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[Emperor_Uriel]

I'm very, very hopeful that we'll see more middle-budget developers like From Software popping up to fill the void left by the titans.

America's economy is still in it's unsustainable "Fuck everything other than short-term gains! The investors demand blood!" phase, so we might not see them here until that mindset collapses, but I'm optimistic we'll get there.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

He's not wrong. Destiny sucked me in for like 500 hours, and I'm not even an FPS guy. When I got my PS4 the main reasons were Uncharted 4 & a new Deus Ex. I haven't bought either of those yet, but I could easily justify to myself being there day one for Rise of Iron.

 

[Yagharek]

I foresee games as services in one arm and evergreen titles on another. Annualized sequels titles are dying.

I could believe this. There will still be a low-tier (eg low cost but high quality indie, and the low cost, low quality shovelware with license tie-ins).

 

[Breakfast at Noon]

So it is nothing to do with the same stagnant shit every year?
Look at BF1 then take a look at watchdogs 2 and CoD.. 1 is trying something fresh and the others are just run of the mill been there done that a hundred times.

 

[Abilidebob]

PC gaming has been "following" that trend for years and years, but it doesn't mean that you can't play other genres or that single player is dead on PC. Consoles will keep doing just fine, especially now that it seems they've been liking the concept of a forward compatibility.

 

[RPGam3r]

These different parts of the market can all exist at one time. Saying AAA is going away sounds like the same broken drum that gets tapped on every year.

 

[Hollywood Hitman]

These different parts of the market can all exist at one time. Saying AAA is going away sounds like the same broken drum that gets tapped on every year.

This x1000

/thread

 

[Mr. Mister]

Btw even though Mafia 3 charted and shifted 500k+ units that's still considered poor and surely signals the end of that franchise.

Like it or not we are officially in the world of 4-5 giant games as service franchises with a few giant licensed games peppered in and then indie games. Hope you enjoy your new world. It's gonna be rough.

Easy predictions. Watchdogs goes away after the next one (though they'll hugely expand online) Far Cry becomes a game as a service, CoD in two years becomes a games as a service, Assassins Creed goes away in two years, toys to life dead (should have been dead a long time ago), Square switches fully to mobile in three years, scraps of Capcom acquired in two-three years by a large Asian mobile pub, Bethesda does Skyrim and Fallout only, Rockstar is fine, EA does Star Wars, Madden, and BF and nothing else.

Sony first party dramatically shrinks, Media Molecule, Bend, Guerilla, Sucker Punch, Santa Monica close shop (3-4 years) and MS shuts down everything not Halo and Forza, maybe you get one more Gears.

 

[Hollywood Hitman]

Btw even though Mafia 3 charted and shifted 500k+ units that's still considered poor and surely signals the end of that franchise.

Like it or not we are officially in the world of 4-5 giant games as service franchises with a few giant licensed games peppered in and then indie games. Hope you enjoy your new world. It's gonna be rough.

Lol, "it's gonna be rough".

 

[Mr. Mister]

it's really just the culmination of games perfecting player behavior. They know how to drip feed accomplishment and appeal to our rat brain behavior. We are at the end game where the big games suck as much money per player as possible. Games never broadened out of niche and traditional gaming is looking more and more like what happened to comic books.

On the plus side in 20 years when film / tv comes in and makes games cool again we'll all feel very in the know.

 

[MattyG]

I've always said Call of Duty should shift to a more long term model like this. Don't make people reset their progress every year, just release a meta-altering update or something and a short campaign to go with it and keep it running for years with one consistent progression. And I know Colin Moriarty says it all the time about 2D Castlevania and FF Tactics (the latter of which we kind of saw a similar, shorter-term version of with Fire Emblem Awakening and Conquest/Birthright's DLC plans).

