| forest-spirit said: That's decent but I wish it had fared better. I'm not sure if 500k is enough to convince others that there's a market for AA games. |
I think breaking even in 3 months is extremely good. While 500k may seem low, the cost of maintaining a 20 people team for 3 years is way lower than a regular 100-200 people team for 4-5 years to do an AAA.
The risk was also much lower. Even if it underperformed badly, like 100K, the damage would still be much lower than an AAA game failing to do 1.5M. And the latter is actually not hard at all. Of course, an AA game won't give the profits of an AAA success (Witcher 3, per instance), but the risks are lower. If the Witcher 3 had sold only 2M CD Project Red would probably be bankrupt at this point. The AAA model also almost destroyed Crytek even if their games were selling millions of copies.
You also don't have to deal with a publisher. AAA games will have a huge publisher messing up with your decisions (like loot boxes on BF2) and adding weird stuff even if you don't want to. If the game flops, they lose some cash but your studio goes bankrupt. With an AA model at least you can conduct your business strategy as you prefer, it's hard to make money with a big brother calling most of the shots.
