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 - 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
@@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.
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.
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
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.
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 😅
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"
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.
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
@@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.
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.
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..
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.
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
"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.
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
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?
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 😁
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As a 37 years-old gamer, who consumed most AAA games since the 90's, I've almost completely turned my attention only to indie games. So much so that I'm now developping my own with a friend. Gamers shouldn't limit themselves to AAA content. There are brighter horizons on the indie scene.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
AAA games is always looked at with negativity for me. AAA is mostly a negative thing for me and any games no matter what that have that mark on it is going to be a really hard sell for me. AAA = expensive box price, ingame shop/subs/DLC and often poorly gameplay.
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.
@@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
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.
@@NemisisRecords I'd argue that those like cards of baseball players people used to collect were also FOMO. As long as there are sets to collect, there likely is FOMO. Heck, even someone who fishes as a hobby might get FOMO over a fish that's only available in a specific season. It's just rose tinted glasses after rose tinted glasses with this topic.
It's two double negatives one is the monetization model that some of these games bring out and two it's because gamers have become worse in their personalities and harder to please I think especially Gamers nowadays are just kind of the worst generation, they all have ADHD plus they're very antisocial most of these guys that are serious Gamers really only care for Indy titles
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Considering the fact the same pattern can be seen at 2 other entertainment branches, movie/tv shows, where crazy amounts of money is spent on failed content. One might ask, is this just a big money laundring scheme?
Yeah i've said this for a while now. I refuse to buy modern games unless they are something i've anticipated like Monster Hunter etc. I mostly stick to old games, even retro arcade games on my multicade. Virtual pinball on a table i got, and private servers to oldschool MMORPG's like EverQuest Online Adventures, which was a PS2 MMORPG that flew under the radar. Still my favorite game of all time. Then you have the Socom series, those servers are back. OH and the Resident Evil Outbreak private servers. Both games. PS2 online games came out at a time when most people were not online with their console, so they deserve a second life. I would ask everyone to check them out. They are still very fun.
Are games really more expensive to make? or are people just mismanaging their budgets for things like ingcreasing their salaries or wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on "Video Game Consultation" services to "make games more diverse and inclusive"
Irrelevant. As long as they make record profits yearly nothing will change. Thank heavens, there are now other indie and half-indie studios making many different good games.
The AAA(A) problems: - Games cost too much to make - Too much focus on photo-realistic graphics - Too much focus on Walking and talking instead of FUN GAMEPLAY - Price at 70 bucks - Seasons pass from 50-100 bucks - Live Service - Awful microtransactions - Always Online... even for SP games - DEI/ESG Seriously, so many problems could be avoided if these big studios and publishers focused on making decent to good games and not overpriced cash grabs and DEI dumpster fires.
Plug in an NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64. No Wokism, No Dei, No Rainbow Nazis, No political agenda on those old carts. Just only the greatest games ever made. Problem solved.
It's almost like knowing what's fun or talking to people about what they think is fun, and leaving out horribly written stories, or bashing people over the head with identity politics, might net you with a good game. After Baldur's Gate 3 it's been smaller or no name studios that's been making the games I've had fun with. I won't even by a game from a previously AAA studio without waiting to see what real people are saying about it.
Two issues: One's been around a while... and getting *Far* worse... Milking your fanbase... OverMonitization. Collecting data/selling it, Incomplete base games while selling the rest of the BASE game as a PAID DLC, P2W "micro" transactions. New one that's crippling some newer games: Wokeness. No one wants to play as a potato. No one wants to be lectured *constantly* about fake issues. Go Woke, Go Broke. The first issue is way more prevalent, and is less disruptive to the bottom line because of whales and addicts dumping stupid amounts of money into "free" games. The second issue is a catastrophic drop in quality of the game and addressable market. Simple fix. Make a fun game and sell it. That's it. Don't require accounts for single player games. Don't require "always online" for single player games. Don't install root-kits. Don't sell anything in game except cosmetics. Just go back to basics. Make a fun game and sell it.
