AAA Gaming Is In BIG Trouble
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- čas přidán 3. 06. 2024
- While the overall industry is doing fine, it seems more and more like AAA Gaming is collapsing under it's own weight. Lengthy development times, overblown budgets, and narrow margins of success. It's been a recipe for failure at many studios.
- Hry
Gaming companies forgot they were supposed to make games first, not revenue streams disguised as games
They use millions to produce their shitty games so you can be 100% sure they will so all their possible to extract money from consumers. I don't blame, inflation is hitting everyone hard this days
They didn't forget, they went public and sold out. Read what fiduciary duty is.
they didn't forget - that's simply what happens to every industry under capitalism. capitalism demands indefinite profit growth every quarter. Obviously not realistic, nor is it good for anyone except shareholders
@@slonismo That literally only matters to publicly traded companies. Private companies can run themselves into the ground if they want to.
@@slonismo you people annoy me so much, capitalism does not demand this, capitalism demands competition, ensuring the best quality product, work enviornment, pay and so on. What we have now is no longer capitalism, as the people who are supposed to enforce the rules or our country and capitalism, as well as make sure laws are updated as times change have been paid off.
In other words they no longer do their job, leading to monopolies which are completely illegal in the US as well as in direct defiance of the constitution, therefore stripping the competition required to make the system work.
This isnt capitalism anylonger, its now a corrupted system due to corrupt and weak people being in positions of power. Corruption happens to literally every system, the problem is the corruption, not the system its self.
* *2003:* _I used to go into a store to find a game,_
* *2023:* _Now I go into a game to find a store._
How far we have come. I remember Babbages in the mall. Where this goes is anyone's guess.
Lmfao 🤣
And its telling you how evil you are for what you like in games
So lame lolz, I hate cosmetics anyway.
There are games where it feels like the board room spent 80% of the discussions on monetization and only 20% on gameplay.
Innovation > Monetization
How can we make more money while giving customers less, Its almost like abusing your customer is bad for business, who would have thought.
That’s such a dishonest take.
They seem to be good at thinking short term as well. Do you remember when hearing triple A was a hype on its own? One could almost pre-purchase the game based on just that. Now it's the opposite. They have ruined the triple A to feel like a triple Fail. At least for me.
@@TheMusicolophile In a way yeah but that's exactly what it feels like it. I don't wanna think they are doing it on purpose but they are trying to maximize profits. A pizzeria increases prices and when it gets too high they start decreasing the ham and cheese on it instead. It feels like we are there now. Have been for quite some time too.
Eventually we will think it's better to just go to some other pizzeria or start making our own pizza at home or buy frozen pizza's in stores. One of these can be indiedevs, and other devs etc. making our pizza at home can be playing old games. We find alternatives.
@@dongarippo7279 I’ve been gaming since the ‘70’s and I’ve only seen an increase in content provided by game developers relative to the cost. Consider this, back when arcades were the rage you could realistically spend over twenty dollars in quarters and not even beat the game. Now we get to roam around in nearly endless worlds for a one time payment of 70 bucks and even less than that if you have a subscription to Game Pass, PSplus premium or any other game streaming service.
It's not different than what's happening in the grocery stores. Went to Walmart today to get salami, only to see the circular slices about as wide as a small cup bottom. Pathetic. The other packs of meat were half as deep of a package.
The industry as a whole started taking itself way too seriously. They forgot that video games are more art than science. The market is helping them correct that mistake.
sadly it's been like this for a long long time. people just love to be nostalgic and pretend it wasnt as bad back then.
I still remember buying shitty movie license game or being hyped for heavenly sword... Heavenly Sword !!! oh man...
compared to then nowadays we at least far more insight and option.
Fully agree, but to be fair, so did the gamers.
Just make it gay and put a chick in it!
Nightingale is a perfect example of this. Beautiful graphics but totally humorless, ponderous game.
Not enough
It’s the same problem that the film industry has where budgets are inflated and each film is expected to make $500 million+ just to break even. These companies are going to have to settle down and accept low and mid-budget projects rather than gamble the entire budget on one or two massive projects. AND if they were to bet big on one project, plan everything out beforehand and commit to finishing it before 11 years have lapsed and all hype has died (same reason Furiosa flopped because it took 9 years after Fury Road for it to come out).
Fr. There used to be great mid and low budget movies out in theaters every year. Now it's like a contest to see who can have the highest budget with yet another crappy,boring, copy/paste superhero movie.
If you're claiming Furiosa would have been any 'better' if the same film released 7 years ago (for example) I disagree. They may have had more engagement from customers but that is typical idiots riding the hype train.
