What's next for AAA games?
by meteora3255
It’s not an exaggeration to say that AAA gaming has reached an inflection point. Games cost more than ever to make, but only a few of them break through and sell enough to be profitable. Excellent games, like Alan Wake 2 , can be Remedy’s fastest selling game while also taking over a year to just recoup its costs. Star Wars Outlaws was projected by analysts to sell 5.5 million units in its firs...
It’s not an exaggeration to say that AAA gaming has reached an inflection point. Games cost more than ever to make, but only a few of them break through and sell enough to be profitable. Excellent games, like Alan Wake 2, can be Remedy’s fastest selling game while also taking over a year to just recoup its costs. Star Wars Outlaws was projected by analysts to sell 5.5 million units in its first six months and this was such bad news that it caused Ubisoft’s stock to tank, reaching a ten year low. At the same time, jobs in the industry have become less stable than ever, with even the most successful studios succumbing to layoffs. With rumors swirling that the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI may be priced as high as $100, it’s past time to have a serious discussion about sustainability.
Any discussion on sustainability has to begin with budgets. Look no further than Call of Duty, where 2015’s Black Ops 3 cost a reported $450 million. Five years later, Black Ops: Cold War cost Activision a reported $700 million. And it isn’t just massive multiplayer focused games that are seeing these increases. A leaked presentation revealed that Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 cost three times as much as the original did in 2018, another five year gap. That presentation went as far as asking if players would even notice the difference.
To rein in budgets, I’d argue that developers should focus on decreasing the size and scope of their games while also maximizing the use of their existing assets. This doesn’t come without risk. Players have grown accustomed to AAA games becoming massive undertakings, with dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of gameplay and maps spanning entire continents. Attempting to cut back, or reuse assets like a map, might cause some players to reevaluate their purchase and opt against it. However, I think we have evidence that proves that a good game can overcome these perceived shortcomings.
I look to the early success of Obsidian’s Avowed, with Microsoft reportedly happy with the game’s sales so far. Avowed is an anomaly, it doesn’t feature the large open world of similar first-person RPGs such as Skyrim and it’s main quest can be completed in around 20 hours, with a completionist run coming in near the 60 hour mark. Compare that to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla where the main story is likely to take 60 hours on its own, with a completionist run easily doubling that. Compared to its competition, it’s downright tiny. But that hasn’t stopped it from generating positive buzz, from both critics and players. I don’t remember every last tower I climbed or bandit camp I cleared out in Assassin’s Creed Origins, and at times trying to complete everything felt like a chore. While it may be nice to have hundreds of things to do, it doesn’t mean it’s always fun. Games like Avowed show that 20 well designed hours can be better than 150 hours of crossing things off a list.
The other games I look to as inspiration are the Like a Dragon/Yakuza series and the most recent The Legend of Zelda games. These games show how you can reuse assets and designs without losing that feeling of surprise and wonder. In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom the game uses the same map as Breath of the Wild along with a lot of the existing assets for everything from enemies to weapons. While there are changes throughout, the game is clearly built upon the framework of its predecessor. Last year’s Echoes of Wisdom is similar, reusing and remixing assets from the Link’s Awakening remake. Even though a lot of what you see in these games is similar, things have still been changed or adjusted to feel new.
The Like a Dragon series does something similar. The vast majority of games take place in the fictional Kamurocho district of Tokyo, with some jaunts to other cities. The map itself has remained largely the same across the series’s history. Playing through the series, you can feel the city change. A restaurant in one game may be closed in the next, shops may have moved, but you can still navigate it almost exactly as you did before, much like a real city. When games have used the same engine, they have reused more than just the layout, with Yakuza Kiwami reusing much of the work from Yakuza 0. More recently, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii will reuse the map from Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
The benefit of reusing assets like this is obvious. Developers only have to pay to design the map or create the assets once, saving time and money. It also keeps developers from starting fresh each and every time. When done right, players won’t care that they’ve seen this map or that enemy before. Instead, they’ll enjoy the fun of seeing familiar settings that have changed over time.
Even if AAA games get their budgets under control, they still may not be sustainable. As we continue to live in a world where we can find hyper specific entertainment made to our exact tastes, creating something with the mass market appeal to sell at the level required may not be possible for all but the most ubiquitous franchises. But as someone who counts some AAA games among my all-time favorites, I feel that it’s something the industry has to try to save. Microtransactions didn’t work. Games as a service didn’t work. Reducing size and scope may not work, but at this point it may be one of the last chances the industry has.