Support NeoGAF

[tusharngf]

Triple AAA Gaming is officially dead in 2024. Helldivers 2 Palworld Last Epoch and more all prove that games like Skull and Bones and other Triple AAA games aren't what the customer wants anymore.

Ignore cringe title of yt video

Great video from Novemberhotel.

TLDR;

1. AAA game budgets are too big
2. AAAA games with even bigger budgets and even less innovation
3. HellDIVERS and PALWORLD make more sense as AA titles
4. Makes fun of Bungie GDC presentation.
5. 70$ live service games suck
6. Games developed by passionate gamers work
7. Rise of new smaller studios
8. New games lack identity and they are generic

 

[LavitzSlambert]

Shawn Layden is having the last laugh.

 

[NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt]

Triple AAA Gaming is officially dead in 2024. Helldivers 2 Palworld Last Epoch and more all prove that games like Skull and Bones and other Triple AAA games aren't what the customer wants anymore.

Ignore cringe title of yt video

Great video from Novemberhotel.

TLDR;

1. AAA game budgets are too big
2. AAAA games with even bigger budgets and even less innovation
3. HellDIVERS and PALWORLD make more sense as AA titles
4. Makes fun of Bungie GDC presentation.
5. 70$ live service games suck
6. Games developed by passionate gamers work
7. Rise of new smaller studios
8. New games lack identity and they are generic

Forgot to add all the woke stuff that's been added to AAA Gaming

 

[Danjin44]

It can if they dont spend stupid amount of money......Elden Ring is AAA game and yet FROM managed to make huge game that has huge expansion without going overboard with the budget.

Also we get high quality AA games.....

 

[Aces High]

Every AAA plays the same.

We have achieved complete creative bankruptcy.

But the absolute worst part of this gen was when AAA devs attacked Larian for delivering a good video game with Baldur's Gate 3.

Shame.

 

[LectureMaster]

Kinda clickbait honestly. Just because two high budget GaaS games flopped doesn't mean AAA is not sustainable.

How quickly you forgot 2023 was loaded with games that critically acclaimed and commercially successful?

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom hits 19.5M sold

Nintendo reported that its cumulative sales of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, has hit 19.5 million copies sold.

venturebeat.com

Hogwarts Legacy Reveals Updated Sales Numbers

Open world Harry Potter action-RPG Hogwarts Legacy reveals its updated sales numbers, and they're quite impressive.

gamerant.com

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 sales zip past 10 million copies

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sales have impressed as the game has now sold over 10 million copies in four months.

www.destructoid.com

 

[Sleepwalker]

Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are not AAA games despite what their makers want to make you believe.

Suicide Squad is a short campaign game with repetitive levels and mechanics that could've been spun out on the PS3.

Skull and bones was a shitty outsourced project farmed out to Singapore in order to get goverment grants, also stuck in development hell. Yes these kind of grifts are unsustainable, as they should be.

 

[DaleinCalgary]

Ban him

 

[kazuyamishima]

I dunno, all the ones below are/were profitable.

 

[bender]

You can't point to successes and failures in games of all sorts of shape, sizes, and budgets.

 

[Danjin44]

Also even without watching the video I'm guessing 99% examples in that video is about western games and ignoring the fact in 2024 we got LOTS OF great Japanese games and still hasn't stopped.

 

[Bumblebeetuna]

Made it about halfway through.

I guess some people have already forgotten how amazing 2023 was, chock full of good AAA games. A couple of stinkers release and suddenly the model is unsustainable.

The two examples given in the video are Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones. One could argue those aren’t even really AAA games but AA games wrapped up in a AAA marketing campaign. Also a couple of dev hell games don’t negate the plethora of good AAA games we see.

 

[Perrott]

Why are all these morons pushing this narrative that a shit, worthless product like Palworld - which is at the borderline of being a scam on the level of The Day Before - makes for a more sustainable business model than that of making 200M AAA games?

Only reason why a 200M AAA game can fail in today's world is if it sucks, which kills the short to mid term sales momentum necessary for it to recoup its development costs.

The Callisto Protocol's problem wasn't that it cost like 150M, but that it has a 69 on Metacritic. Had it been a high 80s or a 90, it'd have sold around as much as any modern Resident Evil title. The same logic applies to Skull & Bones relative to the quality of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, or to Suicide Squad relative to Batman: Arkham Knight.

