Will AAA gaming come crashing down?

Started by the-pi-guy, May 25, 2023, 01:54 AM

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the-pi-guy

Okay, title is a bit exaggerative, and not quite what I want to talk about.

I feel like we mostly talk about ballooning budgets not being sustainable. But I feel like something else could cause a bubble burst far sooner.

It takes an incredibly long time for so many of these games to get made. A game taking 5-10 years in development during the PS1 to PS2 era was usually "development hell". Today, that's becoming more normal.

I'm starting to think this may lead to issues in the future.

I think these long development times have been a major crushing theme for both MS and Sony. Showcases have been becoming less regular on Sony's end in particular. And they've both had very disappointing showcases. Games are too far off to show, and becoming less frequent.

I doubt it will end up mattering. There's thousands of smaller titles to make up for it.

But is it possible that we will hit a point where big companies will either start supplementing their bigger titles with more smaller titles or will we start seeing more of a trend where companies view the long development times as opportunity costs? Maybe it's more feasible to sell 5 $200 million games than wait 5x longer for a billion dollar game.  

kitler53

meh, if anything my problem is i have too many games and not enough time.


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nnodley

It's honestly kinda crazy to me that budgets are ballooning so much and so quickly when there are so many new and really advanced tools available that, imo, should be reducing the costs to make games.

However, I think the biggest issue is gamers want to complain when games don't continue to add more and more pointless systems or side quests which then requires so many more developers and time to make happen.

Just give me some super polished open world games without a ton of fluff or super polished single player linear action adventure games that don't try disguise themselves as a more open game.  The overly stuffed games is really annoying the hell out of me

Legend

AAA games only cost so much to make because they sell so well. If Sony games still sold like their biggest PS3 hits, they'd have no choice but to have smaller teams.

I think we're approaching the limits of development times though. Markets are dynamic and it's just too risky/stupid to make $200 million bets that take a decade to potentially pay off.

BananaKing

I think AI will drastically change game development. So we arent heading the same direction we have been going the past 3 or 4 gens.

darkknightkryta

A lot of markets should have been crashed a while ago.  It's just they spent the last 30 years rigging the system and hiding trillions of dollars, that no market will crash anymore.