Is anyone else REALLY missing the middle tier?

I'm really feeling the loss of the middle tier, those games that aren't quite AAA releases but also are not 2D indie titles.

Don't get me I'm a still a big fan of the Uncharted's the Far Cry's and I love the FTL's and Hotline Miami's of the gaming world. However being predominantly a console gamer and with my laptop not being powerful enough for some titles, I tend to miss a lot of indie stuff.

When I think back to the first two years of the 360 and some of the games I playerd that weren't AAA such as Condemned, Prey, Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Saints Row etc.

Now, all of these games aren't exactly of the greatest quality, but they were still fun to play, had some novel ideas and some them even turned into AAA franchises.

For this generation, in the first year and half I feel like the only middle tier games I've played have been Shadow of Mordor and Wolfenstien, almost as if I may as well just pack all my stuff away until October-December.

I know the industry has changed quite alot in the last decade, but does anyone else feel like the industry is less interesting without these sort of titles?

You're using the term AAA really weird here and I think you're talking about B games. AAA doesn't just mean it's an established and successful franchise, a AAA game is a game with a really large budget for development and advertising. Shadow of Mordor was definitely a AAA title. Wolfenstien was pretty close to AAA and maybe a little B game like (think blockbuster movies vs b movies).

A few of those games you mentioned from the last generation are also AAA games, they just might have been a bit pants.

I do miss those sort of titles though, ones that maybe released at the middle price mark and are probably a bit rubbish in places but you can justify it because they're cheaper and you might get 3 of them for the price of 2. But I think what's really changed is that the games releasing at those price points are just made better now.

I like games. Therefore I miss no 'type'.

Indie games have grown up in scale to fill in gaps left by your "B Tier" type publishers.

Also, some of the games you mentioned are just big games. I guess I have no idea what AAA even means when people use it now. Army of Two was made by EA, as was Fight Night. GRAW were huge UBISOFT games. Not sure what you mean with all of those.

Pretty much everything about your post is just baffling...

More than anything though, there are more different kinds of games being released now than there ever has been.

The majority of the games you mentioned either have released sequels or sequels in development. Just sayin'.

I know what you mean by "middle-tier" though the explanation as to why they have disappeared is pretty basic: The economy is fucked, game production is more expensive, and as a result publishers won't take risks on games that aren't guaranteed to sell millions of copies. The indie shift, while no less precarious, is a natural consequence of this.

Nobody sets out to make a bad game, obviously, but as has become apparent over the past few years; if a publisher loses faith in a game it's cheaper to cancel the project and close the studio, as oppose to pushing it through to completion on the offchance that it makes a load of money.

I miss the quirky middle tier games. Games like the released Deadly Premonition, Nier, ...

I know what you're talking about and I totally agree. You're talking about games like Murdered or Singularity or Remember Me, which are true 60$ retail experiences, but don't have the massive marketing and huge intellectual property attached to it, and thus march out to their deaths dutifully. We get far less middle-tier Japanese stuff now too, now all we get is the games with the biggest production budgets like Final Fantasy and Resident Evil.

Singularity is a better playing BioShock than any of the BioShocks. And the campaign feels like a throwback to 90s shooters for some reason, probably just that it isn't by-the-numbers modern military.

Although I will say that some of the games you have listed were and are AAA games; Saints Row, GRAW (it's a Clancy game!), Dead Rising. Saints Row sells millions and basically held THQ together for 18 months.

I played Binary Domain last year and it was one of the most charming, memorable experiences I had. I miss games like that. Those games that weren't great but at least dared to do something different or weird while still striving to be like a AAA title. And you often never really heard or knew much about those titles going into them, so it was usually a great surprise.

Blue Estate

Bound By Flame

The Last Tinker: City of Colors

Transistor

Murdered: Soul Suspect

Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark

Sniper Elite III

The Legend of Korra

The Evil Within

Styx: Master of Shadows

Lords of the Fallen

Zombie Army Trilogy

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

...

@kidavenger: Fair point.

@kidavenger: Exactly. Plus all your survival type games (most of which cost like $20-30 and are fully 3D with multiplayer but not the highest production values). There's a ton of stuff on Steam like that. Cities Skylines is another good example that just came out. Doesn't quite have that Sim City production value, but has a lower price (and plenty going for it on its own).