And just like the games industry, less than half of that "production budget" is actually used to make the movie and is infact spent on marketting the film.
@@terrylandess6072 I don't think it would have been better, but they would have made a lot more money.
@@bencarlson4300 I concur.
When you design a game around the desire to make money and sell things you get a crap game. People were bound to get tired of it at some point and it seems like we've finally hit that point.
Everyone loves Fromsoft so much because they just make fun games. They don't make forever games. They don't load them with battle passes and microtransactions. They don't add timegates and contrivances to get you to stop playing and come back tomorrow. They just give you the game and say "Go nuts. Play as much as you want."
No restrictions, no trying to pry open my wallet, no nothing. Just good gameplay.
So many AAA developers are just completely out of touch with what makes a game good. But that's what happens when your company is run by a bunch of old crusty suits in a boardroom who only care about creating something profitable. If you've never played a game in your off-time then you have no idea what it takes to make one fun. That's the problem honestly. The leadership for some of AAA companies were never involved with the hobby so they make decisions based completely on the business side of things.
You pretty much hit Skull and Bones on the head. Once I realized the game loop, I pretty much knew there was nothing they could do with the title other than just add more of the same which is, as you say, only designed to get you to 'come back tomorrow'. It's a mobile game disguised as a PC game. Timers everywhere.
Yea, but it works, this is what you people don't want to understand. You complain all day about this right and left and fail to realize you're nothing more than a smidgen of a vocal minority. Games like CoD and FIFA are pieces of shit, yet there's still causal gamers that know nothing but these stupid games on their stupid consoles and will just eat it aaaaall up all the time, every time.
This whole "AAA is dying" is nothing more than shareholders bitching the infinite growth is starting to reach its apex and now they need other means to make number go up. More expensive titles, more expensive skins, more battle passes, battle passes for battle passes, expanding to other markets and giving up on exclusivity cause nobody wants their shit exclusive consoles anymore, seeing how much money they could be making, collecting and selling more data, you name it.
How do you get over the fact that 7% of poor people that don't want to buy your games anymore? Boot out your employees and increase prices, simple. That 7% that doesn't want your games are now 10% but you've just doubled your profits.
You'd think the executives in charge would have connected the dots by now on how to make money given the constant losses but so far, their plan is to include MORE monetization and increasing costs which only drive away more people. It makes me wonder just how did they even climb the corporate ladder if they have made so many bad decisions?
From is a banger of a game dev
@@theforgeryttv6449 They didn't, that's the problem. They're business school graduates who got hired by other business school graduates and eventually move to other companies and return the favor. They're professional managers, a class of people who were supposed to play an auxiliary role to production but have grown to dominate and thus turned malignant the same way financial industry was supposed to play support role to real economy but has grown to dominate and causes disaster after disaster.
Sounds like AAA is suffering from a severe lack of ‘git gud’.
bruh 😂
these poor bastards want greed more money?? ?YEA YEA git gud scrub
The answer too why games are so bad now is actually pretty simple. Now that gaming is known to be the biggest form of entertainment it is attracting people that don't care about video games and are only driven by the money it makes. Before, video games were made by gamers trying to make great games
you mean mobil gameing is the biggest
Everything goes to shit when corporate greed takes over in place of passion for the craft
@@joevaghn457 yes 100%
but not change the fact
that mobil gaming is alot bigger than all other gaming and it not even close
True in some sense, there are very many more mouths to feed and 80% of them are actually not working on the game itself, HR depts,barista offices, perception analysts, consulting blablabla get rid of the fodder and a game wont take 5 years , looking at game engines now there is no reason for it to take that long simple
No even worse, driven by political idiology to influence and brainwash the public. No money-hungry people would advertise for a minority while insulting their main target audience.
What AAA gaming companies don't realize is how much power the paying consumer actually has. These last few epic failures are prime examples of this.
What we don't realize is how investor's don't give a rat's ass about 'our games', only the promised profits from the lying CEOs.
Ehhhhh, depends on the game. EA/2K arcade sports games have been shit year after year across the board but there's no real competition to any of them. Reviews have been awful, the community has grown frustrated, but they still sell like hotcakes and make money hand over fist. Call of Duty has been getting worse for the better part of a decade with occasional peaks and valleys here and there, but they're also making money hand over fist. Destiny 2 has screwed its players over time and time again, but they keep crawling back and forking over their cash. People have completely forgiven the mess of Cyberpunk 2077 at launch and CDPR's sketchy and at times outright dishonest pre-release marketing because they put out a Netflix anime, a paid DLC, and patched some bugs. Most strategy games on PC (Civ, Europa, CKIII, CoH, Total War, etc) absolutely nickel and dime their fans bit by bit for content over the course of years, but fans keep buying every DLC and support the strategy game standard of hundreds of dollars of DLC on a 20-60 dollar game. Bad reviews and angry comments don't mean much when you've already given them your money time and time again. Boycotts in gaming don't work period and they never have, there's too many fools who part with their cash too easily.
