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What has happened to big and AAA PC only games?

M

mclem

Member
Tain said:
The crowd funded heavy-hitters seem to fit pretty well under the "AAA" label.
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Other than Star Citizen (which is pushing numbers that perhaps merit AAAA), not really. A few million isn't AAA.

To be fair, though, PC is probably best thought of as on a whole different scale. It, after all, is a platform where AA does still thrive.
 
O

omgwtfbentime

Member
Stuff from Blizzard (aside from Diablo 3) and the flood of MOBA's would like to have a word with you.

The AAA PC game hasn't really died as much as console development has become a lot easier, particularly for western developers. Microsoft did a really impressive job with the original Xbox getting a lot of formerly PC exclusive Western developers to make port games to their system, and as consoles became more powerful and the networking/online capabilities of them went mainstream it kind of stopped making sense to make most games exclusively on PC. Games are also becoming more and more expensive to make, so unless its a game that simply can't really work on consoles, chances are most developers are going to make it multiplatform.
 
D

Dictator93

Member
There are big PC games, there are little PC games, there are hardware stressing PC games that are impossible on consoles, there are non hardware stressing games that are impossible on consoles.

I am having a great time with PC gaming and it is the best it has been in years. I really do not care so much that corporate jerk offs do not sponsor what would arguably mass-homogenized games on PC.
 
A

ALLseeingEYE

Member
Why should we have to fund our own games? Either way, if you buy it, you are still funding it. I personally think the success of kickstarter for PC games has only been for the best.

Videogame development is of course a business, that needs to sustain itself in order to exist. I honestly see very little reason for a company to invest exclusively in PC development, unless it seems like a viable business, and smart creative direction. So unless your game absolutely cannot be played on console, what's the point of keeping it exclusive? I love the massively multi-platform nature of the industry these days.

The fact that Pillars of Eternity, Star Citizen, Divinity: Original Sin, Broken Age exist at all, is amazing. I actually love when PC gamers help fund games, since it funds games we actually want, and it allows people who are super passionate or well-off, to spend as much as they want, in order to help out.
 
G

Genio88

Member
Maybe because Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo own their consoles and make exclusives AAA games for them, whilest no one actually owns PC hardware, so nobody has the real interest on making AAA exclusive games for it, especially nowadays when making a AAA game costs a lot of money and nobody can afford to sell it just on one platform
 
E

EdwardTeach

Member
Gunslinger said:
I agree too aside from MMO most large PC games are f2p. Even the MMO genre is dying. Every single p2p MMO post wow failed miserably. They either went f2p or was shut down. B2p games don't find much success on pc unless its made by blizzard lol.
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That is not true, there are a lot of b2p exclusives on the pc that do just fine. Total war Rome 2 has sold ~1.5mil, the annual football manager games always sell in the region 900k (+/- 100k), Crusader kings 2 has over 1mil in sales and over 7mil in dlc and expansion sales. I could go on but these games make a fuck ton of money especially something like FM or Crusader kings which don't have horrendous development costs. All games do terribly when compared to wow or the mobas (or to a much lesser degree a big seller like diablo 3) but in reality many pc devs are thriving. I would suspect as an annual franchise FM could be in the same ballpark for profit when compared with the likes of diablo 3.
 
M

mclem

Member
loganclaws said:
RPGs have huge budgets, if you do some research in game development you'll realize that.
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Pillars of Eternity's Kickstarter made just $4M. Not sure how much it earned after that, but usually Kickstarter drives the vast majority of the budget. What are you regarding as a huge budget?
 
J

Jacksinthe

Banned
Fantastapotamus said:
Pirates were always there. That didn't change.
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Ease of access did change and drastically. Sharing your floppies with friends at school won't net thousands of pirated copies on day 1, unlike today.

Today we have the ability to share class with billions of people and share notes without ever handing a physical item to anyone.

Scale changed dramatically. Not the same ball park anymore so the argument that piracy was always there cannot work. It was there, but not nearly the same scope as today.
 
Denton

Denton

Member
Why should anyone with big budget restrict themselves artifically to a single platform with no moneyhats if they are making a game that is controller friendly ? That would be utterly idiotic, especially now with consoles being midrange x86 machines and porting is easier than ever.

Still, there are plenty of big PC only games that are on PC only because they actually use PC's capabilities. The fact that nobody artificially restricts games to PC only is a good thing.
 
petran79

petran79

Banned
Difference in spending is not that high if you consider that PC game developing companies do not have to pay huge sums in royalties, retailers, technical support and marketing. Digital distribution helped to reduce the costs significantly.

AAA console game costs are mostly bloated.
 
