Ryuu did you watch the presentation.  Just the 3 different demos were totally different.  Now the character was still a fortnite character but everything else like the Fable looking level with the dragon, the COD like level, one fighting this robot and the last was more around a spooky setting.  Each one show a huge diversity from the assets of Fortnite.

Character wise that probably takes a lot more time but nothing stops anyone from creating brand new characters and animation but key framing stuff is very time consuming.  The fact that you can use your own phone to to capture video of yourself and then have it keyframe your animation into the meta humans as we seen with Ninja Theory.  Yes now the character are using Fortnite assets but they are not limited to fortnite assets which is what I am saying.  You should know giving the community the tools they will expand way beyond fortnite assets in probably less than a year.

I am not underestimating Roblox appeal among kids, I have kids.  My son and his friends use to spend a lot of time in Roblox and I use to ask him why is he playing that crap looking game.  Now he is in his teens and playing a lot of fortnite.  All those kids move up form Roblox to Fortnite and now they get to play all the crappy games they use to love in Roblox in Fortnite.  Trust me, when the creators move to Fortnite so will the kids.

What exactly is the measurement you guys define AAA. For me it takes more than just someone opening a studio saying its AAA. They actually have to release a product along the lines of a AAA IP and you really cannot short the process if you do not have enough staff to develop the product.

Just over the past month it's been like 5-6 announcement in the regards. I never saw that much activity before, hopefully economic context only improve from now on and most goes on to carve their place. I would love for MS to announce a new studio themselves even though the last was not so long ago with World's Edge in 2019.

Honestly, my thoughts on Diablo 4, after playing the beta, is that this game is a bit overhyped. Looking around in recent months, there has been so much glowing praise in the coverage of this game, and getting to finally play it myself...it's a bit much. The game is good, don't get me wrong. It's perfectly fun to play, it looks good, the story starts off very promising (although it gets much less interesting after like the first hour, which is far stronger than the rest of act 1), and I think that the open world, and mmo aspects are well integrated into the game.

That said, Diablo 4, as of right now, doesn't appear to me to be bringing anything particularly new, or fresh to the table. It's a good solid ARPG, and it doesn't do anything particularly poorly (at least not anything that can't be addressed with a few balancing patches, bug fixes, and tweaking of the odd mechanic or two)...but there's also nothing here that's really giving me the "wow" factor. I can't point to anything they're doing with this game that would make me say "Yes! This is why I need to play Diablo, instead of the next league of PoE." I will play it, and I'm sure that I'll enjoy it for at least a couple of months or so, but then they're really gonna have to show me something in terms of how they build on the game in future seasons.

My biggest concern right now, is that it looks like the endgame is going to be all about dungeons. They're essentially taking inspiration from PoE's mapping system, by letting you take the dungeons, and making them harder and harder with up to 5 affixes that will change the dynamics of how they play. This is fine one paper, as a starting foundation for endgame, but does present some problems. For one, visually, all of the dungeons in Diablo 4 (at least in act 1) are...well...either the same flavor of dungeon, or some flavor of cave system. They say they've got 150 dungeons, but if they all blend together visually, going through them countless times is gonna get old real fucking quick. In PoE, the maps could pull from any environment in the game. Also, some of the mechanics in Diablo 4's dungeons are just fucking annoying. You'll often have to kill either every single enemy to progress through a door (very fun if you missed 1 or 2 stupid enemies in some corner), or backtrack in various directions to collect some artifact or other (which happens on slow, interruptible timers), etc. This kind of shit is just plain irritating, and you better believe it'll drive you mad once you're knee deep in the endgame, trying to farm efficiently.

I do like the world bosses as an idea, but in the beta they're supremely undercooked imo. Mechanically, it didn't offer much in terms of challenge, or anything that would foster cooperation from the players. I could easily solo it with my rogue by just staying glued to it's back legs, and dashing after it whenever it repositions. If you get a solid build going, you could easily down this thing in a small fraction of time you have available, and then, if you're so inclined, get yourself into another world instance, and kill it some more. That last part probably needs to be fixed, cus it's a bit of an exploit for massive amounts of loot, but yea...just in general would like them to design some world bosses in the future that really push the players. That would be cool.

Not too much to say about it other than that at this point. Class balance is all over the place, even within single character trees. You got stuff that's literally useless, and stuff that's hilariously OP. None of that surprises me, and I don't anticipate it will be particularly well balanced on release. I won't hold that against them too much, cus it's honestly kinda par for the course with these types of games. This will probably be like an 8/10 game at launch, with like a 6/10 endgame. Then we'll see where they go from there.

