Do Reviewers Have To Big Of Expectations For AAA Games? - General Discussion

#1 Edited by fiberpay (266 posts) - 2 months, 21 days ago

Today I was thinking about video games and I started to wonder if reviewers are expecting to much from AAA games. By that I mean AAA games are expensive to make, and having so much overhead makes a game have to sell a lot of copies to be profitable. That being said, doing new or exciting things are a big risk as you don't know how the market will react. So can you really knock a game for not being innovative?

On one hand your want them to do new things and push the medium but on the other if they try that and fail, there will be no one to left to try things.

So what do you guys think? I personally think we are headed for a future where the AAA titles do what the company knows works (ie. COD) and the smaller teams will work on the new cheaper innovative games and when they find something new that works will make its way into the AAA titles.

#2 Posted by Danteveli (798 posts) - 2 months, 21 days ago

No reviewers do not expect too much. Often they expect too little. Gamers should not really care about how much more expensive is making games since we are the ones paying for it. You can say the game is not innovative since not everyone wants to play that exact game every couple weeks.

#3 Posted by Soapy86 (2425 posts) - 2 months, 21 days ago

@danteveli said:

No reviewers do not expect too much. Often they expect too little.

Came in to post this.

#4 Posted by Shakey1245 (49 posts) - 2 months, 21 days ago

Surely by their nature a AAA game will have high expectations surrounding it driven by advertising. Most AAA games do pretty well at the reviewing stage as long as they live up to those expectations, if it doesn't then there is a sense that the consumer has been lied to during the promotion of the game and that they should be told that the reality does not live up to what the developers/publishers led people to believe.

As for innovation, it doesn't have to be some grand, world changing alteration to the existing status quo. It just has to be different enough from other games in the same genre or previous games in the series to make it worth, in the reviewers point of view, your time and money. This could be something as simple as improving on an existing mechanic or feature so that it is more intuitive to use or fun to play. Of course it is a gamble for the devs and the publishers because if they muck it up then it will reflect poorly on them and the game.

They have to do something to differentiate it from the competition or prequels other than a new single player campaign with multiplayer that contains the same maps, weapons and perks as last time otherwise why bother getting the new one? Right?