L

loganclaws

Plane Escape Torment
HK-47 said:
An AAA RPG is something like Skyrim or Dragon Age. Not indie CRPGs like Underrail.
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Whether it's a crpg (isometric view) or a regular rpg is not really a deciding factor. The design of RPGs requires huge budgets regardless. This is why all of them are pretty much AAA.
 
A

ALLseeingEYE

Member
AkuMifune said:
Ain't no one left willing to pay $60 for a retail game on PC anymore. Steam has spoiled us I guess.
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I don't think that's entirely true, as games like Star Citizen, Diablo 3, Starcraft, Civilization, Guild Wars, Elder Scrolls seem to be able to do well at $50-60 price points, but I do agree that it's rare. Personally, I think PC is doing scaleability right. It's simply a ridiculous idea to expect every game to have the same size of budget, same pricepoint, and compete with entirely top-tier visuals. It's better when we have games of all sizes, quality, and budgets. It would certainly be nice to see some more blockbusters on PC these days, but we still get more than enough great, pretty things to play on PC.
 
M

mclem

Member
petran79 said:
Difference in spending is not that high if you consider that PC game developing companies do not have to pay huge sums in royalties, retailers, technical support and marketing. Digital distribution helped to reduce the costs significantly.

AAA console game costs are mostly bloated.
Click to expand...

AAA console game costs are high, but it's not due to royalties, retailers or tech support. Possibly marketing, but that's a different kettle of fish and regarded as an investment.
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
loganclaws said:
Whether it's a crpg (isometric view) or a regular rpg is not really a deciding factor. The design of RPGs requires huge budgets regardless. This is why all of them are pretty much AAA.
Click to expand...

Pillars of Eternity was funded on around 4-5 million dollars. If you think PoE was an AAA game you dont understand the term.
 
D

decoy11

Member
I'm going to take a guess at it but the complexity of graphics has increased over the years but the workflow hasn't kept up. Those crazy hi-res textures has got to be a lot of work to do compared to what something like half-life 1 had to do. With more man hours needed mean more cost to produce a game. Eventually someone had to of ran the numbers and saw it wasn't worth the money to do AAA PC games.
 
M

mclem

Member
Robert at Zeboyd Games said:
I'm guessing that's not the case in most instances. Generally, developers pump a lot of their own money into their Kickstarter games beyond what they raise on Kickstarter.
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Ah, fair point. I was largely thinking in terms of non-Kickstarter crowdfunding, but there is indeed also budgeting from within, which is why I'm curious what PoE finished at in real terms.
 
Megatron

Megatron

Member
funkypie said:
This isn't a PC gaming is dying thread btw, I am a pc gamer myself but I just find the lack of exclusives or games that take advantage of a PC lacking.

most pc games these days by the big companies are all multiplat, sure PC gets the best version depending on your hardware but still.

sure PC gamers get indie titles, MMOs and F2P games in abundance.

apart from certain games like Cities skyline that would be near impossible with a controller, we are not seeing a lot of big games no more.

Apart from Grey Goo when was the last time a decent even semi big RTS was released? I can't think of one, and GG wasn't exactly a big release either.

However, we are seeing a lot of crowd funded PC only games, such as Pillars, Elite and dare I say star citizen. Why should PC gamers have to fund their own gamers, we know pc gamers will buy games, especially good ones, pillars and elite seem to be very well liked, I have not played either yet. Diablo 3 sold record numbers with its PC launch so what is the problem?

It also makes upgrading your rig less of a priority, like I said sure you can get the best looking version of GTA and yeah mod it, scale it up 4k or whatever you do, but these multiplats are not exactly pushing PC either.

On a final note, how often do these multiplats run like shit on PC to? I remember DMC and a few other games off the top of my head being good ports. It seems PC games have to settle for multiplats to an extent and not always getting a great port either.
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Why do you want exclusives? Do you only like games if other people can't play them? If aaa exclusives are so important, I guess get a ps4 and a WiiU and an XB1. Problem solved.
 
A

Almighty

Member
loganclaws said:
Whether it's a crpg (isometric view) or a regular rpg is not really a deciding factor. The design of RPGs requires huge budgets regardless. This is why all of them are pretty much AAA.
Click to expand...

Yeah I think you are misunderstanding what people are talking about when they say AAA. They are talking about games with budgets in the tens of millions and sometimes much, much more. Pillars of Eternity for example 4 millionish budget isn't even in the same league as that.
 
R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
The cost of making a game with graphics that stress the PlayStation and Xbox is high enough. Imagine the cost of making a game with graphics that push modern $400 GPUs. This is why you really only see them in genres that don't work on consoles: strategy games, MOBAs, some MMOs, etc.

