BPX086: Everything Will be AA-OK

[Neon Ignition]

Similar conversations have been going on of late in both film and gaming.

Strained by the pandemic movies have gone through fits and bursts of releases but when in full motion they have faced extremes within the market. Some making huge sums whilst others earning less than nothing as audiences make very Yes/No decisions on what they go to watch. Hollywood has not just been catching up with delayed titles, but also making new ones as a continuation of the viewing habits of the years before and this has been raised as a potential problem. Projects with budgets so immense that to make a single dollar of profit they need to make more box office than most studios could hope to pull in across the span of years. Ru times so long that they test the patience of viewers and cut down on the amount of screenings that theatres can hold per day. Reliable, recognised IP has proven a massive winner - as long as it's not the same reliable, recognised IP that people were going to see at the big screen in the lead up to the pandemic.


In gaming we have a similar problem but born from a different trajectory. Where the film industry largely closed up shop over the pandemic years, the games industry boomed. Stuck at home consumers dove in with greater numbers playing online, buying newly released hardware, testing the waters of VR and more. With things opening up more the tide pulled more back out and some high profile titles that have since struggled have seen studios closed, bought out or more commonly suffering layoffs. Studios have raced to produce cheaply maintained, highly profitable GAAS titles for a marketplace too crowded to sustain them all. AAA single players still see success but take so long to produce and cost so much to make that the profits are often required to be spread out sustaining the studio rather than lining the pocket.


This week see's the release of RoboCop: Rogue City which is scoring reasonable reviews, featuring a limited scope but with care and attention focused on delivering the core experience its IP promises. Quantum Error is also releasing and is also scoring relatively wonkly scores but was made by a team of just four people, breaking financially even before it even releases.


In a year where Sony has released just a single AAA title and Microsoft has shelled out an eye watering $69bn to by a company primarily responsible for a AAA franchise that requires nine studios at a minimum to sustain it:-


Should it finally be the time for companies to step back from AAA and GAAS titles and revive efforts to make smaller scale, more frequent AA titles?

Would you be happy to see less AAA titles if it meant more variety and frequency albeit with less quality consistency?

[fishbowlhead]

We’ve been here a few times over the generations, it all gets too big and expensive to sustain, then projects & game scope shrinks to accommodate, then goes full circle as it all gears back up again.

The industry will be fine.

I do think indies will carry on with smaller titles though with the platform holders picking up the bill for big games, rather than the platform holders releasing loads of indie size games as well, I just don’t think they want to directly compete with indie devs on the stores.

[Neon Ignition]

I'd almost happily take a permanent shift to AA's. 10+ wait times for sequels is just laughable. 6-10hrs really is pretty perfect for most games as a run time and so few open world games justify their inclusion and yet so many have spent millions putting one together. It's a shame that the few times a studio has begun to gain traction putting out regular decent titles they seem to get bought up and stripped bare by their new owner.

Even without focusing on the borderline indie scale of developers, more companies need to look at the likes of Capcom who are broadly quite good at balancing release frequency with scale and profitability

[fishbowlhead]

Well you can point the finger at streamers directly and solely for this modern issue of games being far, far too long and big.

-Astrobot playroom, oh it’s just a demo. No, it’s a game, that doesn’t have 4000hrs of pointless fluff and grinding in it.

-Mario Wonder is spot on as usual from Nintendo.

-D2, yep pretty much 99% pointless mat grinding now.

-Jedi survivor: 2/3 of it could have been cut.


That’s just from what I’ve recently played, but this is squarely streamers fault, oh I’ve blasted through it in and 8 hour stint it’s done and gone because I can no longer monetise it daily, F off.

Games CAN be short and great, a few are just ruining it for the rest of us, it needs to stop as it’s unsustainable.

[Lebowski]

Well you can point the finger at streamers directly and solely for this modern issue of games being far, far too long and big.

-Astrobot playroom, oh it’s just a demo. No, it’s a game, that doesn’t have 4000hrs of pointless fluff and grinding in it.

-Mario Wonder is spot on as usual from Nintendo.

-D2, yep pretty much 99% pointless mat grinding now.

-Jedi survivor: 2/3 of it could have been cut.


That’s just from what I’ve recently played, but this is squarely streamers fault, oh I’ve blasted through it in and 8 hour stint it’s done and gone because I can no longer monetise it daily, F off.

Games CAN be short and great, a few are just ruining it for the rest of us, it needs to stop as it’s unsustainable.

Yup i posted about this in the PlayStation thread dev's need to ignore streamers. D2 is the perfect example of what happens when you pander to them to much, you end up with a stagnant game that's gone so far in one direction its lost all its playerbase bar a select hardcore and is completely impenetrable for new players.

[Asura]

Yup i posted about this in the PlayStation thread dev's need to ignore streamers. D2 is the perfect example of what happens when you pander to them to much, you end up with a stagnant game that's gone so far in one direction its lost all its playerbase bar a select hardcore and is completely impenetrable for new players.

That isn't so much streamers though, it's in-game purchases. Same problem though. In most games with in-game purchases, hardly anyone ever pays anything, but of the people who do, 0.5% of the paying userbase pay 95% of the revenue - so developers have to do stuff to please them, even if everyone else hates it.

[Lebowski]

Destinys IAP is all silly dances emotes or Armour skins, the vast majority of the community ignore it as it has no bearing on the game. Earned Armour from hard events like Trials or raids has far more Kudos in game than a £20 skin from the in-game store. Destiny's problem is tuning the game to pander for a small minority of streamers who pretty much play the game as a job so need this constant grind or harder and harder content. This just makes for a game that's pretty impenetrable for new comers and people who play casually.

[Asura]

Destinys IAP is all silly dances emotes or Armour skins, the vast majority of the community ignore it as it has no bearing on the game. Earned Armour from hard events like Trials or raids has far more Kudos in game than a £20 skin from the in-game store. Destiny's problem is tuning the game to pander for a small minority of streamers who pretty much play the game as a job so need this constant grind or harder and harder content. This just makes for a game that's pretty impenetrable for new comers and people who play casually.

Interestingly it seems they missed their revenue target massively, so whatever they're doing, it's not working

[Lebowski]

Revenue is down due to people not pre-ordering their latest expansion, they tend to drop a big expansion yearly with a preview for the next DLC, as well as a load of pre-order bonus stuff, Lightfall the last Major expansion was very poorly received by the community and killed off a lot of players who had been their from the start.

I will no doubt play the next dlc to see the story through but i wont be buying the season pass if this years content is anything to go by. Their a studio that is really talented but have been working on the same game to long. it used to be a game where you would get people happy to help but the increase in difficulty and the time investment for activity that you can and will fail and get zero rewards from has dried up making it a game i wouldn't recommend to new players.