@@TheBeastlyFolloweri agree especially now as i feel that now moee than ever the average customer not just gamers are getting more desensitised to paying more for less. A good example is how a few years ago EA suffered one of the biggest online backlash campaigns ever because the lootbox system in star wars but nowadays the most revenue grossing games are usually mobile gachas where the main mechanic of the game itself is the actual paying for the gamble with you needing 1000s if not 10000s of dollars to access all the game "content"
Just like AAA movies, play stupid games get stupid prizes.
I start to think AAA game developers need to hire a team whose sole function is to ask “but is this fun?”. No one seems to ask that question anymore. They just drop $200m on making a game and then are surprised hardly anyone likes it.
Sometimes it feels like they have this kind of team...but they use the information more like "Is this fun?? It is ?? Okay lets remove that part og monetize it"
There used to be quality assurance teams but it seems like they fell out of favor for rushing broken games. Or they were ignored/neglected like in Bethesda's case.
Stockholders is a big problem for the AAA industri.
Woke people are much bigger problem. Profits were driving games development for decades, the modern problem is more political driven, make everything gay and ugly then insult people of a big portion of your audience disappears
For *every* industry
They already basically almost destroyed the movie box office industry
But skull and bones isnt AAA, it's AAAA!
so what is star citizen is then AAAAA? it will surpase 900mil $ budget by the end of this year ..
AAAAAAAAAA!
At least Genshin Impact has pretty gacha girls (which there are Reddit channels showing off Genshin Impact artwork for free, so I get the benefits of Paimon "emergency food" without downloading or microtransacting the game), so that's a AAAAA game, whether you spend or not 😅
Ubisoft is a joke, who would buy any game from them
Genshin made 3B dollars in its first 185 days. For reference, ESO made 2B USD....in 10 years.
brother this is a massive exception, Genshin came right on the lockdown time, everybody forced to stay inside home just played it
@@resolutogamer4859game's also good, otherwise there wouldn't be so many players
@@resolutogamer4859 What are you defensive for there is no assault only data.
Definitely one of the most successful P2W games of all time.
@@theprofessor7965 On the contrary friend, you are the defensive guy, every discussion about games always has someone religiously spreading the word that this game is the best in the galaxy;
It even seems that there are people hired by large business conglomerates to promote it 🤔
Oh well weirdness aside, THE PAST of this game is nothing more than an exception to random factors and companies today shouldn't base themselves on this for future projects.
"Triple A" has actually been a mark of concern on new games for a while now. It's not something I'd personally want to advertise if I were trying to sell a game.
cost can be even 1 billion but if game is trash it wont sell.
Part of the struggle is that spending money doesn't necessarily make the game better, even if its a decent idea. A lot of failed AAA titles would be financially viable if they were produced as AA games. Those require fewer employees and studios could instead be releasing many new games while still keeping their bread n butter titles alive.
Many trash AAA games sell, cod madden & most ea games.
It does sell? that's the issue. They shouldn't sell.. So soon it won't! You see AAA had the stamp of being instantly pre-purchase good! Just a game being AAA was a hype. Now it's becoming the opposite. Because everyone has been cheated on AAA titles, more than once or twice.. Making AAA titles feel like the scam it is.
That's the real issue.. triple A feels like tripe Fail, at triple costs
@@dongarippo7279 too many idiots for them to stop buying
AAA games have lost the magic that made them worth playing, The executives at the top only want to shoot for record profits and not making a truly fun game. They forgot that you need to actually make the game good in order to make money. But instead they prioritized monetization and DLC over everything else, notice how in the past 5-6 years games come out half asses and half finished but to no ones surprise the in game shop is fully functional. Gamers eyes are open now and were all hyper-aware of what the industry is doing so its pushing us to play indie games more often. I have only played one AAA game last year. Every other game I played was an indie title with 10x more content than I could ever dream of and those games were $30 or less.
when it takes 7 years to make a game the engine is outdated before you play the game.
AAA is gone .... we now have the first AAAA game ....
Courtesy of Ubisoft, the first ever that has Quadruple A flopped. 🤣🤣🤣
And it doesn’t deserve AAAA.
