| shikamaru317 said: The thing is that the AAA budget doesn't really need to be as high as it is. These $100m+ AAA's are starting to feel more like a brand new quadruple A tier to me, with games like Sony releases and Rockstar's RDR2 far too big and high budget for their own good sometimes. In this day and age you can still make a good AAA game for less than $50m if you budget well, for instance Remedy released Control with a $41m budget and it sold 2m+ copies, made a profit, and got great reviews (85 meta on PC, was nominated for many GOTY awards). At this point I'd say that 3 or 4 of Sony's studios are more AAAA than AAA, Naughty Dog, Guerilla, and Sony Santa Monica in particular seem more AAAA than AAA, with Sucker Punch being a bit of a question mark, on the one hand they are the 2nd smallest out of Sony's big studios with only around 162 devs (only Bend is smaller), but on the other it took them 6 years to develop Ghost of Tsushima, which is definitely more of a AAAA dev cycle than AAA. I personally think that Sony should try and refocus some of those studios into multi-team AAA instead of single team AAAA, allowing for faster dev cycles, lower budgets per title, and less creative risk. |
As a side note: I just finished playing Control, was a very good game albeit with some flaws and being a bit repetitive. Reminded me a bit of Max Payne. I may have to find a way to play Alan Wake and Quantum Break.
I think only TLOU:2 stood out to me as being 'AAAA' if we were to use that expression. That game had a level of polish that was above and beyond anything released before. Entire buildings, fully accessible with unique lighting, design and props that the player didn't even need to explore. It screamed 'money'. I think that project may have ballooned out of proportion though, as there were rumours ND was already split in two but the other team (including outsourcing as well) were drawn in to complete it.
I believe ND, SSM and GG are all apparently two team studios now. GG since their move to a new development studio and nearly doubling their staff is looking to half their development time. The hiring listings for SSM seem to imply a new IP, but we know GOW is on the way, and with ND prior to all the staff being used to finish TLOU2 I believe the other team may have been doing preliminary work on a new IP.
It's an interesting discussion, because on one hand do you limit the scope of one project in order to adhere to a tighter schedule and timeline of releases? Or do you allow it to blow up to a point where its unnecessarily big and ambitious? The most effective route is probably somewhere in the middle and on a case by case basis.
I believe Remedy were fortunate that they brokered a $10 million deal with Epic just to make it exclusive to their store. That covered a quarter of their budget. It also didn't sell as well as they would have liked and they seem to be brokering deals left and right in order to be financially secure as a studio. Which is very important, if Control had bombed it could have been disastrous for them.