Say what you will about Diablo 4's monetization and end-game and it's psychologically optimized mush, but I really think half of Diablo 4 is a great game. And by that I mean I think it's pretty much two games, and the first one is fantastic. The first game is the story and progression to level 50 in world tiers 1 and 2. The second game is the grind from level 50-100 in world tiers 3 and 4. The first game is a game meant to be a game. The second game is a game meant to be a job. A game meant to get you to spend money. I will say though that there is one big problem with the first game, which is that the story lasts longer than the progression to level 50, and as a player you want to enter world tier 3 to make the game challenging again and to be able to make noticeable progression and get better loot, but you aren't allowed to enter world tier 3 until you've finished the story. And so the game is actively shooting itself in the foot, incentivizing players to rush through the good and fun story in order to get to the next stage of character progression. It's trying its hardest to rush people out of the very good game 1 (which, by the way, would be a perfectly lengthy and complete game if it just ended there) and into the very grindy game 2. A simple but huge fix would be just to make it so you can enter higher world tiers without having finished the story. Basically I wish Diablo wasn't a live service game, and I played it as if it wasn't one.
I play an MMO on my phone called Viking Rise, I spend money on it daily at this point. P2W games might be greedy but atleast they always have new content to grind.. the whales will always be on top but its just like IRL, people with more money having a nicer car. In a perfect world some of these grindy p2w games would have servers that were not p2w.
This video is unbelievably inaccurate and misinformed. Please do your research next time. You keep saying development budgets and this whole video is looking at how much it costs to make a game. Yet a lot of the numbers you mentioned are game’s budgets including marketing. A few of your examples are games that had less money for development than for marketing. And you can’t make such a video without adjusting for inflation. If you’re going to use your voice to make a statement make an informed and constructive one. If you just want to rile people up and get clicks keep doing what you are doing.
Honestly I think the home console portion of gaming is what's really dying. Stupid, nonsensical mobile games are on the rise, and everyone's down for a quick bite of entertainment (given today's average attention span) so it's come down to PC for adults and people that work with Windows, mobile for everyone else, and Switch because Nintendo has strong IP presence and knows how to make their products fun. Their quirky approach to gaming has kept them afloat in the midst of a fluctuating market. But Playstation and Xbox with their "AAA titles" are on the brink of extinction these days
2023 was one of the best years for gaming releases in recent memory almost solely off the back of big AA releases and it was an unusually bad year for indie games with exception to few. I am all in for small dev studios dominating through innovation and hard work like they always have. AAA games have been marketing scams for over a decade and gamers are finally wizening up to it.
WHY? ... Why are games getting so expensive to make, some of these older games mentioned back in the day the studios had to build the engine and the tools to make the games, now we have engines and tool sets that come wrapped in a bow. Code had to be invented from scratch and hell one of Bioware's first 3D modelers was a guy who carved Duck decoys for a living ... now we have libraries of base models. Shouldn't it be taking less people to make a game now-a-days then it did 10 to 15 years ago? In my industry 30 years ago we use to have a floor of people in marketing to make sales presentations and they all got replaced by giving the sales people a copy of Gimp and Powerpoint.
Bethesda as a whole didn't profit. They were the ones responsible for Hi Fi Rush studio getting closed because Microsoft was like what's going on here? Bethesda threw them under the bus. Probably because Starfield was poorly received and cost too much to make but didn't get the return in value. So they put an entire studio on the chopping block for microsoft.
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.
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.
@miinyoowe had software etc, and funco land across the street
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.
Innovation > Monetization
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 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
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.
Just like AAA movies, play stupid games get stupid prizes.
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
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
when it takes 7 years to make a game the engine is outdated before you play the game.
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. 😁🤷♂
they try to make gold mine not a game.
"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.
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
All hail "FromSoftware" Quality games and no microtransactions
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?
I will NOT participate in 'micro transactions'.
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 😁
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.
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.
50M for the salary of the CEO. 5 years, 250M sounds about right
Rimworld, Stardew Valley, 7 Days to Die....those are the games I've played the most over the past several years.
With me it was city-builders/looter survival games like Wandering Village, Void Train and Forever Skies.
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.
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
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.
Good. We don’t want their crap anyways. Especially with some AAA studios thinking of putting advertisements in their games
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.
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?
You know what they say about trying to please everybody.
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
Id rather play something like palworlds than a AAA game.
As a 37 years-old gamer, who consumed most AAA games since the 90's, I've almost completely turned my attention only to indie games. So much so that I'm now developping my own with a friend.
Gamers shouldn't limit themselves to AAA content. There are brighter horizons on the indie scene.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
AAA games is always looked at with negativity for me. AAA is mostly a negative thing for me and any games no matter what that have that mark on it is going to be a really hard sell for me.
