper to re-buy the base game in the "gold edition".
The problem is gamers being presented expensive things that aren't worth the money and buying.
You are what I just described.
Somehow in your mind, it's not you being, as you say, "fickle, cheap, not knowing what, FOMO, or buying pre-orders...", it's the games industry presenting "excessive, expensive, abusive, exploiting FOMO, offering pre-orders"...THAT YOU STILL BUY!!!
Those companies would literally all crash if it weren't for the people who buy. Plain and simple. They don't actually force anything. They OFFER. The fact that a DEMAND responds to the offer is how the market holds. It's always two hands signing the deal. And you still sign.
Let me show what a market with low demand is, because I happen to be a low demand buyer, as I play less and less as I age:
- Game is $60? I don't really want to play it, so I don't buy.
- Game is on sale at $40? Still don't really want it, I do not buy.
- Game is $20? Well, I don't really want to play it now, but I do like these types of games and want to support it financially, so I'll buy it just to encourage these types of games to exist, and to own it if i ever want to play it. And that way I'll have it if I ever have the desire to play it.
This pattern is the exact reason I must have 450+ games in my Steam Library and have played barely 100 of them BTW. And I don't complain that I was "tricked" or "FOMO'd". I just accepted the prices.
- Game has a "game pass"? Do not buy.
Just to illustrate how much I do not even consider those: I don't even know what they are. I can explain the full economics of AAA, but I don't actually know what a "game pass" even does. Cause I never bought a single one. I buy games, I don't care about whatever a "game pass" is and never buy. THAT is low demand. THAT is the attitude that will quash AAA.
- DLCs? If I buy them, I consider them a good buy. If I don't, I don't buy. I almost never buy those, maybe I bought a few OSTs since I'm a big game music fan.
- Game is perma 60/70 because it's a console game? That is precisely why I do not buy consoles, despite thinking that the PS5 is an exquisitely well designed system.
I buy games rarely, only good ones, and do not regret my buys. If I regret them, I blame myself for assuming that I'd enjoy the game and paying for it. If I think I'm going to regret it, I do not buy. THAT is low demand. That is someone who buys what he considers good, but what he considers good isn't too expensive nor is it many things.
You think you can scream "publically traded companies worrying about the stock market and short term profits" with your mouth while swiping left and right on the credit card reader with your hand. You can't. And I'm a perfect example of it being avoidable, because I AM NOT PART of this crushing demand. The deresponsibilisation of gamers in a market where they are 99% of the demand is profoundly ridiculous. This market exists the way it does because you enable it, as I demonstrated. As YOU just demonstrated. Literally just do not buy and they'll stop selling it, crash the market and it will rebuild on saner principles.
I don't blame anyone for the contracts I sign but myself, unless the terms of the contract were willingly misleading. This is what gamers really, really can't stand to be put under: accountability. And they must. You are the problem for paying, you are the problem for blaming them, you are the one(s) accepting the terms of the contract.
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