 

[Aces High]

Why are all these morons pushing this narrative that a shit, worthless product like Palworld - which is at the borderline of being a scam on the level of The Day Before - makes for a more sustainable business model than that of making 200M AAA games?

Only reason why a 200M AAA game can fail in today's world is if it sucks, which kills the short to mid term sales momentum necessary for it to recoup its development costs.

The Callisto Protocol's problem wasn't that it cost like 150M, but that it has a 69 on Metacritic. Had it been a high 80s or a 90, it'd have sold around as much as any modern Resident Evil title.

Why would Palworld be a scam?

It has 94% on Steam from 240k reviews.

 

[Danjin44]

Why are all these morons pushing this narrative that a shit, worthless product like Palworld -

I dont people liking that game but his example of good game against AAA is Palworld while ignoring games like Elden Ring? are fucking kidding me!?

 

[SHA]

You mean modern AAA getting lazier, it takes 6 years to build the next mass effect, the past wasn't even immune to AAA standards, there were shitty AAAs, it wasn't perfect either, but real numbers are real indicator of how well this industry is doing, if we just get ten ips at mass effect trilogy tier, Borderlands prime tier, Bioshock tier, you get the point, it would be sufficient, you won't hear complaints.

 

[Luigi Mario]

Also even without watching the video I'm guessing 99% examples in that video is about western games and ignoring the fact in 2024 we got LOTS OF great Japanese games and still hasn't stopped.

Kinda. Some comments even bring up recently released AAA games like TotK or Rebirth, but he responded to those as either not counting due to being remakes/sequels or just being overrated.
So, rather than ignoring them he just dismisses them because they don't fit his narrative.

 

[Danjin44]

Kinda. Some comments even bring up recently released AAA games like TotK or Rebirth, but he responded to these as either not counting due to being overrated or being remakes/sequels.
So, rather than ignoring them he just dismisses them because they don't fit his narrative.

He think game TotK and Rebirth are "overrated" but he chooses Palworld over them?......FUCK THAT!

Yeah. I'm not gonna even bother watch this type of video, waste of time.

 

[SHA]

Pal world is a Trojan to xbox and Playstation, you're injecting Nintendo numbers into these two systems, you get what I'm saying?

 

[Aces High]

Pal world is a Trojan to xbox and Playstation, you're injecting Nintendo numbers into these two systems, you get what I'm saying?

Palworld isn't even available on PlayStation.

 

[kikkis]

Since when have supposed "innovative" games dominated sales charts? If gamedevs cant tell if innovative mechanic is fun or not, why are they gamedevs?

 

[lh032]

maybe devs should go for path tracing 16 bit games

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

"pAlwOrLd wAs mAdE bY ReeL GaMuRZ!!!"

 

[BiohazardX95]

Without AAA games I don't find a reason to Buy a next gen System.

 

[Aenima]

You can't point to successes and failures in games of all sorts of shape, sizes, and budgets.

Prime example is using WB games. One was Hogwarts Legacy, the other Suicide Squad. Both big budget games, one was a massive success one a massive flop. At the end of the day if a game is not good and reviews bad, it will flop hard. Dosent matter if its AAA or Indie. The only diference is the risk factor. Reason most AAA games follow proven concepts and dont risk new ideas.

 

[SHA]

Palworld isn't even available on PlayStation.

But these people are smart, you can't beat smart people who even know how to use AI, if you're Take 2 CEO, you'd actually need these people to build the next aaa, he actually know that already.

 

[Roxkis_ii]

I have to be honest, this whole AAA Games are unsustainable narrative bores me. It a business problem that I as a comsumer shouldn't care about.

Good games arent defined by their budgets and if every AAA studio disappeared tomorrow, they would be replaced the day after.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

AAA games make the most money.

they are here to stay like it or not.

 

[M.W.]

Nah, AAA are all I play, feed me gaming industry.

 

[StereoVsn]

I think that expanding budget in games is an issue, but not as much as the video author wants to make it.

Bad games don’t sell, I am shocked. Skull & Bones and Suicide Squad were stuck in dev hell, took way too long to release and were stinkers everyone saw a mile away.

That said, Spider-Man 2 cost over double the first game for unclear reasons. While it was certainly a sales success, profitability was hit quite a bit. But that could also be partially an Insomniac issue.

So AAAs can certainly sell well, witness Hogwarts, SP2 (sold very well), BG3 (reported over $100mil budget puts it firmly into AAA bucket), and more just last year.