@@ichigokage They will go for AAAAA to make up for that (and probably fail even harder).
cdpr said their games gonna be AAAAA
Adding an extra "A" and including even less game material but costing more.
50M for the salary of the CEO. 5 years, 250M sounds about right
Live service/Gaas games are taking the industry down. There's just too many of them. Doomed to fail with all these microtransactions and pay to win exploits.
Bring back the SINGLE PLAYER supremacy.
I agree but in a way I'm not against F2P live service games such as Wuthering Waves, Snowbreak, Vindictus and all. At least we know what we are paying for and what we're getting. Sure we can play coop and such on those games but you know what I mean..
They won't because they're too worried about video game piracy and how to make people pay for the next game if they won't move on.
Single player isn't really making as much money either though look at Spiderman 2
@@lightdarksoul2097 Sony dogshit is a bad example.
@@lightdarksoul2097 Spiderman 2 has earned way more than anticipated. Their production value was high so did the sales.
I will NOT participate in 'micro transactions'.
Star Citizen raised 700 million on their recent Invictus Launch Week (event) alone. Yes. In one week.
To say theyve broke $600m would be a vast understatement.
I feel no matter how good star citizen is when it comes out, it would not be enough to justify a basically +1B dollar budget at this point
@agiant5715
I'd be hard pressed to make a counter arguement. All I can say is only time will tell.
If they do somehow manage to pull it off with a solid 1.0 release with all the bells and whistles... "Wow" would be an understatement. It really would push the boundaries of open world/open ended gameplay farther than ever before.
A lot of the gameplay loops for AAA games these days is something i experienced in a game back in the late 90's. Zero innovation.
Yep mostly, the reason I like games like Elden Ring is it feels like a modern evolution of Ocarina of Time. Big boss battles with great music, lock-on third person combat, etc. Games like Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy 7, Half-Life, Doom, Gran Turismo, Super Mario 64, still seem to be the template for modern games in many ways
The only AAA games I play anymore are the ones I already own.
My backlog of AAA games released from the past ten years is insane. Got so many games, according to my spreadsheets, about 2500-3000 hours worth for the Top 100 games in my backlog. I own and haven't yet beaten Doom Eternal, Atomic Heart, Like A Dragon, Metal Gear Solid V, Witcher 3. Got a bunch of Final Fantasy games, Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, Persona, Monster Hunter, Pokemon, Xenoblade. I wonder where the future leads when AAA is competing against their own library of previous releases available on the cheap, do they start delisting like crazy?
they try to make gold mine not a game.
All hail "FromSoftware" Quality games and no microtransactions
There’s been like 4 next gen games this entire console generation. Games have gone backwards completely. With all the new hardware and power from current gen consoles we barely see any graphical improvements and on top of that it’s not like we are getting larger more detailed worlds, more NPCs, better physics, etc… games like ac unity, rdr2, last of us, continue to be the most impressive games despite being created for a system with a mobile cpu from 2010.
The cherry on top is that this is all happening while they try to raise base game prices
Eh... I mean I bought Mario WOnder to play with family. That was fun.
A fun extra credits video i recently watched did the math and found out that adjusted to inflation, games at base price r still the cheapest they had ever been weirdly enough (the host even noted multiple times throughout the video why it doesn't actually feel like it but the math doesnt lie) especially compared to other entertainment stuff like movie tickets..etc. He then argued that maybe why we have alot of annoying monetization mechanics nowadays to compensate. Im probably forgetting alot of the points as its my memory is ass but i highly recommend searching for it if your interested in that werid fact
@@agiant5715 That's probably pretty true. Game prices really haven't changed much over the years. I imagine the costs of labor make it pretty difficult to profit off box sales alone, at least given how long most games are in development for like 5 years.
Doesn't change the fact that price increases and declining quality aren't the best of companions, however. I'm not incentivized to pay more by what they are producing these days, if you know what I mean.
My man said “LFG Uber Duriel” but did not offer up his mats😂
I stopped buying games i can't mod or host my own server for. I hate the limitations of most AAA games and how consolified they are telling me to use a gamepad and reminding me not to turn my computer off while it's saving. They should make PC exclusives again with all the features we older gamers know from the past.
You mean the constant crashing,bugs,network, incompatable versions, windows directx failures of the past? Broken games at release never fixed and yadayada cheat galore...no please stop, not everyone can own a gaming pc, it was xpensive then its goddamn overpriced now so no make it viable to own one then we can have a discussion
its the obsession with trying to create a cinematic experience through video games. They are a spectacle, but most of them are just that. A spectacle and nothing more.
This is becoming a fairly large issue yea.
