EvaUnit02 on 18/10/2024 at 15:38
2024 is the year where all of the AAA slop seems to be flopping. Core gamers seem to be finally no longer blindly consuming any old garbage shat out by AAA. Concord, flop. Star Wars Outlaws, flop. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, flop. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (+ FF16), flopped badly enough that it caused Squeenix to reconsider timed platform releases + taking exclusivity deals from any particular console manufacturer. MS corporate is now expecting the Xbox division is actually become profitable in the wake of the massive $69 billion Activision Blizzard King buy out, so they're now releasing first party games onto their competitor consoles (i.e. not just Minecraft).
The chickens are coming home to roost, all the short-sighted hiring sprees from COVID lockdown sales highs has court up with reality and companies are currently "right sizing". So many mass lay offs this year.
What do I think of this? A 1980s style market crash has been a long time coming and I welcome it. Maybe they'll start having to giving their customers what they actually want instead of treating them like findom pay piggies.
Ex: Just found out about this garbage, Project Ethos from 2K Games. All of the trend bandwagon marketing buzz words of the last 8ish years! Rogue-like, extraction, hero shooter, F2P, GaaS! Fortnite art style! Even industry shill publication IGN is being critical of this trash, pointing out that the game began development in 2019 and it's certainly looking like it too.
[video=youtube;v2EDJ84EDSI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2EDJ84EDSI[/video]
demagogue on 18/10/2024 at 17:10
There's always at least one or two good ones each year ... Baulder's Gate 3, Deathloop, Cyberpunk 2077 & Ghosts of Tsushima, although slim pickins this year.
The level that Unreal Engine 5 is at, an indie team can put together a high quality game, although a lot of drivel can be pumped out as well.
It's just as well though. Indie games are better for the soul anyway.
weylfar on 18/10/2024 at 18:38
Black myth Wukong is most likely most successful AAA game to date.
The Concrete Age on 19/10/2024 at 00:31
AAA Games of 2024 makes me feel so out of time, they look generic and appeal to no one other than Gen A.
Sulphur on 19/10/2024 at 03:03
I've been saying it for years, we don't need all these AAA games anyway, at least not at the current scale. You don't need to spend hundreds of millions to make a game, and you don't need 1000+ people working on a single game. Just make tight experiences with good art styles and put your effort into creativity and polish, invest in diversifying your output and marketing that, and you're not risking your company's profitability on a single game. Double Fine went this route, and while they haven't done bangers left and right until Psychonauts 2 came out, they managed to keep on keeping on.
Tomi on 19/10/2024 at 08:05
I don't think that AAA gaming is burning, but with the way how the industry (yuck) has been growing in the recent years, something like this was bound to happen. I do welcome the change of course, and it'd be great to see indie gaming become even bigger, but I think that all these big and boring franchises also have their place in gaming. They just need to scale down a bit, otherwise it'll end up in a disaster sooner or later.
Quote Posted by demagogue
There's always at least one or two good ones each year ... Baulder's Gate 3, Deathloop, Cyberpunk 2077 & Ghosts of Tsushima, although slim pickins this year.
Do games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Deathloop even belong to the AAA category though? Yes, they were very anticipated releases, but I'd imagine that the teams behind them were fairly small compared to some Ubisoft team working on the next Assassin's Creed game. That's just my gut feeling though and I'm probably wrong, and perhaps that's not even how you define an AAA game. :p
zajazd on 19/10/2024 at 10:52
The new PCSX2 is awesome. Na mean.
demagogue on 19/10/2024 at 14:48
Quote Posted by Tomi
...I'd imagine that the teams behind them were fairly small compared to some Ubisoft team working on the next Assassin's Creed game. That's just my gut feeling though and I'm probably wrong, and perhaps that's not even how you define an AAA game. :p
Fair enough. If you define them as the really mega-teams, then Assassins Creed, GTA6 / RDR3, and Elder Scrolls 6 are the kinds of upcoming good ones we can look forward to, and those can take upwards of a decade to produce evidently, and even then they're not guaranteed. Starfield was supposed to be Skyrim in space, and, well I wouldn't say it completely flopped, but it wasn't all that.
We've already been on this road a long time though. I'd even say Halflife 2. But I think I noticed this generation of it (since this is a repeating cycle like Eva was saying) with Mirror's Edge 2 (2016), which gutted what I thought was the perfect recipe for a perfect game flow they already had, like reinventing the sandwich to put the bread on the inside, and a year before Fortnite (2017) which was the apotheosis of pastel twitch of course.
Tomi on 19/10/2024 at 16:46
Alrighty. I didn't realise that Larian Studios has grown so huge. Definitely AAA then. :)
Edit: According (
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/assassins-creed-series-could-soon-have-2800-people-working-on-it/1100-6514231/) to this article on GameSpot, Assassin's Creed series has more than 2000 people working it, but that's just crazy. And last year they were planning to increase the number of people in the project:
Quote:
People working on other projects will be shifted to Assassin's Creed to grow the franchise and reach its 40% gain goal. Management also confirmed that there are currently 2,000 people working on Assassin's Creed, so the goal will be to reach 2,800.