So it’s a mixed bad. Cost certainly needs to be controlled though longer term.

 

[NightmareFarm]

Meh. Indies are doing it better anyway.

 

[FunkMiller]

You mean AAA GaaS games are unsustainable, OP.

 

[Loomy]

Elden Ring DLC comes out: AAA games are back! People want good games. They generally don't give a shit how many As or $ publishers spend on it.

 

[Ozzie666]

Is an AAA or AAAA game just the amount a publisher or developer is willing to spend on development?

Nintendo games are AAA, without the chase of photo realistic graphics. It all depends how you define AAA/AAAA games or what your expecting. And yes, most GAAS suck and the eternal chase for that next hit sucks too.

 

[Ozriel]

Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are not AAA games despite what their makers want to make you believe.

Suicide Squad is a short campaign game with repetitive levels and mechanics that could've been spun out on the PS3.

Skull and bones was a shitty outsourced project farmed out to Singapore in order to get goverment grants, also stuck in development hell. Yes these kind of grifts are unsustainable, as they should be.

Whether a game is AA or AAA is solely tied to the budget for the game. Both games you cite here are undoubtedly AAA

The Callisto Protocol's problem wasn't that it cost like 150M, but that it has a 69 on Metacritic. Had it been a high 80s or a 90, it'd have sold around as much as any modern Resident Evil title. The same logic applies to Skull & Bones relative to the quality of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, or to Suicide Squad relative to Batman: Arkham Knight.

Alan Wake 2 had a very high MC score. It didn’t sell as much as any modern Resident Evil title.

 

[T-0800]

I like a good cutscene as much as the next guy but we don't need them to tell a story and they add nothing to how a game plays. They do however contribute to the cost.

I would also be happy with PS3 level graphics but at a locked 60fps and 4k.

 

[violence]

Crap people learned with Mobile caused splash damage everywhere else.

 

[tommycronin]

95% of AAA games are soulless so this is good news

 

[Robb]

Make more linear games with less eye candy, don’t hire expensive actors, use less voice acting etc. etc.

If the game is good and fun people will play it anyway.

 

[rhodesianshepard]

I think that expanding budget in games is an issue, but not as much as the video author wants to make it.

Bad games don’t sell, I am shocked. Skull & Bones and Suicide Squad were stuck in dev hell, took way too long to release and were stinkers everyone saw a mile away.

That said, Spider-Man 2 cost over double the first game for unclear reasons. While it was certainly a sales success, profitability was hit quite a bit. But that could also be partially an Insomniac issue.

So AAAs can certainly sell well, witness Hogwarts, SP2 (sold very well), BG3 (reported over $100mil budget puts it firmly into AAA bucket), and more just last year.

So it’s a mixed bad. Cost certainly needs to be controlled though longer term.

Spider-Man 2 budget of 315mil almost certainly included marketing and Disney royalties. Internal leaks showed it only needed to sell 7+million copies to break even. SM2 will certainly sell 20+ million by the end of the generation. SM1 cost 90mil without marketing and royalties, reportedly.

I'm not saying that the increased costs don't matter, but there is still a lot of money to be made, especially with big AAA games. It is the smaller AAA titles that are getting squeezed out of the industry. But, imo, that has just as much to do with the oversaturation of big AAA games as the increased costs of game development

I will say, big AAA new IP's are pretty much dead in the water. Outside of a couple powerhouse Sony studios(Santa Monica, Naughty Dog), I can't think of another new IP that will cost 200+ million in development. It is just not worth the unnecessary risk

 

[nkarafo]

Nah, this is just an excuse publishers use to increase the base prices, shove monetization and make the consumers pay for their shitty decisions.

All they have to do is to better control their spending. Stop paying the CEOs half the budget of a game, stop using the most expensive voice actors, stop using celebrities for their likeness, stop hiring "diverse" people who burn money without doing anything productive, stop burning money on shit like "Sweet Baby" consultants, maybe stop using expensive DRM methods and trust your quality will make the sales numbers you want to reach.

 

[THE DUCK]

You completely forgetting about the huge amounts of money that a company makes off general subscriptions, the share they take of every other game published on the system, plus add on sales, plus peripheral sales, the list goes on and on. It's those key 5 or 6 games that drive people to buy the system that there is tons of addition revenue from, it's not just "X game cost 300 million, and barely broke even". You take away those games then you potentially lose out on the other revenues. For instance, lets say the last of us is just to expensive to make a 3rd game for. So no last of us 3 for ps6. Do you think that sells more or less PS6's?

