Scoobes said:
Dusk said:
Scoobes said:
Dusk said:
Scoobes said:
There are actually more third party developers then ever before. You could argue there are less third party AAA developers, but I'm not sure how true that is either as the more sucessful studios tend to expand and have multiple teams working on multiple titles but under the same studio name.
I'd argue there are less AAA games in the same time frame because they take so damn long to make these days. Even Call of Duty has moved to a three year dev cycle.
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How do you figure? The large studios aren't expanding and working on more games, they are actually aquiring more studios and teams to work on less games. 10 studios are working on AC Unity, 10! It makes no difference whether COD is a three year development cycle cause they have so many damn studios working on them one is released every year. Why not just have a group working on COD that releases every three years and then the rest of the stuidos could work on something different, maybe multiple different smaller less costly titles. In 2013 Ubisoft released 12 games, 2012-24, 2011-28, 2010-23, 2009-31, 2008-32. Oh and 2014 is looking to have 10.
Less games.
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That's not refuting what I was saying. You've basically said large publishers have huge studios working on multiple games (in the same franchise a lot of the time) that take ages to come out because development takes ages. That's pretty much what I said in the case of AAA third parties. You also have sucess stories from last gen like Bioware, Insomniac and CDProjekt that have multiple teams and franchises on the go whereas before they only had one or two; more games, longer time-frames.
But, there are still more third party developers because there are many more smaller indie developers that publish directly to consumers via PSN.
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Sure if you count indies as third parties it's undeniable. The problem with that is people don't buy $400 dollar consoles for indie games. Also, 10 studios working on a single title instead of ten or even 5 titles in the same amount of time is LESS. It's not like there is an infinite amount of studios to work on an infinite amount of games. If there are 100 studios, and each game requires 8 studios over 3 years you get 12.5 games as opposed to 100 studios where each game requires only 2 studios you get 50. So even if there are more studios like you think there are you would have to have 4 times the amount of studios to release the same amount of games as before. The more that the big publishers require the studios to combine work from more stuidos the less games will be released. The funny thing about this is that with this form of thought from these big publishers is that if they have a single flop, it could mean disaster. They might have to shut down multiple studios or even close the doors like THQ did. It's like the expression, "don't put all your eggs in one basket" but that is exactly what these guys are doing. If AC Unity flops like a fish out of water don't be surprised to see 5 out of 10 studios shut their doors. It's all a money game. A gamble. And these suckers are getting greedy. LIke a poor addicted gambler betting his life savings on 24 black.
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Whilst I agree with most of what you said about AAA developers/publishers, it's also not true for all AAA developers/publishers. The three companies I gave in my previous post are all working on multiple franchises with different teams on each. It also depends on what each studio/team is doing. Most big AAA games still only have one studio working as the primary, with many other studios pitching in as secondary studios. Many of these will be working on multiple games but just happen to have the expertise needed in a certain area to help out and whilst it adds a lot of names to the credits, it could only account for 10% of their resources with 90% on other games.
@bolded
The other thing about Indie devs is whilst right now they may not seem worth a $400 console, these are the AAA devs of tomorrow. They're the ones that will come up with innovative ideas and who will later get contracts with publishers along with bigger budgets. We're already starting to see this with the likes of Project CARS so by year 3 of this gen, expect a lot more.
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No, it's not true for all AAA devs and or pubs.
I'm not sure they are the AAA devs of tomorrow. Some have already been the AAA devs of today or yesteryear but moved on for one reason or another. In many cases they have stated that they don't have the freedom to do what they want to do anymore. That's why kickstarters are so common place now, but that's not going to be able to stand up for the long run I don't think. There will be people that try to take advantage of it, like with Mighty No 9 asking for even more money when they already far exceeded their original goal. This is a small example and one of the first, but I'm sure it won't be the last. Tends to be the human condition as sad as that is.
Yes, Project CARS looks great, hopefully it plays that way as well. I'm worried it will be over shadowed by all the large franchises being released at the same time though.
