The Realm of AAA Games ‘Not Fine,’ Says Eternal Darkness Director Denis Dyack

[Alby_da_Wolf]

zarx said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:
The Witcher says "Hi" three times to Dyack.
Surely, the biggest and least nimble publishers and devs will need more and more to be prudent as dev costs grow, but when marketing costs exceed dev ones, maybe the problem lies there, otherwise smaller, emerging studios could never ever produce excellent games or even masterpieces, while instead it's a thing that happens quite regularly.
And this whining happens each time a new gen begins, and dev tools are sttill immature and devs still need to gather experience in the new environment.
A big videogame industry crash is very unlikely with the current wide diversification of platforms, and the availability of two, big, low dev cost and royalty-free platforms, PC and Android, but surely some big devs and publishers cannot consider themselves by any means safe.

The Witcher games arn't AAA tho (well mabe 3 is borderline) they are relatively small budgeted games without huge marketing campaigns. I love them (and I would put up 2 and hopefully 3 above any of the recent AAA games in the genre) but they are not AAA. AAA is stuff like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty, 20m+ budgets with even bigger marketing spends. AAA games are mostly very sucessful which is why all the publishers are pushing to make all their games AAA even when the IP and gameplay aren't going to sell AAA numbers. But now that the smaller publishers (THQ etc) have killed themselves or refocused on more reasonably budgeted games and the major publishers have mostly focused on a few core franchises AAA flops should be much rarer. Of course this will mean more bitching about AAA games being overly focus tested and designed for the lowest common denominator. But now that digital is finally hitting critical mass and retail shelf space isn't so much of an issue we should see some more B teir games and the constant stream of indie and experemental stuff with tiny budgets bubbling up.

AAA games are the summer blockbusters of the game world they have massive budgets and they are designed to have as wide an appeal as possible. With a heavy reliance on franchises and known quantities. Occasionally you will get an interesting or risky new and different movie/game (Bioshock, The Last of Us, Inception, Pacific Rim etc) but it is not the place to look for innovative and risky ideas and anyone who expects too is silly.

The industry needs to be better at making games that aren't AAA and aren't also tiny downloadable/mobile/indie that is for sure. But the AAA industry is pretty safe (not that it won't change and evolve as it must) people calling dooom and for a AAA crash are just silly. True AAA games like GTA, Assasin's Creed, Battlefeild etc do make money and lots of it. They will always be flops from time to time trends will wane and others will rise but they aren't going to crash and burn any time soon there is far too much money being made.

Well, sometimes budgets that aren't AAA bring results with AAA quality and near-AAA sales numbers (although surely not AAA marketing budget can in many case prevent to reach higher sales), but sometimes AAA budgets, both for development and marketing, may not reach the necessary sales numbers to recoup investments, some other times, AAA budget for marketing, but senseless savings on dev, or bad management of human and other resources in development, despite adequate budget, can bring sub-par quality results and from then on drag a previously successful franchise towards its demise. In these non-ideal cases of AAA budget games, relatively small budget projects that nevertheless deliver top quality and near-AAA sales could have a thing or two to teach to larger publishers and devs.