Yeah, I'm kind of glad we've at least got publishers like Deep Silver and Nordic Games kind of carrying THQ's torch. Even though the quality of their releases are questionable.

I'm also not terribly confident in a Saints Row 5 with Deep Silver footing the bill. You'd hope they'd know they need to put their best foot forward with that franchise and give Volition whatever they need to make Saints Row as awesome as possible, but I just don't know, man. That shoddy Saints Row IV/Gat out of Hell port to PS4/Xbone is a bummer.

When this conversation about middle tier happens, my mind immediately goes to Bulletstorm, Singularity, Binary Domain and the like. Yeah I'm gonna miss those types of games but I think the indie space is bringing it more and more each year so it's really helping to ease the pain. As a plus, indie games now cost less than those games did when people weren't buying them day one/week one, and often less than those games cost when the price was dropped to $40 after a few weeks.

There's absolutely loads of these game still around, Steam is completely full of them.

I love the B-tier stuff, but I think there's a shit-ton of them still being made and released, even on consoles. There's still a place for them in the market, and some of the publishers people have mentioned are still finding a way to fit that niche.

@kidavenger listed most/all of the recent ones.

Also who can forget this gem:

I'd argue that Transistor is more a high-point in the lower tier rather than a low-point in the higher tier. It's more like a Premium Indie Game than a Budget Retail Game. It's a big small thing rather than a small big thing.

@juggertrainuk: I don't quite miss the mid-tier as you described it, since I feel those types of games still get made, they just get slightly less/more funding or slightly bigger/smaller teams. However, it does kind of bum me out with a very specific kind of game: the dumb game with minimal (but still more than AAA) funding. The Deadly Creatures and Rise to Honors of the world.

Walking into a game store and seeing some C-List actor on a box cover with a generic title like 'Ultimate Justice', exclaiming "what the shit?" picking it up and taking one look at the back and going "Oh, I HAVE to buy this" is something that may have died in the PS2/OG Xbox days (and may have continued on life support for part of the next gen). That makes me really sad. I mean, Raven's Cry did come out recently, so it's obviously not extinct, but it's just not common enough.

Dumb games are great. Cheaper than AAA games but still with all of their confidence ("do we have the funding/talent for a third-person action game?" "Fuck it."). That way, you don't feel bad shelling out thirty bucks so you can appreciate games that do those genres or designs better.

I sometimes feel like I'm losing the foil of organized and well executed game development; the thing that used to show me why things like Far Cry or Dark Souls or MGS are so impressive. Hm, too deep? Besides that, they can actually be good in their own right.

Yup, though I think there were some on console last year that imo do look pretty good despite some of them getting a not-so-great reception (not sure these all qualify but games like Bound by Flame, Lords of the Fallen, Murdered Soul Suspect & Sherlock Holmes)

I reallyreally like midtier RPGs in particular, the last one I played was Two Worlds 2 and I really enjoyed it - sure it has some obvious issues but it's also got a whole lot of personality and some really cool/interesting ideas. I would definitely like to see more of them.

I mostly miss midlle-tier Japanese games on consoles. Those were the ones that were easily my favorite around the PS1 and PS2 era. Nowadays if you're not a AAA console developer you're probably sticking to handhelds, and although some good handheld games have come out of that, it has also limited their potential. I feel like indie games are still a different beast as well. (And more often than not lean toward old-school nostalgia than unique modern gameplay.)

Basically, more Suikoden, less Final Fantasy.

Middle tier? You mean big-three publisher AAA multiplatform titles? Because you do, that shit's middling at best.

I miss sort of sub par but still fun dime-a-dizen 3D platformers. Tak, Ty the Tazmanian Tiger, Scaler, etc etc etc. I loved that shit as a young teenager. I don't even think they were that good, I didn't have particularly discerning taste, but I miss them anyway.

@brodehouse: I think Transistor is just a normal ass indie game with a slightly higher price.

I think I understand what you're getting at, but like others have already mentioned in this thread, the B-tier game is still going strong. If anything they're more viable than ever with triple-A game budgets becoming so inflated that they have to sell millions upon millions of copies to see a reasonable return. If anything, the future holds even more cheaply developed gaming experiments as development tools become more accessible and cheap. It's an exciting time to be a gaming enthusiast.