Aware that this would take a lot of extra work, it'd be really nice to have a little title at the edge of the screen when you're showing some of these game 😁
Does anyone know the game at 6.27 please?
Thanks. Great video btw 😁
Larian to develop Baldurs Gate 3 used 450 collaborators. This is not a small studio or team doing a small game for sure, this phrase was misleading at best.
Yeah, Larian is def a AAA studio at this point.
Rimworld, Stardew Valley, 7 Days to Die....those are the games I've played the most over the past several years.
Great taste!
With me it was city-builders/looter survival games like Wandering Village, Void Train and Forever Skies.
I cant remember who but someone interviewed a senior designer and he put the state of todays studios in such a perfect image. He needed a small script or something to test a important thing in a game he and the team was working on. he went to one of the coders and asked how fast can you do this? the coder guy say 4 weeks. And the senior guy was flabbergasted as it was a few lines of code that would take a couple of hours at most. I believe he ended up doing it himself cuse he work would be halted to a stop if he was not able to test what he needed to. Now imagine EVERYTHING that should take a few minutes taking hours. things takeing hours taking days or weeks. BANG no fucking wonder things gets expensive. And this is just one of many problems in large AAA companies.
I saw that guy's vid, he worked on Fallout 1 or 2 IIRC. I agree with his point, AAA companies have big teams with bad management usually, but game engines are much more complex than the ones in 1998
@@dondahighhh12 hmmm having some experience myself within making games i would say they are more complex yes. But they are WAY easier to get into today.
3:42 "It has probably made over a billion at this point"
Oh my sweet Summer child. Multiple times.
what are the names of these games at 4:28-4:44 and 6:25-6:30?
Game companies are being made through Reddit with "hey lets make a game" which board would people suggest for a boomer like me to find people? Been spending a lot of time learning how to use Unreal.
You know what they say about trying to please everybody.
What game is show at 6:09 ?
All fair points - but let's not forget inflation: $40m in 1997 (FF7) would be ~$150m today - to help with perspective at least
Triple A gaming is dying, that sounds like good news to me.
The only bad thing about it is they'll try to push "Quad A" games which will have far less content and more monetization.
6:28 game name anyone?
Project LLL
The funny thing is that if they would just cut down on marketing and not grosely overpay their executives, they could probably remove a quarter of their production costs if not more. If you fail to create good products people sooner or later are catching up and calling you out, no amount of marketing is going to reach seasoned customers in the way they hope and the pool of newcomers to gaming is just not big enought to make their current businessplan feasible.
6:28 what game is that??
Id rather play something like palworlds than a AAA game.
The problem with AAA games is the money men make all the decisions, the corpo's don't play games, don't care about enjoyment, all they care about is a return on investment. Theres a reason nearly every open world game feels, looks and plays the same. Its copy upon a copy of a known framework. There's a reason every game is grindy as hell with cash stores. Addiction = money.
Video games are just digital casino's now. Anyone saying otherwise is delusional.
Exactly. Why risk paying so much for a brand new game when you can just copy and paste the same game and put in gambling/monetization to make up for it? Then make it grindy while putting in a payment method to skip it and cut back content to release as DLC. The ironic part is more people are catching on to this, especially with inflation going on, so companies will have to adjust or else.
jews. They are called jews
I don't fully agree look at Xenoblade 3 or Mario Wonder those are triple A and fun.
Game in the background @6:28?
Project LLL
what does "brunt end" mean?
if AAA gaming is in trouble then what about the BBB, CCC and DDD gaming ??? :P
Another issue I find with triple a games is devs want to make the next huge game with hundreds of hours if not thousands of hours of content. Sometimes it's nice to be able to just start a game and 20-40 hours later you beat it and move on. There are so many huge games these days that as a consumer it is almost daunting to start one and play it to completion
Bobby Kotick may be gone but his legacy remains.
Stellar Blade deserved every cent I spent on that day one purchase. No cash shop, no bugs, no sensitive politics.
Need more of those!
Larian could be considered an indie company today? I don't think so, it has 400 employees, and Baldur's Gate 3 cost more than 100 million and took more than 5 years to develop. It's not an indie game at all, with that time and budget, it's a AAA game.
It’s more of a AA game because yes the studio size and budget is massive and took a long time but at the same time they are not forced to do things by investors or a mega corporation. Meaning they are free to do what they wish.
Indie means independent studio not necessarily small studio. Larian stands on its own if bg3 failed it would have probably ended the studio. Triple A companies mostly mean massive multi game studios making multiple games where they can prop up each other.