I personally want to get into these types of games more too. I'm tired of buying game upon game upon game and then only finishing a small portion of them. I'd love to get into FFXIV, but it just feels really intimidating, since I've never been great at understanding MMO systems. I've tried starting it twice now and I never make it past level 15. Maybe next year if there's a lull in releases I'll be able to sink my teeth into it.

 

[Branduil]

One thing that's clear is that the current path of ever-increasing budgets, even as the core gaming population stagnates and casual gamers all drift away, is not sustainable. The Japanese AAA has seen a massive shift because of this, and the west isn't going to be able to avoid it either.

In addition to games-as-a-service, I'm expecting a huge rise in pre-made assets that are shared and recycled between games. Just like custom engines have become cost-prohibitive, the same thing is going to happen to in-game art assets.

 

[Bjoern the Smexy]

I hope the term "AAA" will soon be abandoned. Use something like "high profile" or something. Anything that makes more sense than a term that describes itself as a highly-rated game before it has even been rated.

That said I don't really see a significant turn right now. Though if this leads to less games that are actually good (as opposed to many games that lack polish) then I'm all for it.

 

[GankzyMcfly]

Very interesting article

I'm doing my part to avoid this future by staying away from these kinds of games, which in many ways don't seem to respect the time of their audiences

For some games i agree, but others like overwatch and rb6 siege i couldnt disagree more.

 

[AudioEppa]

These different parts of the market can all exist at one time. Saying AAA is going away sounds like the same broken drum that gets tapped on every year.

Aman.


For me, outside of a actual good call the duty and rocket league. I need my AAA story games, but I wouldn't mind some extra AA titles. That's why I love telltale games.

 

[Sotha_Sil]

Agree, that's why we need so urgently AA games again. Moderate budget, moderate sales expectations and creativity.

And we've seen them come through strong lately. X-COM 2, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Stellaris, ReCore, Ori and the Blind Forest, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Witness, The Talos Principle, Helldivers, Divinity: OS, Starpoint Gemini 2, SOMA, Tell Tale game series, This War of Mine..... we can keep going.

Meanwhile, Square Enix (FFVX, Nier, Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Mad Max, Hitman, etc), Sony (God of War, Uncharted, Days Gone, Horizon, etc), and Bethesda (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dishonored, Prey, DOOM, Evil Within, Wolfenstein, etc) are holding down the AAA single player segment just fine.

 

[FerretGamer]

One thing's for sure, AAA games tank in price faster than ever before.

 

[AudioEppa]

One thing's for sure, AAA games tank in price faster than ever before.

I've noticed and I personally don't understand why this industry is so stubborn to keep prices at $60. Like does it work for a few titles, yeah, but overall I feel like if the majority of AAA titles drop the launch price down, they would get more sales.

 

[redcrayon]

So no more Uncharted huh? Or Team Ico games? Or JRPGs?

Edit: as in examples of games without long lifespans. I understand we arent getting Uncharted anytime soon. No need to get caught up on the specifics...

JRPGs outside of FF have never been AAA games, and largely moved to portables/mobile years ago.

 

[redcrayon]

Just with regard to the OP, while games as a service, the economy and a crowded AAA market all might well contribute to the effect, another factor is choice.

As a kid I (and many other console owners I imagine) played one £40 game for months at a time, we could only afford a handful a year, they were toys.

These days, I have hundreds of games I could play for free alongside widespread digital sales offering games for peanuts. If games as a service is taking up player time, I'd say the sheer number of games that cost very little must be taking up a chunk of player time too, not everyone is a 'only buy £60 AAA games' customer, you can play games on just about any device now.

Sometimes I'll even stop playing an rpg because a game on my phone has grabbed my attention. It might only be for a few days before I ditch it, but that kind of 'disposable' gaming is now a thing too.

 

[kyser73]

While I think there may be some merit in observing this as one of the many trends in the gaming market, it really feels like he took his personal anecdote and extrapolated it, based on some dumb release scheduling (TF2), IP burn from a poorly received first episode (WD2) and long term franchise fatigue (CoD) leading to poor sales.