Sure, your definition of "middle-tier" has gone away, but for the better. Those games were deemed middle-teir by the industry, not by consumers. Today it's more swing for the fences big budget titles with massive marketing budgets to make sure you know about it, and below that a plethora of video games of all shapes and sizes that are made successful and profitable by the audience and word of mouth. They're more games now than ever before, and because of that, the industry is more dependent on us consumers to pick out the gems.

It's a pretty great time to play video games, guys.

I'll always be a sucker for the expensive stuff. I love supporting indie games more than I love playing them most of the time. But I do kinda miss mid-tier stuff. A lot of my biggest trade-in regrets were mid-tier games with so much personality.

No, I do not particularly miss B games. I have too many great games to play in my back log as it is, I don't need more "average - alright" games to play as well.

What is an AAA game and what is a B game, or whatever is below it? Where is the cutoff, and who gets to determine this?

A good example of what I consider a middle tier or B game is Persona 4. (The series may have blown up quite a bit since, but it wasn't at the time.) It neither had the budget or the profits of a AAA game of the time, but the budget and scope was still significantly greater than what most indie games are doing now. B tier doesn't mean the actual quality of the game is lower than AAA, it just means the budget isn't as high. The cutoff between AAA and B may be arbitrary, but anyone can tell that a game like P4 didn't have anywhere near the development budget as FFXII.

Honestly, I remember the B-grade disappearing pretty hard during the beginning of last generation. Calling stuff like Lost Planet and Dead Rising low-level or B-tier or something...I don't agree with that? Those games were huge deals. When I think of the middle-tier, I think of weird shit like Trigger Man or really neat stuff like Rise to Honor. Of course, maybe I'm alone in loving Rise to Honor, but whatever. Smaller/independent games are getting to such a scope that I think they're essentially filling that gap. Not that every game will be a No Man's Sky or an Outlast because the people who make small games probably are interested in making small games. I used to have this notion that the sorts of people who make shit like Shovel Knight would morph into large studios and make big games (or at least bigger games), but that is 1) crazy, and 2) not what those guys really want to do.

The independent space is so exciting. Big, $60 releases are definitely having a hard time finding an equilibrium between being ridiculously expensive and taking a million billion fucking years to make, but I should think that studios will figure that shit out?

You know, when I first got my PS4, I felt like sort of a dipshit playing Trials and Strider and Trine, but I got over it. Those games are fucking good. Right now, small stuff like that is games, especially when major players keep fucking around with release dates only to release sub-par experiences, or busted experiences that obscure good games.

Indies are awesome!

Yeah I miss the so called "AA" games. Mid tier budget games from AAA publishing houses.

Today we get indie games and AAA games, but those in the middle feel comparatively rare.

Still I wouldn't go back to say like Gen 6 /early Gen 7 times, indie games more than make up the slack.

Depends on what you mean by middle tier. Budget wise than sure. I liked PSI Ops a lot. I don't think that had a massive budget. Before the Souls series hit it big Demon Souls was one of my favorite lower budget full price games. It did not feel like original Xbox games (The Thing) or (Tenchu Return from Darkness) were full budget titles. AAA and indie have killed those types of games off. The lower risk/reward of indie or the homogenized AAA games is the popular business models now. The likelihood of a new Cromehounds kind of IP is a rare sighting nowadays instead of having a few a year. Any time you lose an option needlessly (like always online or only 2 business models used instead of three) with no recompense is really bad for your hobby/business/life. Demand options. It makes things better when you do.

I still want another Metal Arms game

Yes , I miss 3d platformers .. :( :P

Why would you miss games that are, usually, of worse quality, but cost the same as a big tent pole 60 dollar game?

Honestly, I think games costing 60 dollars is idiotic. If games were to cost 40 dollars new, launch sales would increase, counteracting the 20 dollar deficet, and having more users for a product means publishers have a better chance to sell future games to them.

To me, the 60 dollar price point is to blame for AAA staleness. Its harder to convince someone to pay 60 dollars vs 40, and this causes publishers to take less chances, shitting out the same things year after year (which is a foolhearty tactic, as less people will buy games the more they become bored with them). I don't know, does this sound crazy/I'll informed, or sensible?

Middle tier still exists, but I do miss stuff like Psi-Ops or Red Faction coming out regularly. Those types of games that shoot for ambitious production values and fall short, but that make up for it with cool, outside the box design.