@@Sci-Fi_Freak_YT It's even close to being a AA game. Companies like Spiders would literally kill for the resources and money Larian have.
Also they do have private investors. Tencent owns some of them. They just aren't a public company.
People acting like larian is tinyv😅😅
@@Prawnsacrifice nobody in this thread has said Larian is tiny?
We’re in the middle of right now so we can’t figure out why it happening…. Could be Sweet Baby Inc for an example of corporate bullshit or a CIA psy-op to destroy all our hopes and dreams
Love the content, would love it even more if you nailed the difference between "less" & "fewer"
After spending the past year learning UE5 to make my own indie game and studio. This video confirms I'm on the right path. Thank you
There is an entire generation of kids that have FOMO baked into their culture and personalities. When game companies found how willing they were to pay to skip and pay to win and pay for power, they shifted their entire model to this. Revenue soared to never before seen heights. I think we're over that peak, and on the way down now. As playing games for fun and entertainment re-gains popularity, the industry will inevitably have to swing back.
Thats a terrible assessment. FOMO was baked into the equation far before this new generation could buy any games for themselves. It worked on ADULTS, thats why the model shifted. You think a bunch of kids and teens make up the brunt of money these studios earn? No, blame the stupid adults who kept enabling this behavior, not the new generation who has to grow up in this current gaming market.
You already know asmongold is gonna be here
Fr I was thinking the same thing 😂
The professional leech
Oh for sure it’ll probably be double the watch time too
@joelhodoborgas stay mad.
@@joelhodoborgas The guy who makes your yearly income in a month. Okay, just making sure. 😁🤷♂
Thank you, Force. Long overdue but still good to see you standing up for what's right. Cheers!
Good. We don’t want their crap anyways. Especially with some AAA studios thinking of putting advertisements in their games
This all goes back to DEI. These companies prioritize DEI over talent, and the companies that push that nonsense the most are buying up all the smaller companies.
Yeah, the games are expensive. They have entire departments that do nothing to improve the quality of a game.
What a clown comment
Baldur's Gate 3 is Triple A, and it was in Early Access since 2020.
Count in Helldivers 2 as well.
No Baldur's Gate 3 is very much so an Indie Game. I think people confuse 'Successful' with 'AAA'. The term 'Indie Game' means a game made by an Independent Developer (that's where the 'Indie' comes from). Larian Studios is an Independent dev, they even self-published BG3 (making them VERY indie, not beholden to an external publisher).
BG3 is about as Indie as it gets, they just happened to be successful. But them doing well doesn't all of a sudden make it not an Indie game. If BG3 had flopped, would you still consider it AAA?
Indie doesn't mean made by 10 people in a basement. It doesn't even mean made for less than 'X' Million dollars. It means a game was made by an Independent studio (which many times DOES mean smaller team / budget, but doesn't have to).
@@ForceGamingYTit’s made by and independent studio but that’s not what’s understood as ‘indie games’. Your reply is technically correct but indie games refers to smaller studios with smaller budgets. Larian is an independent studio but calling BG3 and indie game is a bit of a stretch (even though is technically correct) it’s all just semantics in the end but Larian had as many people working on Bg3 as Bethesda had on Starfied
@@ForceGamingYT No AAA is budget and resources not "success". You can still be independent and make a AAA game.
Part of the resources Larian has got is through private investment. Tencent owns a third of them as well as other investors. So you are also wrong about them being totally independent, they just aren't a public company.
I think people typically define indie as small companies. Larian has 450+ employees and STILL crowd funded.
I may be a bit out of the loop, but I'd hardly consider a company of 470 employees "indie". That's a bigger team than some "AAA" devs lol.
If we're going to argue semantics, then we should just stop the discussion at that...
Also, Are you really indie when your fans funded your 450+ dev team game instead of a publisher?
Are they an "independent development team"? Technicallyspeaking, sure. But they aren't what people refer to as "indie". Saying Toby Fox and Larian studios are equally "indie" is just silly, and you know it.
The problem with games in general is that devs have no clue what kinds of games gamers want to play. As long as they won't care about this aspect, why would gamers on a massive scale care about the games they produce?
A massive problem is video game developers are no longer in charge of these AAA studios, let alone have a say in the actual development. They’re being run be business and marketing professionals. Not to mention shoveling the DEI message down players’ throats. And it’ll get so much worse with AI taking over the creative process, which will result in even more layoffs. If there has ever been a time to look into Indy devs, it’s now.
The cost to make these games is not correct
Show me the proof or stfu when these companies are publicly traded and by law they have to show their financial statements
Stop Pretending Baldurs Gate 3 isn't Triple A, the amount they spent on developing the game was not Indie money.