 

[Hohenheim]

Is Dragons Dogma 2, Rise of the Ronin, Shadow of the erdtree and Metroid Prime 4 AAA? If so, I don't want those kind of titles to go away, no.
Those are my most anticipated games along with No Rest for the Wicked (which is probaby AA..?) I don't really know, and don't really care.

I'm enjoying FF Rebirth atm, and that one probably even have a few extra A's in there. Lots of people are quite excited about GTA 6 too, it seems. Which has all the A's in the world.

Lots of great games in all A's too me!
But some of these huge budget games have definitly falled flat on their noses lately, which is not new btw. That's been happening with lots of huge games since before these "A" terms even was a thing.

I don't think the latest couple of huge flops (Suicide S and Skull an Bones) should decide that big games is dead.

 

[ahtlas7]

Creative, imaginative, engaging games that capture our imagination will always have a place and it doesn’t matter how many A’s assigned. Let’s be real, A’s don’t sell games but what‘s inside them that does.

 

[WitchHunter]

It can if they dont spend stupid amount of money......Elden Ring is AAA game and yet FROM managed to make huge game that has huge expansion without going overboard with the budget.

Also we get high quality AA games.....

Who was that "overly creative" individual on the Fires of Rubicon team who decided that the voice warnings of your hull level should be the same language you choose for voice? I had to listen to the fucking english voiceover (which, surprisingly, wasn't that bad), because otherwise I wouldn't know when my hull is near zero... The only gripe I had with this game.

 

[Perrott]

Alan Wake 2 had a very high MC score. It didn’t sell as much as any modern Resident Evil title.

Alan Wake 2, with its 50M development budget, isn't a AAA game by today's standards, and it shows by how uninteresting all pre-release materials representative of actual gameplay looked. There wasn't any equivalent to The Last Of Us Part II's E3 2018 trailer that sold the audiences on a gameplay experience either of an originality or a level of refinement they've never seen before - which is the essence of real AAA titles.

It's clear that Remedy poured all of their resources onto the story and the delivery of their ambitious narrative, but due to its limited resources, Alan Wake 2's gameplay wasn't anything special, didn't bring much to the table (not only for the survival horror genre, but also in contrast to the original) and couldn't match the level of refinement in the mechanics of its competitors.

To someone that isn't familiar with Sam Lake's chops as a storyteller, the pre-release materials of Alan Wake 2 simply didn't say anything to them. On the other hand, the promotional campaign of Resident Evil 4 grabbed everyone's attention with that impressive gameplay walkthrough of the initial village area, where enemies would ambush Leon from everywhere. That's an example of a fresh gameplay scenario that draws interest towards your game, and what Alan Wake 2 lacked.

On top of that, the game didn't have a physical edition nor a Steam release, and was launched with minimal marketing in between Spider-Man 2, Mario Wonder and Call of Duty.

No wonder why it didn't set the world on fire.

 

[DragonNCM]

Made it about halfway through.

I guess some people have already forgotten how amazing 2023 was, chock full of good AAA games. A couple of stinkers release and suddenly the model is unsustainable.

The two examples given in the video are Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones. One could argue those aren’t even really AAA games but AA games wrapped up in a AAA marketing campaign. Also a couple of dev hell games don’t negate the plethora of good AAA games we see.

No one asked for this games & they are not AAA games in quality. Developers are confused about AAA.
AAA game is not considered if you spend 200mil & your game has shit story, boring meaningless gameplay & in development for 10 years.

 

[Salmon Snake]

I wonder if the general public would be satisfied if most of the AAA games graphics wouldn't get a lot better but the image quality, shadow quality, fov, less pop in and framerates would get higher?

 

[Jesb]

Where the fuck did AA or AAA even come from. In my day you just did your best to make a good game. Who’s to even say what a AAA is. You can have a 200M budget and your game is still crap, and you can have a 30M budget and your better than many other big budgets.

 

[AeonGaidenRaiden]

It can if they dont spend stupid amount of money......Elden Ring is AAA game and yet FROM managed to make huge game that has huge expansion without going overboard with the budget.

What you on about lol, ER cost between 150 and 200 million to develop and produce. RDR 2 for example is $175 mil. They most definately spent a ton of cash to make Elden Ring. The budget is on par with any other popular AAA game, there was nothing cheap about ER.