Plus a lot of the companies that used to make the big PC games got a taste of that console cash after Microsoft built a console with a development environment PC developers could actually understand.

The need for crowdfunding happens because by and large, publishers aren't willing to greenlight games that aren't AAA these days and thus aren't "sure" to sell five million copies. A lot of what made up classic PC gaming falls into that middle-tier that's been squeezed out of today's game industry. I hope the kickstarter games coming out now are just that -- kickstarters that become sustainable businesses for their developers so we don't have to crowdfund inXile's or Frontier's next games.
 
Darkangel

Darkangel

Member
When I think of a AAA PC game I think of something like Half-life 2, Doom 3, or Far Cry. Those were games that significantly raised the technology bar and were hard or impossible to replicate on consoles (though I have to say the Xbox Doom port was not bad).

I think Crysis 1 was the last true "AAA" PC exclusive. Maybe you could count The Witcher 2, but it was more of a mid-budget game that ended up looking nice. Battlefield 3 was also a bit of a throwback to the glory days of PC gaming seeing as the console version could barely run and was significantly compromised.

I know PC gaming is supposedly more alive than ever, but there will never be another year like 2004 (Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-life 2). Most of the "big" PC exclusives are either low budget indie games, low budget DOTA/F2P games, or large budget MMOs.
 
JordanN

JordanN

Banned
Far too expensive with little incentives.

Sony and Microsoft can at least help foot the bill if you decide to make an AAA game console exclusive. On PC, where is the help coming from? And don't say kickstarter.
 
S

SneakyStephan

Banned
PC has way more exclusives than all the consoles combined, it also has way more good exclusives.

I like how OP decides what games count and don't count to fit his statement.
Other than games like cities skylines and mmos and all those hugely popular f2p games and the recent CRPGS and space sims , TCGs , the dozens of unique IPs and all the hundreds of games that wouldn't work well on a controller there are no pc exclusives guys!
 
M

mkenyon

Banned
Megatron said:
Why do you want exclusives? Do you only like games if other people can't play them? If aaa exclusives are so important, I guess get a ps4 and a WiiU and an XB1. Problem solved.
Click to expand...
From a mechanics point of view, there's a lot of concessions or things that don't even happen when it's being developed for two different systems with very different methods of interacting with those systems.

FPS games, for example, require different balance tweaks to play properly with KB&M compared to a controller.
SneakyStephan said:
PC has way more exclusives than all the consoles combined, it also has way more good exclusives.

I like how OP decides what games count and don't count to fit his statement.
Other than games like cities skylines and mmos and all those hugely popular f2p games and the recent CRPGS and space sims , TCGs , the dozens of unique IPs and all the hundreds of games that wouldn't work well on a controller there are no pc exclusives guys!
Click to expand...
TBH, I was waiting until they crossed out everything except The Order.
 
F

family_guy

Member
It's also becoming hard to find good stuff since advertising seems almost nonexistent on the platform. Never heard of Pillars of Eternity until it was released. Going on Steam is liking trying to find something on the ios app store. There's just too much junk and copycat games to sift through.
 
R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
Darkangel said:
When I think of a AAA PC game I think of something like Half-life 2, Doom 3, or Far Cry. Those were games that significantly raised the technology bar and were hard or impossible to replicate on consoles (though I have to say the Xbox Doom port was not bad).

I think Crysis 1 was the last true "AAA" PC exclusive. Maybe you could count The Witcher 2, but it was more of a mid-budget game that ended up looking nice. Battlefield 3 was also a bit of a throwback to the glory days of PC gaming seeing as the console version could barely run and was significantly compromised.

I know PC gaming is supposedly more alive than ever, but there will never be another year like 2004 (Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-life 2). Most of the "big" PC exclusives are either low budget indie games, low budget DOTA/F2P games, or large budget MMOs.
Click to expand...

When you think about it 2007 in general was the last year for "big" PC-targeted games that weren't mostly online-focused. That's when you got Crysis, STALKER, and the first Witcher game. Around 2011 and 2012 AAA developers, impatient for new hardware, started to focus on PC again and then throw out shitty console ports like Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, Crysis 3, and Far Cry 3. Maybe that'll happen again when the PS4 and Xbox One get too old.

The closest thing to such a game I can think of today is ArmA 3 (and probably ArmA 2 before it). You could probably get the core control scheme of that game to work on a console, and its graphics don't outshine the best looking PS4 games, but everything that goes on in that game from a CPU standpoint just would not go down on current console CPUs. Maybe that's just because of how terribly optimized ArmA still is.
 
BibiMaghoo

BibiMaghoo

Member
funkypie said:
I just find the lack of exclusives or games that take advantage of a PC lacking.
Click to expand...