Yep and palworld isn’t a inde I’m pretty sure it had a couple of million in budget and helldivers
Well, the question is, who own's Larian Studios. Is It Microsoft? Is it Sony? Is it some other big name with huge pockets? Nope, The studio is majority owned by it's founder and his wife. When they got the rights to BG3 they figured out that their usual approach, to fund via Kickstarter was not going to cut it so they sold 30% of their shares to a silent partner (Tencent) so they could fund the needed expansion of the studio. They build a prototype, put it in Early Access at full cost (60$) and sold 2.500.000 copies. Call it Kickstarter Pro, supercrowdfunding.
And they are their own publisher meaning they absorbed all the costs a publisher would normally advance them themselves.
So while BG3 was not Indie money Larian Studios is in fact an Indie Company.
Huge indie studio that took immense risks to make a hit. Vs Microsoft that can fail uphill
The biggest challenge about suddenly having a lot of money and a positive reputation is making sure neither disappears.
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall" - failure in the early stages while you're still small sucks, but you're ultimately still happy to have tried and failed than always wondered, however if you are successful with that first project, then you may have a sudden onset of pressure bearing down on you to the point that you become apprehensive regarding your design choices, and you become conservative while aiming to make a game that doesn't disappoint, in contrast to your first project which could be a personal success if at least 1 person unironically enjoyed the game.
I said it years ago, corporate greed at the publisher level along with their investors would eventually kill the market. The devs unfortunately are always the first to be blamed by the majority of the uninformed gamers.
They can't take risks? They make their games woke, insult their own audience for what they like and want? How is that not risk?
Mald harder, Jeremy.
@@Aries73 have you seen woke people? Nothing malds harder :D
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 Do you even know what the word even means?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for a non-Gamergate answer.
@@Aries73 its all about sex, gender and race instead of making a good story
Only ignorant people don't know what woke means, even the mainstream know it by now
I've basically stopped playing things that aren't indie titles.
Development studios don't understand that you don't need hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs if the game is fun.
The aaa games industry, like Hollywood, is bankrupt of new ideas.
Gimme another remaster, the only change is adding microtransactions and then whine more about your profits.
Great video! I remember the Force Gaming making magic the gathering gameplay videos and now its cool to see you still succeeding at gaming news.
Old games costs listed, adjusted for Inflation or not ?
Good video but how is Larian a small studio?
what is the game at 11:21?
Pretty sure that's "no rest for the wicked"
What's the magic game he's playing at 3:00?
Immortals of Aveum
@11:28 what game is this?
Pretty sure that's "no rest for the wicked"
Star Citizen is beyond AAAA and there is no publisher - it shouldnt even be on this list as it is a meme at this point
I think one massive problem in the gaming industry is that many leading devs don't even like or play games themselves. every great video game was made by a gamer.
Triple A companies literally just copy the next trend of a game and then are confused when it’s oversaturated to the point where they can’t keep people playing
The cost of marketing shouldn't be included in the cost of making the game. If you make a good game you don't need marketing. Instead like Hollywood they spend near half the budget of the product on bloated production lines and huge pay checks to the top 1%. At this point the only logical conclusion is they're milking every last drop till the business fails and they fail upwards.
Giving up on big over-marketed "AAA" games and diving into Indie titles has rewarded me with more enjoyment in the last several years than every huge hit title combined. It's like the Invincible meme with Omni Man. Old Flash games innovating and being creative and still more fun than games that cost a chunk of a billion dollars to make. Indie games are really out here saying, "Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!"
One of my favorite indies that just came out of Early Access is Chrono Ark.
The general gist of how the story progresses, is through loops. Beginning part, when you die, some more is unlocked in the story.
Then when you complete a run, the story progresses further. And as it goes along it gets deeper and more intense(if not a bit insane). The story is done in two ways. Half are the main events, then the other half is through the bed.
The archives from the bed is how you learn what led into the main stuff. With the ending really hitting hard.
Phenomenal art style, good graphics but not important. And pretty complex battle system.
To cut it a bit short, they turned a card battler into a party based RPG. And it smoothly links together, haven’t played a card battler that does it that well.
Each run, since it is a rogue game. You have to rebuild your party. However, it is a game that appeals to all play levels, aside from one thing.
Where you have to take on a special quest from a shop on normal mode+, and defeat 3 bosses with those characters alive that has the equipment to unlock twins.
These characters are necessary to unlock the epilogue which clarifies the True Ending.
That aside, it is a game based off of your skills. With another mode to help you along if it is too much. So, you can learn the system, experiment with builds and just have a fun time.