If he'd led with actual data showing e.g. Destiny players have a lower attach rate or display other negative purchasing behaviour (e.g. Buying more pre-owned over new) this would be on much more solid ground.

FWIW, gaming is where this model is uniquely possible. Iterative content development over years with periodic technology overhauls is a good fit for the medium.

 

[gypsygib]

I'd buy Dishonored 2, Deus Ex, and Mafia 3 if my 970 ran them better.

 

[patapuf]

Kinda a side point to this, but this is why I think Age of Empires Online came out 2 or 3 years too early. If it had been released now (and had more content at launch than it did) I think it could've been successful. Oh, and if it released now, it would've been on steam from the start instead of Games for Windows Live, which was another thing holding it back.

Nah, it failed because it was a competitive RTS where you had to unlock stuff. And it wasn't very good.

I'm glad we got an update to AOEII on steam out of it.



On topic, this is just what's been happening on PC. Games will be fine.

 

[Vex_]

I think this has more to do with the general age of gamers going up rather than a financial crisis or smaller, less risky budgets (AAA). The core audience is getting old, very old. So they have less time to spend on throw away hobbies like gaming.


Many people in this thread already mentioned that they only play one online game (ex: overwatch) and I dont blame them. You really have to make that hard choice of which game you want to stick to and be good at nowadays because time is limited.

 

[Kill3r7]

Btw even though Mafia 3 charted and shifted 500k+ units that's still considered poor and surely signals the end of that franchise.

Like it or not we are officially in the world of 4-5 giant games as service franchises with a few giant licensed games peppered in and then indie games. Hope you enjoy your new world. It's gonna be rough.

Easy predictions. Watchdogs goes away after the next one (though they'll hugely expand online) Far Cry becomes a game as a service, CoD in two years becomes a games as a service, Assassins Creed goes away in two years, toys to life dead (should have been dead a long time ago), Square switches fully to mobile in three years, scraps of Capcom acquired in two-three years by a large Asian mobile pub, Bethesda does Skyrim and Fallout only, Rockstar is fine, EA does Star Wars, Madden, and BF and nothing else.

Sony first party dramatically shrinks, Media Molecule, Bend, Guerilla, Sucker Punch, Santa Monica close shop (3-4 years) and MS shuts down everything not Halo and Forza, maybe you get one more Gears.

You had me going until you forgot what will arguably end up being the best selling game this year WW. Also Gears is bigger than Forza.

The AAA industry is struggling with reaching the mass market at the same level of consistency as last gen has but ultimately it is not going to die. At the end of the day it is the most effective way to make a ton of money.

 

[Langdon Alger]

So single player games will cease to exist and everything will be on-line multiplayer? I hope that never happens.

 

[kinoki]

I'd rather have 1 game that I can spend 100 hours in than 10 games that I spend 10 hours on each. Destiny, Civ6, Skyrim Special Edition and the like are enough for me. Most people are having their fill.

 

[Ushay]

What's so bad about AAA shifting towards Evergreen games? It's why Nintendo is so beloved, and why PC gaming is so strong.

The sooner we move towards games with long lifespans instead of disposable annual AAA generica, the better.

I have to agree with this, I won't miss the annual CODs or throwaway Assassins Creed games. I like the concept of fully fleshed out games with expansion packs in the vain of Witcher 3.