How does one take advantage of something that varies massively across users, in both hardware and software, in cost and in power, and in input?

AAA games push what hardware can do to get the best looking results. You cannot do this with PC games, because what exactly is the hardware they are pushing? Do they push the games for $1000 dollar video cards and top end CPU's? How many customers would they have?

I think the answer is because it's impossible to satisfy that criteria in any sort of way that would make it profitable, hence why games include settings for such users, but are not aimed at them specifically. The majority of steam users have integrated video cards. It cannot be done, because no one wants to put the money up for that.
 
C

CecilRousso

Member
Exclusives makes less and less sense as the budgets rise, so unless a party that pays for the exclusivity comes up, AAA PC exclusives are bound to be rare. Those that will show up will be the ones that really takes advantage of the platform.

I'm pretty comfortable with PC being the platform where most games show up though. Exclusives, PC/XBOX "exclusives", PC/Playstation "exclusives" and ports.
 
L

loganclaws

Plane Escape Torment
HK-47 said:
Pillars of Eternity was funded on around 4-5 million dollars. If you think PoE was an AAA game you dont understand the term.
Click to expand...

Almighty said:
Yeah I think you are misunderstanding what people are talking about when they say AAA. They are talking about games with budgets in the tens of millions and sometimes much, much more. Pillars of Eternity for example 4 millionish budget isn't even in the same league as that.
Click to expand...

It's easy to be dismissive and just say "you don't understand", but I explained how RPGs in general require extensive design and development and hence much more budgets based on their nature. I don't have development budgets, but Lords of Xulima for example has extensive voice acting and a massive sound track that I'm sure required a significant budget, not to mention the huge world requiring all that background artwork.
 
T

tuxfool

Banned
loganclaws said:
It's easy to be dismissive and just say "you don't understand", but I explained how RPGs in general require extensive design and development and hence much more budgets based on their nature. I don't have development budgets, but Lords of Xulima for example has extensive voice acting and a massive sound track that I'm sure required a significant budget, not to mention the huge world requiring all that background artwork.
Click to expand...

You're the one arguing it is AAA.

The term isn't related to the quality of the game but rather the budget of the game. I'd say that anything under 10m isn't AAA.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
Spork4000 said:
We can't get AAA exclusive ANYTHING anymore. Dev costs for big games are just too high to risk on one platform
Click to expand...

Yup, I agree with this. There are still AAA PC games being made, Wicther 3 and Project Cars are good example of this as their lead platforms are on the PC. But these games are being pushed out to multiple platforms to reach a larger user base.
 
M

mkenyon

Banned
BibiMaghoo said:
How does one take advantage of something that varies massively across users, in both hardware and software, in cost and in power, and in input?

AAA games push what hardware can do to get the best looking results. You cannot do this with PC games, because what exactly is the hardware they are pushing? Do they push the games for $1000 dollar video cards and top end CPU's? How many customers would they have?

I think the answer is because it's impossible to satisfy that criteria in any sort of way that would make it profitable, hence why games include settings for such users, but are not aimed at them specifically. The majority of steam users have integrated video cards. It cannot be done, because no one wants to put the money up for that.
Click to expand...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92xo7r3FQXw
 
L

loganclaws

Plane Escape Torment
tuxfool said:
You're the one arguing it is AAA.

The term isn't related to the quality of the game but rather the budget of the game. I'd say that anything under 10m isn't AAA.
Click to expand...

Yes it's AAA based on the budget which is related to quality and depth.
 
M

Mandoric

Banned
MMOs and F2P can easily be AAA from a budgetary standpoint. Think of the $200m SWTOR, the massive ad pushes for every WoW expansion, the PC-leading FF14 with PlayStation as an afterthought that arrived three years later; think of DotA and LoL filling arenas.

In terms of design cues? Early online, lack of a platformholder to paywall online, and online play as the only moderately effective DRM all encourage titles that are more about the journey and less about the destination, at the same time as a lack of platformholder-bankrolled marketing blitzes and a far larger potential userbase mean there's no need to focus everything on being the year's one title that every ~gamer~ can and will enjoy.
 
F

funkypie

Banned
Megatron said:
Why do you want exclusives? Do you only like games if other people can't play them? If aaa exclusives are so important, I guess get a ps4 and a WiiU and an XB1. Problem solved.
Click to expand...

I think my point was more of taking advantage of what pc can offer rather than restricting other from playing.
 
M

mclem

Member
loganclaws said:
Yes it's AAA based on the budget which is related to quality and depth.
Click to expand...

I have worked on AAA games with budgets in the $50M bracket. Lords of Xulima did not have a budget even a tenth of that. Not even sure it had a budget a hundredth of that.
 
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