Battle system to cut it down more clearly.
1. Draw skills
-> The main character acts as the one with the draw skills for the team. Aside from the mod, which puts them in as a playable character aside from the one story mission. And the main character is down right busted.
2. Party Members
-> Each party members have their own set of cards, and these can link very well to each other. You shouldn’t brick if you carefully build your team.
3. Status ailments
-> These as it implies are not only for negatives on the opponent, but to also further chain combos.
4. Relics
-> These are special items found in a run that provides permanent benefits(usually) for that run. These also chains into your play.
5. Equipment
-> Equipment system provides a range of benefits, that also chains into your gameplay.
Etc.
There is much more, such as unique character traits. Their passives, and how they work with each other. It is honestly too much for me to list and explains.
Anyway, an issue to note with AAA are how they try for cinematic experiences, but they do not come off as gameplay.
Let me dive back to Dark Cloud, where the cinematic battles were actually directly involved. You had to pay attention, how the screen moves and be ready for those inputs. Fail, and you gotta do it again. You had zero room for failure. It wasn’t hard, but it kept you involved.
Chrono Ark, there is really one cinematic experience. However, you had to work your @ss off for it. This is one battle(there are a few), where the main character has unique commands.
These commands has to be implemented into your playstyle to win the battle. And only when you get the boss down to 1 HP it proceeds to where the main character can use a skill to proceed to the next phase.
For the second phase of this battle, you had to survive the countdown timer to be able to use the skill. Note, these specific moments a small portion of the battle is animated.
And these battles are hard, they just don’t hand it to you. You get your cinematic battle, but only when you meet the conditions. For the last phase, you cannot target the boss, but have to destroy both of his support at the same time, while he summons support amongst other things.
When both of the main targets are destroyed, then you can initiate the last cinematic scene. So, in the end. It felt earned, since you worked hard to achieve those moments.
Idk I’m starting to think that the worst kind of ”micro transaction” is the pay for convenience, where the devs make the game more annoying, more player unfriendly, less intuitive, and lock cool features behind paywalls. They actively hurt the game and try to make the games as annoying as possible (right up too just annoying enough to where you won’t quit) so you are tempted to pay for features that already exist but are taken out to be monetized.
Man, seeing that shot of an old gamepro magazine cover unlocked a core childhood memory.
Anyone know what game is playing in the background at 9:32 ?
No rest for the wicked. It's in early access but worth every penny. Currently at 20% discount on steam
No Rest for the Wicked. It's still in EA but it's quite good!
for a long time, 3A games looks the same but different skins. playing, quests and cut scenes like movie which just press ESC or space are the same. But indies, most of them are unique and different. like darkest dungeon,rimworld, enter the gungeon.. etc
The thing with the development cost is that it is unclear where that money go. AAA game may cost bajilion dollars, but it doesn't feel like it most of the time.
Pretty simple economics: Sell a half-cooked product for $10 more than Market value and you'll get stuck.
I love you for mentioning everquest ....games need to go back to that
No industry is immune from the competency/skills collapse.
Nobody knows how to make games anymore and they hope that just adding on more employees will somehow solve the problem.
I don't think Larian studios can be considered an indie or AA studio, I would say they are AAA, just not the scale of ubi or EA, but they are quite large and were def well known especially with DoS 1 & 2... I mean studio wise they have more employees than Valve
imagine being a AAA game buyer with the current state on indie games
Mario Wonder was pretty fun and Xenoblade 3. Plus my lil sister beat Princess Peach Showtime.
2 questions:
Is there a cash shop?
Is there a battle pass?
Yes to both: no.
Yes to 1. Highly likely no.
I am surprised that many people don't classify BG3 as AAA. The studio behind it has multiple departments across EU countries, and the budget for making the game is over 100 million. Of course, it is AAA, and it is a really good one, probably one of the best of the entire generation.
A theory i heard before is that the AAA games are suffering because of the same reason new box office movies are failing. Mainly huge budgets which leads to mediocre gameplay design choices as its basically impossible to have innovation when the game is 1+ million dollars and many investors need their investment back fast with extra so the safest/blandest games appealing to the commonest demoninator are always the only choice. Indie games meanwhile are more free to innovative as they don't have to sell millions of copies to break even especially now with the advance of technology leading them make ps2/3 lvl AAA games with a fraction of the budget/team it took for the big game companies needed in the early 2000s/2010s.
i think it will help to have experienced seasoned gamers feedback for AAA games in early development to avoid low interest for the game when released. dont know if they do so , if they do it looks like they need a better focus group.