I feel like a lot of those were experimental, and the new non mid tier games represent the knowledge attained from the mid tier ones but done with either a lot of polish or in a very focused manner.

PC is still pretty ok for this. Games which fall in the massive chasm between <5 man team indie stuff and the $20m dollar multi-plat behemoths. Obviously most of them are complete trash, but they're there if you want them and you do get the odd gem.

I think most people in console land eventually figured out that you couldn't spend some-but-not-enough millions making a shitty Gears of War knock-off and expect to make Gears of War money out of it. Or indeed any money out of it. Go very big, go very small, go to a former Eastern Bloc nation and make mid-sized PC games, or go home.

Well some of them are genuinely just as (if not more) enjoyable than the big guns imo, be it because they have more personality/interesting ideas/don't always do what you'd expect or whatever. Sure they usually aren't as polished, though some like Demon's Souls I would say are practically impossible to distinguish from the AAA tier in terms of quality. Yeah there are some duds, and some are heavily flawed but all I care about is how much I enjoy the game. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding some of the AAA juggernauts kinda boring, while really liking some flawed & 'average' or even 'mediocre' games. And let's face it, even the biggest AAA games aren't always top-quality polished experiences.

I dunno about the price thing, I think the issue is more with the swelled budget of AAA games. That you can end up with a game selling millions & yet not break even is kinda crazy.

The combination of the rising costs of development and consumer demands of "bigger and prettier" destroyed that midtier at the beginning of last gen. That was a space that publishers like THQ amd Sony used to thrive in.

There is a lot from the PS2 days of the industry that has vanished. As AAA development constructs more and more, we are going to less to play. The Indies are trying to fill that space, but that is decent of gaming that isn't on the radar for the majority of the market.

I miss 3D platformers. I wish A Hat in Time would come out already, but that thing is wayyyyyyyyyy behind schedule, to an almost alarming degree.

When I say "middle tier", I mean budget, not quality. To that end, yes, I miss the middle tier. We need games that are in a middle ground between the creative freedom that a lower budget than AAA allows while still having enough of a budget to look reasonably polished and be in 3D. Indie games and smaller games do not fill that.

Condemned. Seriously needs a proper sequel.

@discomposure: I think you can definitely tell that Demon's Souls is not a AAA game. One look at that game and it's easy to tell it did not have the budget of any AAA game on the PS3. Of course, the mechanics and gameplay were still solid, so those rough edges don't matter to a lot of people, but that game certainly isn't flawless. But I do think Demon's Souls is good example of why a sub-AAA game is not inherently inferior. It's unique ideas and fun gameplay that makes a game great, not an endless budget. AAA games often play it too safe, it's those other games that are often more willing to take risks to stand out.

@zeik Fair enough, I guess I knew it wasn't COD budget-level but I honestly didn't think of it as being a mid-tier game when I played it but that might just be me. I admit I'm probably a poor judge of this kinda thing, int he past I've assumed several games were AAA which actually weren't so eh.

It certainly isn't as obviously midtier as some games though & it doesn't really have the same level of jankyness/unpolished-ness that seems to usually be associated with midtier games, at least on console. I know it's not flawless by any means & I probably worded the sentence wrong. I just meant that there are some real gems in the 'midtier' that are certainly not 'worse' than their AAA counterparts (I'm sure there are many who would argue Demons Souls is better than a lot of AAAs which is why I used it as an example), whilst there are others which have more obvious flaws & could legitimately be considered 'worse' due to these - but which can still be awesome&enjoyable too.

Anyway I agree with you.

Most of the kickstarter games I've played qualify as middle tier to me.

@juggertrainuk: I see where you're coming from. Unfortunately this is becoming the trend on consoles. PC seems to be where that nice middle ground still exists!

Don't forget Shadow Warrior or Space Marine. These were games limited in budget and reflected it. but still they could be good. I like indie games, but I also liked developers working with good concepts and such as say an AAA game, but more limited by budget. Not everything has to be Assassin Creed-Force Fed, or the hip indie bracket (we love pixels) bracket. I do think so called indie games are or have been creeping into the AA tier.

I absolutely miss it. Some of my all time favorite games are budget titles that got middling reviews in their days.

I guess we've still got Cyanide, Techland, City Interactive and a few other studios like that, but they're few and far in between, and the ones that are still around mostly do knockoffs of big titles.