AAA = expensive box price, ingame shop/subs/DLC and often poorly gameplay.
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.
All fair points - but let's not forget inflation: $40m in 1997 (FF7) would be ~$150m today - to help with perspective at least
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
3:42 "It has probably made over a billion at this point"
Oh my sweet Summer child. Multiple times.
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.
@@NemisisRecords I'd argue that those like cards of baseball players people used to collect were also FOMO. As long as there are sets to collect, there likely is FOMO. Heck, even someone who fishes as a hobby might get FOMO over a fish that's only available in a specific season.
It's just rose tinted glasses after rose tinted glasses with this topic.
It's two double negatives one is the monetization model that some of these games bring out and two it's because gamers have become worse in their personalities and harder to please I think especially Gamers nowadays are just kind of the worst generation, they all have ADHD plus they're very antisocial most of these guys that are serious Gamers really only care for Indy titles
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.
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
if AAA gaming is in trouble then what about the BBB, CCC and DDD gaming ??? :P
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.
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
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
6:28 game name anyone?
Project LLL
Yeah that's capitalism for you. Ruins everything it touches.
Stop Pretending Baldurs Gate 3 isn't Triple A, the amount they spent on developing the game was not Indie money.
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
But dont worry, Amomsgold just saved you. He is the only viewer you need to bait.
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
maybe make games instead of wallet and time sapping, pandering rubbish?
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
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.
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.
It wasn't rocket science that skull and bones was DOA. Absolutely terrible gameplay.
Seriously! They own Black Flag. They should've came in, added onto it, changed characters away for AC brand and boom! It will sell like hot cakes!
My man said “LFG Uber Duriel” but did not offer up his mats😂
Considering the fact the same pattern can be seen at 2 other entertainment branches, movie/tv shows, where crazy amounts of money is spent on failed content. One might ask, is this just a big money laundring scheme?
government run psy-op more like it.
what are the names of these games at 4:28-4:44 and 6:25-6:30?
Not really a "micro" transaction anymore is it..
The only AAA game i will be buying is gta VI. Other than that im content with warframe,eve online and hell divers 2.
EVE Online! I need to get back into that.
ESG/DEI is killing the games...
Good video but how is Larian a small studio?
Enshrouded is so good, and the devs so humble.
Yeah i've said this for a while now. I refuse to buy modern games unless they are something i've anticipated like Monster Hunter etc. I mostly stick to old games, even retro arcade games on my multicade. Virtual pinball on a table i got, and private servers to oldschool MMORPG's like EverQuest Online Adventures, which was a PS2 MMORPG that flew under the radar. Still my favorite game of all time.
Then you have the Socom series, those servers are back. OH and the Resident Evil Outbreak private servers. Both games. PS2 online games came out at a time when most people were not online with their console, so they deserve a second life. I would ask everyone to check them out. They are still very fun.
Are games really more expensive to make?
or are people just mismanaging their budgets for things like ingcreasing their salaries or wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on "Video Game Consultation" services to "make games more diverse and inclusive"
Woke games for the woke market 😅
Irrelevant. As long as they make record profits yearly nothing will change. Thank heavens, there are now other indie and half-indie studios making many different good games.
1:40 he's got a pretty face.
genshin are making 2B a year
The AAA(A) problems:
- Games cost too much to make
- Too much focus on photo-realistic graphics
- Too much focus on Walking and talking instead of FUN GAMEPLAY
- Price at 70 bucks
- Seasons pass from 50-100 bucks
- Live Service
- Awful microtransactions
- Always Online... even for SP games
- DEI/ESG
Seriously, so many problems could be avoided if these big studios and publishers focused on making decent to good games and not overpriced cash grabs and DEI dumpster fires.
What game is show at 6:09 ?
6:28 what game is that??
Gamers have to be willing to support the indie games and not wait for gamepass/ subscription services.
Plug in an NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64. No Wokism, No Dei, No Rainbow Nazis, No political agenda on those old carts. Just only the greatest games ever made. Problem solved.
It's almost like knowing what's fun or talking to people about what they think is fun, and leaving out horribly written stories, or bashing people over the head with identity politics, might net you with a good game. After Baldur's Gate 3 it's been smaller or no name studios that's been making the games I've had fun with. I won't even by a game from a previously AAA studio without waiting to see what real people are saying about it.
