The 'AAA blockbuster' business model not being sustainable...when will it finally crumble?

[turtuls]

richardhutnik said:

turtuls said:
When?? I don't think it ever will. There will always be a series that will be popular that demands AAA money to sustain it. There will most likely just be less of them since right now developers are claiming that their games need X amount of sales and are not getting close to it and after only of month of great sales but not hitting the target calling it a failure. I just hope that developers and publishers get their expectations to be more realistic so that new and old franchises can thrive and survive.

At any time, a AAA franchise can just fail.  Look at Activision and Tony Hawk and the whole music instrument craze.  Withing like a 2 year period, a hot genre dies off.  It happens.

Thing is getting the realistic expectations are tricky.  Everyone on these AAA projects end up thinking their game is the next big thing, and they get caught up in a bubble of expectations.  And when it comes to bubbles, well...

I see your point but to say that games like Rockband and GH just died off is completely ignorant. They both had their online infrastructure in place to allow the players to purchase and even sell their own songs. The publishers built up and tought the players to buy DLC songs over the years and so after they got bored with the original set list they went online to get more songs they wanted. They gave the consumers choice and the ones that loved the series loved buying DLC.

As for Tony Hawk, Activision lost the bet on its own motion peripheral and then just made a second game to get rid of the excess boards. A couple friends liked the HD remake but to say that this triple A franchise is dead I think is an overstatement. The only other Skateboarding game that is relevant now is Skate and I think that if Activision makes a new Tony Hawk game for the gen 8 consoles before Skate 4 comes, then you will see how popular Tony Hawk still is.