Eh, I would still consider The Initiative as the last new actual studio. World's Edge are just caretakers of the Age of Empires IP. And they're doing a damn good job at it!

At least the latest rumors are that development of Perfect Dark is going extremely well. 

Yeah, it's a definitely a bit silly, all of these people moaning about the gaming industry becoming more consolidated with Xbox and Sony acquiring more studios and publishers. We are over a dozen new AAA studios that have opened over the last several years, some of them publisher owned, some of them independent. This is just some of the new AAA studios that have opened over the last 5 or 6 years and have yet to ship their first game that I found on a Bing search just now:

• Lighthouse Games
• Jar of Sparks
• Lightspeed LA
• Maverick Games
• That's No Moon
• Smilegate Barcelona
• SkyDance New Media (making AAA Marvel Captain America and Black Panther WW2 game)
• 31st Union
• Cloud Chamber (making Bioshock 4)
• Ridgeline Games
• Unnamed EA AAA studio headed by the former head of Monolith (the Shadow of Mordor one, not the Nintendo one)
• Build a Rocket Boy
• IO Interactive Barcelona (making Project Fantasy)
• Fool's Theory (developing Witcher 1 remake for CD Projekt while they concentrate on Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk DLC)
• Humanoid Studios
• Fuse Games
• Skeleton Key
• Atomic Arcade (making a AAA GI Joe game)
• Haven Studios

And this list is definitely not complete, I'm missing some new AAA studios here. We don't need to worry about publishers acquiring AAA studios and publishers and the industry consolidating because the games industry is in a huge period of growth right now, more new PC/console game studios, including AAA studios, have opened over the last 5 years or so than at any point in gaming history.

I've paid $1 for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and it won't expire for another 3 years. I had maxed out Xbox Live Gold to 3 years and upgraded to 3 years of Ultimate for $1. I just make sure to earn more than enough each month to keep my Ultimate at 3 years. We will see if I will be able to keep that up or not once Friends & Family plan becomes available in the US. 

While I tend to agree with you that a studio is not truly AAA until they ship their first AAA game, all of the studios I listed are headed by AAA veterans with AAA vets in department lead positions, and are being advertised as AAA in their recruitment drives for new hires. That typically means they intend to grow to AAA size before their first game ships (100+ devs) and have AAA budgets (usually over $30m per game in today's industry). Some of the ones I listed already have investments necessary to make a AAA game, for instance That's No Moon already received a $100m investment from Smilegate for their recruitment drive and budget for their first game. Jar of Sparks has NetEase financial backing. Cloud Chamber, 31st Union, Ridgeline Games, Haven Studios, Smilegate Barcelona, Lightspeed LA, Atomic Arcade, Skeleton Key, and the unnamed new EA AAA studio headed by the former Monolith head are all owned by publishers and therefore have AAA funding on their first games. Fool's Theory has a AAA budget from CD Projekt for Witcher 1 remake. SkyDance New Media got a $400m investment in 2022 and has a Marvel AAA budget for their first game.

AAA only means budget, it doesn't mean anything else, studio size is irrelevant. Yes, usually a studio making an AAA title has a large amount of employees but it isn't a hard rule, a AAA title could come from a studio of 30. Studio size also doesn't take into account outsourcing partners.

Typically all these studios calling themselves AAA are doing so because they have the budget and investment ready.

You can betcha that the Co-Founder of PlayGround Games has investors lined up.

The thing is it takes more than just one head or even multiple heads to develop into a successful studio.  My personal take would just to call them new Dev studios until they actually ship. There are just so many factors that can happen to prevent a game from coming to market and getting enough seasoned help can be one of them.  We see budgets for most AAA games in the 100 millions and that is a lot of money for any new studio to muster.  I do not believe all of these new studios need to come up with that kind of money but if you want experienced talent, its not going to be cheap.  

Having the money and getting the people are 2 different things.  Staffing up can take years all the while you paying salaries, office space, dev machines and what not.

I think its great that a bunch of new studios are forming, I am just reluctant in calling them AAA when they have not shipped one game.  You first have to prove yourself before you can claim a title and you have to produce the results.  As an example I look at Striking Distance Calisto Protocol.  It took 161 million to make and they have not come close to breaking even.  Visually the game looks AAA and it has some nice tech but a failure of that nature could pretty much shuttle the company. A lot of these companies have high ambition but at what cost.  Having the money does not mean they can successfully bring a product to market and sell to recoup their cost.