So copy what Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Baldur’s Gate did and make good replayable games.
Also stop listening to the C suite and start listening to the gamers.
I’m curious though, viewing movies as investments has made a some studios filthy rich. Why does that seem to be different for games?
Why do they need to get filthy rich? Why not settle for rich and having a good game?
This is the problem with capitalism now. No one is happy making a good profit. They have to extract maximum profit by cutting everything else.
Capitalism has always been that way. Might be more accurate to say it gets worse when hobby becomes mainstream enough for more money to start flowing into it. Best balance seems to be when something is profitable but niche so corporations consider it not big enough for them to go all in on with their wealth.
Gaming was better when it was some loser hobby in the eyes of society than accepted like it is now causing it to grow to bring in more revenue than movies and music combined. That drew the attention of the vultures.
They absolutely don’t. I’m just wondering why it works out financially for Marvel and Mission Impossible movies but not for games
Nevermind, I just remembered Call of Duty exists
It is less of an effort and time commitment to passively consume tv shows or movies. You can zombie out while watching it before going to sleep or fall asleep to it.
Games are an active medium in comparison with progression gated behind level of skill, so that makes it less accessible than something like movies or tv shows that is the equivalent of an auto clicker game.
Suppose this is why Marvel films just don’t work for me. Like, I can appreciate the artistic talent that went into things, I can appreciate that they’ve got impressive budgets and teams working on it, but narratively they kind of suck.
Sat down and watched Antman with a friend recently. I liked the moments the main character had with his kid. I liked it when the step-dad showed equal care for the kid as the father, and them sort of resolving some of their differences in that moment. That was nice.
I’m still bothered by the whole “when you shrink you retain your mass, so you’re essentially like a bullet” part, and how that concept got completely shit-canned for the rest of the film. You can’t just punt an ant-sized object weighing 90 kg, yet I think there was a moment where he literally got flicked away. Why even bother with some scientific-sounding BS if you’re not going to adhere to it?
Guess you’re just not supposed to think about it. But then, what is the point? I don’t read books to not think, I read books to experience something new, and have something to think about. Film works the same way for me.
Because filthy rich is more attractive for capital.
On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It’s been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it’s nowhere close to the same amount as with games – and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.
Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren’t allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won’t happen to the same extent for movies.
“Popcorn movies” are a big thing, and most of those big investments are these. They’re “turn off you brain for two hours and chill” events. A game, even the most chill ones, almost always last much longer and require more engagement. That is the defining trait of the medium. If you can totally turn your brain off then you didn’t make a game, you made an expensive movie. Games, for players, are an investment. Movies often aren’t.
Even then, turn your brain off and chill only fits a certain market segment. Sure, it’s a large market segment, just look at how popular the Marvel films are, but it’s not the entire market, and just like with gaming when something truly compelling comes along it tends to shake things up a bit.
Might be because you’re not just spending 2-3 hours with games, but >30h, often hundreds or even thousands of hours. Making that a compelling experience that people don’t quickly get tired of is much harder.
It’s not. Plenty of game franchises are similarly profitable.
It’s okay, we can just not play AAA games.
They aren’t bad, they just aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is… EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won’t leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.
It’s no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony’s been doing well because the games they’re publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that’s only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.
Everything’s turned into a live-service game because they’re the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.
Right? After AC3 i stopped caring.
The budgets are too big
People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.
In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.
And then you have Clair Obscur schooling studios on how it should be done.
I just started playing this game. I cried at the end of the fucking prologue. What amazing writing and voice acting.
This is… but the prologue. Steel yourself. You’ll need it.
Some dude pushed himself to finish it all in a weekend because he had a busy week ahead and was in shambles. Man was not made to handle that much feels in such a short period 🥲
I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur’s Gate 3.
Pretty good tbh.
BG3 is technically an indie game if you go by the literal definition of the term!
Nightreign pretty damn good too
Bring back games that you’re passionate for and gamers will love instead of designing a gamified soulless money funnel.
There are thousands of amazing indie games created by people who have an idea and a will to make something. I’ll spend my money there instead.
That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!
I dunno about anyone else. I don’t wanna pay 100 for a half finished buggy as fuck game. Wait a year for bugs to maybe be fixed. Only to then pay another 50 to get the 3 dlc’s to make it the complete game. So I can finally buy the same game the for 67th time as cause it’s got a new skin or some shit this year. All while the dev calls it staying power.
Wholeheartedly agree. Games these past few years have been big letdowns for the most part. There’s been a couple exceptions, but for the most part it’s been disappointing.
The gaming scene outside of AAA studios has been about as vibrant as it’s ever been.
Most of the nominees for GOTY have been AA studios at best and this was a stellar year imo with titles like Silksong, Hades 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and The Alters to name a few!
“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?
What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.
We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.
If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.
Can’t think of a game that really needed more than like 10GB of RAM. It’s all VRAM for textures and even then 8GB is enough
Painkiller wasn’t great either. Just saying.
I have played all the way through all the resident evil series, picking up the last 3 when they came out, which is rare for me. I am usually a patient gamer. I assume RES is a AAA game, but correct me if I am wrong.
Point is each one has been fantastic. Not many games hold my attention like those do. So apparently it can be done. Hoping the next one out soon is just as good.
Oh, and I played all of them on Linux, they worked flawlessly.
Yeah it’s always funny to see these quotes about games being bad, from people who make games of questionable quality
I don’t think the industry has the willpower to spend less money. They’re always going to chase the highest graphical quality.
Sometimes you get both. And then it’s really special (especially 8 years later when you can turn the settings up), see RDR2.
I think RDR2 was so memorable because the Western genre is so underrepresented these days. Sure it was such a popular genre with ton of movies and books for a while decades ago before video games were really a thing, but what was the most recent Western movie or TV show any of us have seen? I think the newest one I’ve seen was 1999’s Wild Wild West. Maybe 2004’s Home on the Range if that counts?
If we were getting 3 AAA titles released each year that fall in the Wild West genre RDR2 would just fade into the noise. Its a brilliant game but the only thing it notably did differently from any other open world RPG was unabashedly be a Wild West game that hit every possible trope of the genre including the silly ones like dueling quick draws
I disagree, it’s not just the setting. I’ve played about 50 hours of it in the last couple weeks and like 250 total, and the entire time I’ve felt its level of polish and detail is unmatched in any game.
“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.
I am screaming internally.
We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.
Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.
At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.
“Almost like” and “behaving like an independent studio” is vastly different from being one.
Well, yes it is.
That is exactly how being things and not being things are.
If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.
I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.
If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.
