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by hbn 767 days ago
AAA basically just means nice graphics at this point. You can't dump more money into a piece of art to make it better, that's why all the innovation comes from indie games. Look at Balatro, a guy made a poker roguelike and became a millionaire overnight. I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.

Everyone keeps suggesting AI NPCs. I'm sure someone's gonna take a crack at it and it'll go about as well the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 before everyone realized how horrible of an idea it is. If anything it'll make for a silly novelty like the VR games where you clumsily try to perform basic tasks with VR motion controls. But in this case you argue with an in-game LLM and see how quickly you can make it get defensive or start gaslighting you with made up facts about household cleaners you can combine to make a delicious cocktail.
4 comments
_mlbt 767 days ago
It’s nice graphics, but it’s also voice acting, and robust storytelling that sets a good AAA game apart from indie games for me.

Honestly even some of the indie games are getting pretty incredible graphics these days thanks to Unreal Engine.

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phone8675309 767 days ago
I'd rather see studios make 100 games that each cost $2 million to make than one $200 million game.
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johnnyanmac 766 days ago
Thing is 2M doesn't quite get you as far as you think. You get 10 devs (let's say, 4 programmers, 4 artists, 2 designers), pay them 100k each (which is lowballing it in med/high COL areas), and work 2 years. That's 2.4m just from labor, before advertising and other duties like community outreach. Sell for $30 (which is basically the top end of an "indie) and you need 80k copies to break even, more after platform cuts.

That's definitely a scale a AAA studio can afford, but far from what we associate "indie" with in our heads.That's where the exploitation begins.

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JetSpiegel 765 days ago
That's more devs than made Doom, Deus Ex, Fallout(?).
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johnnyanmac 765 days ago
The original games in the 90's? Yeah, probably. But cost of living was very different (so even if they made > 100k after adjusting for inflation, it went a lot farther), and the standards of games were much lower.

You can definitely make Doom 1993 with 1-3 people today (and without crunch). Making Doom 2016 levels of fidelity (even if we ignore the excellent optimization) would still be a very lofty task for 10 people. We still don't really have that many "full stack game devs" that can work at that scope and fidelity to bring the team size down.

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ProfMeowsworth 767 days ago
We have both of that, right now.
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npinsker 767 days ago
> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.

This is what game publishers do, and many of them are struggling too. It’s harder than it seems to pick winning horses. (Though in this case, it may be partially because more and more skilled teams are opting to self-publish.)

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chucke1992 767 days ago
> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.

Big publishers tried and did not succeed much. EA, Square Enix, T2 with Private Division and so on.

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