| WoodenPints said: What I find most bizarre is how over the last couple of years all western publishers have doubled down on AAA titles despite underperformance from them consistently then we had Square Enix say the same despite all their recent AAA games massively underperforming and we had Sony do it as well despite thin margins and super high budgets and risk of them and now Microsoft going down the same road whilst all the good stuff is coming from A/AA teams these days. |
They all seem to want to release these Hogwarts Legacy or Elden Ring style AAA megahits, but the simple fact of the matter is that only a handful of games are capable of sales on that tier. These publishers simply can't afford to keep pushing AAA games only at the expense of AA and A. AAA budgets have ballooned enormously, a decade or so ago the average AAA development + marketing budget was around $100m, these days the average has pushed closer to $200m and some AAA games are at $300m or above. Chasing AAA only while AAA budgets remain this high just isn't sustainable, these publishers are going to have to wake up and start cutting AAA costs as much as possible, moving studios out of these high cost of living cities, reducing graphics and animation quality, smaller dev team sizes, shorter development cycles, some combination of those are going to be needed to get AAA budgets back down to a sustainable level, and they also need to allow AA and A to continue to flourish, instead of killing them to chase AAA only.