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.
Two issues:
One's been around a while... and getting *Far* worse... Milking your fanbase... OverMonitization. Collecting data/selling it, Incomplete base games while selling the rest of the BASE game as a PAID DLC, P2W "micro" transactions.
New one that's crippling some newer games: Wokeness. No one wants to play as a potato. No one wants to be lectured *constantly* about fake issues. Go Woke, Go Broke.
The first issue is way more prevalent, and is less disruptive to the bottom line because of whales and addicts dumping stupid amounts of money into "free" games.
The second issue is a catastrophic drop in quality of the game and addressable market.
Simple fix. Make a fun game and sell it. That's it. Don't require accounts for single player games. Don't require "always online" for single player games. Don't install root-kits. Don't sell anything in game except cosmetics. Just go back to basics. Make a fun game and sell it.
Say what you will about Diablo 4's monetization and end-game and it's psychologically optimized mush, but I really think half of Diablo 4 is a great game. And by that I mean I think it's pretty much two games, and the first one is fantastic. The first game is the story and progression to level 50 in world tiers 1 and 2. The second game is the grind from level 50-100 in world tiers 3 and 4. The first game is a game meant to be a game. The second game is a game meant to be a job. A game meant to get you to spend money. I will say though that there is one big problem with the first game, which is that the story lasts longer than the progression to level 50, and as a player you want to enter world tier 3 to make the game challenging again and to be able to make noticeable progression and get better loot, but you aren't allowed to enter world tier 3 until you've finished the story. And so the game is actively shooting itself in the foot, incentivizing players to rush through the good and fun story in order to get to the next stage of character progression. It's trying its hardest to rush people out of the very good game 1 (which, by the way, would be a perfectly lengthy and complete game if it just ended there) and into the very grindy game 2. A simple but huge fix would be just to make it so you can enter higher world tiers without having finished the story. Basically I wish Diablo wasn't a live service game, and I played it as if it wasn't one.
I play an MMO on my phone called Viking Rise, I spend money on it daily at this point. P2W games might be greedy but atleast they always have new content to grind.. the whales will always be on top but its just like IRL, people with more money having a nicer car. In a perfect world some of these grindy p2w games would have servers that were not p2w.
This video is unbelievably inaccurate and misinformed. Please do your research next time. You keep saying development budgets and this whole video is looking at how much it costs to make a game. Yet a lot of the numbers you mentioned are game’s budgets including marketing. A few of your examples are games that had less money for development than for marketing. And you can’t make such a video without adjusting for inflation. If you’re going to use your voice to make a statement make an informed and constructive one. If you just want to rile people up and get clicks keep doing what you are doing.
Honestly I think the home console portion of gaming is what's really dying. Stupid, nonsensical mobile games are on the rise, and everyone's down for a quick bite of entertainment (given today's average attention span) so it's come down to PC for adults and people that work with Windows, mobile for everyone else, and Switch because Nintendo has strong IP presence and knows how to make their products fun. Their quirky approach to gaming has kept them afloat in the midst of a fluctuating market. But Playstation and Xbox with their "AAA titles" are on the brink of extinction these days
2023 was one of the best years for gaming releases in recent memory almost solely off the back of big AA releases and it was an unusually bad year for indie games with exception to few. I am all in for small dev studios dominating through innovation and hard work like they always have. AAA games have been marketing scams for over a decade and gamers are finally wizening up to it.
WHY? ... Why are games getting so expensive to make, some of these older games mentioned back in the day the studios had to build the engine and the tools to make the games, now we have engines and tool sets that come wrapped in a bow. Code had to be invented from scratch and hell one of Bioware's first 3D modelers was a guy who carved Duck decoys for a living ... now we have libraries of base models. Shouldn't it be taking less people to make a game now-a-days then it did 10 to 15 years ago? In my industry 30 years ago we use to have a floor of people in marketing to make sales presentations and they all got replaced by giving the sales people a copy of Gimp and Powerpoint.
I didn't even realize Skull and Bones was out lol. Didn't exactly have quadruple-A marketing
Bethesda as a whole didn't profit. They were the ones responsible for Hi Fi Rush studio getting closed because Microsoft was like what's going on here? Bethesda threw them under the bus. Probably because Starfield was poorly received and cost too much to make but didn't get the return in value. So they put an entire studio on the chopping block for microsoft.