Rise of AA / A games

[Arkaign]

I think smarter investments and management can HUGELY help Sony/MS/Nintendo/EA/Activision/etc.

Think about it, you have XX budget. Let's say for the year you have 200M available and 500 employees (100 direct salaried and 400 guns for hire in subdevs you can contract at will).

The conventional wisdom in recent years has been to make 2-3 games costing 50-100M dollars, and which might very well be in development for 2+ years. This is unsustainable and stupid. It's putting all your eggs in one basket. Great if you end up with a hit like GTAV, not so great if you end up making Brink.

So, what I think is smarter, is start with the project manager level. Find the people who have made not necessarily the billion dollar games, but people who have resumes with multiple 90+ metacritic games under their belts in some major capacity.

Look at the list of potential projects, and greenlight around a dozen games that will have 1 year dev times, and that can be lined up in the pipeline to start releasing on a regular basis. Give each of them a tight team with a good project manager, and a moderate budget. Cut the fluff, at this point last-gen porting should be left out of the picture unless it's really cheap to do and doesn't limit the potential of the 8g version. For all of these, you spend about half your overall dev budget on.

Take the remaining dev budget, and start on one showcase AAA title. Don't announce it or leak it early. Make sure it's something truly special. Then when it's basically done, start polishing it up for an online public beta in the summer months. Announce it E3 and say 'this is available for preorder NOW, and you can get access to a portion of the game immediately for free! People who preorder the game will get an additional month of beta access containing more of the final game!'.

That's the kind of thing I think can have some more focused impact. I think it dilutes things sometimes when you get info too far in advance of a final product. I hate CG trailers, they're nearly worthless.

A really well oiled company could do some awesome things with the right management at work. They could even tie together multiple games in the future. Imagine a future next-gen only Watch Dogs game where the main character can explore the city, and he passes a racetrack that is actually a level in a racing game with the cars racing based on data streamed from the actual game being played. An optional achievement could be made where you download the free trial of that racing game and win a time trial in it, and in the racing game you could have links to register for a 60 minute timed trial of Watch Dogs Atlanta. With the right imagination, there's tons of amazing things that could be done to shake things up without breaking the bank.