Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises year after year and aggressively sues anyone for anything.
Sony (somehow) believes that investors are what give their company value, not customers, and certainly not employees. They’re abandoning physical media and not backing down on their anti-consumer practices that only continue to get worse.
Microsoft has become the new EA, aggressively buying up every single schmedium-sized gaming studio they can get their hands on, mismanageing them all into the ground, then selling them off for parts to save their own asses while leaving talented studios to die on the vine. They’re basically buying the right to scrap their competition and they’ll get away with it because they have enterprise IT subscriptions to absorb the losses.
AAA gaming is dead. And greed killed it. I’ll be playing indie PC games and emulators for the foreseeable future.
Greed has been a problem in the AAA game space for a long time. It’s just that before reliable Internet connections, it was harder to exploit people.
Before this, it was lootboxes and gambling mechanics, before that, it was microtransactions, balancing the game to incentivise spending money, and before that it was chopping bits off the game and selling it as DLC.
Prior to that, the worst we got was cheap sequels and shovelware.
It’s all about maximizing shareholder value. Unfortunately, companies have come to the realization that happy customers are no longer the path to success. There is more value in capturing a market and then gutting services to squeeze those pennies out. Long term this can’t be sustainable but here we are.
There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
Indie doesn’t mean “small and pixel art game”. It means the studio is independent. Kingdom Come and BG3 were made by independent studios with little to no help from pubblishers (if any at all).
The rest you mentioned at max could be considered AA or simply A games IF there was a pubblisher behind them helping with development. What you said was a world of AAA games aside those mentioned is actually a world out there aside AAA games.
Kingdom Come is an Embracer joint; a subsidiary of Plaion. They’re definitely not independent. Baldur’s Gate 3 was self published but with a sizable investment from Tencent to fund its $100M budget. Valve is independent, but I don’t think anyone would say Half-Life 3 is their most anticipated indie game.
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises year after year and aggressively sues anyone for anything.
Sony (somehow) believes that investors are what give their company value, not customers, and certainly not employees. They’re abandoning physical media and not backing down on their anti-consumer practices that only continue to get worse.
Microsoft has become the new EA, aggressively buying up every single schmedium-sized gaming studio they can get their hands on, mismanageing them all into the ground, then selling them off for parts to save their own asses while leaving talented studios to die on the vine. They’re basically buying the right to scrap their competition and they’ll get away with it because they have enterprise IT subscriptions to absorb the losses.
AAA gaming is dead. And greed killed it. I’ll be playing indie PC games and emulators for the foreseeable future.
Greed has been a problem in the AAA game space for a long time. It’s just that before reliable Internet connections, it was harder to exploit people.
Before this, it was lootboxes and gambling mechanics, before that, it was microtransactions, balancing the game to incentivise spending money, and before that it was chopping bits off the game and selling it as DLC.
Prior to that, the worst we got was cheap sequels and shovelware.
It’s all about maximizing shareholder value. Unfortunately, companies have come to the realization that happy customers are no longer the path to success. There is more value in capturing a market and then gutting services to squeeze those pennies out. Long term this can’t be sustainable but here we are.
they will just end up putting mtx into everything.
There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
Indie doesn’t mean “small and pixel art game”. It means the studio is independent. Kingdom Come and BG3 were made by independent studios with little to no help from pubblishers (if any at all).
The rest you mentioned at max could be considered AA or simply A games IF there was a pubblisher behind them helping with development. What you said was a world of AAA games aside those mentioned is actually a world out there aside AAA games.
Kingdom Come is an Embracer joint; a subsidiary of Plaion. They’re definitely not independent. Baldur’s Gate 3 was self published but with a sizable investment from Tencent to fund its $100M budget. Valve is independent, but I don’t think anyone would say Half-Life 3 is their most anticipated indie game.
And all of those are available on an open platform digitally if not available on physical media.
Maybe controversial, but I and most of my friends have said fuck GTA6. We’ll wait to see what happens with the PC release.
they are lucky pokemon is sustaining nintendo directly and indirectly, even its mostly slop games. even the physical card game became kinda like slop.
luckily they wernt succesful against Palword, which is producing a better game than the consoles.