 

[CrazyArcadia]

I don't like most online-multiplayer centric games. That said, I've still spent countless hours in Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 (couch multiplayer) to the point where I sometimes didn't buy another game immediately because I had gaming-with-friends weekends planned or just wanted to finish 1-2 other games before.
On a Nintendo platform, that doesn't change much - Holding off on buying a newly released game for a few weeks or months, it's still roughly going to be the same price. The same behaviour on PC or other 3rd party centric devices... yeah, apart from the absolute bestsellers, everything will be down in price by then.
So I am not even sure that it is just the multiplayer titles which the article deemed "AAA+" responsible for that, rather a mixture. A lot of games are quite long and together with many games needing patches in the first couple of weeks and a bunch of stinkers early this gen, I'd guess that people aren't as anxious to get the newest release day 1 anymore - I don't think AAA will need to die off or anything, I just believe that this rush where only the first 2-3 weeks of sales truly count for a publisher needs to come to an end since that is unsustainable in the long run seeing the budgets and development times of current games. A great and well-made game should be able to maintain prices above "10 bucks garbage bin" for longer and maybe a more consistend and long-living price could allow more devs to prepare free updates since money still comes in after the first few weeks. (then again, I am quite happy to pick up all those great cheap AAA PC games, even though I often thought afterwards "well, that would've been worth full price still, even a few months after release" such as with DOOM or Alien:Isolation).
You get a more reasonable pricing scheme with movies btw. at least in my country, most new movie releases on Bluray cost around 15-20 bucks, and will be 10 bucks after 4-6 months. That's not as harsh as say, releasing a game for 60-70 bucks and down the price to 10-20 bucks after 3 months.

I am also with people who say B-tier gaming needs to return. In my personal opinion, I already believe that happend over the last few years with lots of indie studios preparing their second or third games which feel more accomplished and less 'indie' as well as some smaller Japanese devs such as Falcom, NIS, Atlus, Marvelous and a few European publishers having more down-to-earth development cycles and budgets for their games. (I started playing Falcoms RPG Trails of Cold Steel 3 weeks ago - the 2nd one just released in EU - and from there on out I probably won't even need to buy another game this year...)

 

[Shadowhelper]

Games selling badly on console has to be seen in light of the physical decline, which is the only method Gaf has of tracking console sales.


PSN numbers could be rising industry wide, and we would never know about it. The physical sales are only a real method in telling us about the ratio of sales to others across the industry, but the absolute numbers aren't so trustworthy and more and more console players cut the cord. Watch Dogs 2 for example could well be breaking even with half the sales of Watch Dogs 1, the overall market is absolutely growing, all we know is that it's selling less than BF1

Yes, this is a very good point. It took the TV industry like a year or two to completely abandon initial viewing numbers, as the DVR and digital now actually have greater numbers than the number of people viewing them on TV on its first live show.

But there was a period of like a solid 3 years that the industry did not know how to report or understand the real numbers and their implications.

 

[Sad Affleck]

I hope that at least part of those weak launches is due to consumers wising up to the fact that many games launch unfinished or straight-up broken. It is much smarter to wait a while until the game has been patched and its price has dropped. More than ever before it seems that buying games on day one is just not worth it.

 

[Durante]

And we've seen them come through strong lately. X-COM 2, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Stellaris, ReCore, Ori and the Blind Forest, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Witness, The Talos Principle, Helldivers, Divinity: OS, Starpoint Gemini 2, SOMA, Tell Tale game series, This War of Mine..... we can keep going.

Meanwhile, Square Enix (FFVX, Nier, Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Mad Max, Hitman, etc), Sony (God of War, Uncharted, Days Gone, Horizon, etc), and Bethesda (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dishonored, Prey, DOOM, Evil Within, Wolfenstein, etc) are holding down the AAA single player segment just fine.

I don't think Nier is "AAA" by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[Moongazer]

So single player games will cease to exist and everything will be on-line multiplayer? I hope that never happens.

There will probably be fewer big budget single-player games especially from Western publishers. I don't think single-player will ever be fully abandoned after all the online multiplayer and games as service markets aren't without risk. People can only dedicate to a few or just one of those at a time and saturating the market with online games leads to the situation that we've just with Titanfall 2. The industry can't sustain itself purely with online games.

 

[prudislav]

I'd rather have 1 game that I can spend 100 hours in than 10 games that I spend 10 hours on each. Destiny, Civ6, Skyrim Special Edition and the like are enough for me. Most people are having their fill.

i am the complete opposite and i am 99% of time harcore PC gamer with little to not time currently...as i like to experience different worlds and different stories instead of watching single same world everytime with similar experience and hear kids ranting on voicechat

 

[bonej]

You can only makes o many of them. The market for these types of games (aka onlime mp games is limited). It can be expanded on console tho, siege and division are good examples. On pc they are already at max.

Siege is also a good example of low investment big return. No campaign, few small maps, no complexity besides balancing.

 

[ElBoxyBrown]

Article is overthinking it.

Good AAA titles still sell, so long as they are not completely stupid and release at the same time as a big competitor.

The other AAA titles are suffering from becoming annual cash-cows, milking consumers with more IAP and DLC than ever whilst bringing less and less innovation with each release. I saw myself transiton from buying COD every year, to every other year, to not at all. And i don't feel like I'm missing anything, even if I jumped back it's probably the same old. Even buying a title at day one these days only gives me what? 3 months before I need to pick up some DLC for it to stay relevant. Fuck that noise.

But I have no qualms spending money, hell - I spent more than ever this year on PSVR titles, and will continue to buy original, interesting titles.

We don't need an AAAA tier, we just need more original AAA titles.

Kinda hard to convince the public to do free DLC when TF2 bombs and B1 and IW sell way more. Overwatch so far is the only game with free DLC to succeed.

 

[Bolivar687]

N'Gai Croal commented ten years ago that the game business was becoming winner-take-all. The latest round of bombs stem more from the stagnation of releasing the same games season after season for 8 years now.

When the 360 and PS3 came out, and Japanese developers abandoned consoles for handheld, it was PC developers who stepped in,and mainly developers of multiplayer shooters and open world RPGs who capitalized. The problem is there was nothing new about these games then and they're well past the expiration date now. Gameplay never ages but consoles need new experiences to reinvigorate the base. Combining these two genres in Destiny and the Division won't cut it. Its like American chain restaurants using cheaper and cheaper ingredients to maximize their margins.

This isn't sustainable.

 

[RedSwirl]

N'Gai Croal commented ten years ago that the game business was becoming winner-take-all. The latest round of bombs stem more from the stagnation of releasing the same games season after season for 8 years now.

When the 360 and PS3 came out, and Japanese developers abandoned consoles for handheld, it was PC developers who stepped in,and mainly developers of multiplayer shooters and open world RPGs who capitalized. The problem is there was nothing new about these games then and they're well past the expiration date now. Gameplay never ages but consoles need new experiences to reinvigorate the base. Combining these two genres in Destiny and the Division won't cut it. Its like American chain restaurants using cheaper and cheaper ingredients to maximize their margins.

This isn't sustainable.

Honestly, I don't think the problem is that those developers are still doing those genres, but that they haven't really advanced in any definitive way.

Most of the games we're getting now are pretty much of the same scale and similar complexity to last-gen iterations. A few games like Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto V truly do feel like the next step forward in building game worlds, but a lot else feels like it's just prettier than before. It's like publishers figured out they can make more money honing in on what get's players to keep coming back and keep spending money instead of trying to really push things forward like physics or level design or scale or whatever. What I'm saying is, it doesn't feel like we're getting Ocarina of Time moments or Tomb Raider 1 moments or GTA III moments anymore. Crysis felt like it was pushing boundaries just to push boundaries nine years ago, but first person action games in the years since in many ways haven't matched up to its design. The only game I can think of right now that reminds me of that "fuck limits" mentality is Star Citizen, and who the hell knows when or if that's getting done. We're even praising some games for getting back to something resembling what older classics like felt like: Dishonored, MGSV, Hitman. People tell me new Hitman feels a least as good as Blood Money which came out in 2005, but I haven't heard anybody say it's the legit next level of the Hitman design, doing things not done before.

I don't know. I might be wrong.