Hey, remember when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, was pretty excellent, mostly everyone loved it, and then all the AAA studios started whining that it was an unrealistic standard to be held to?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Best early access ever.
Act 1 was released like 18 months before the game actually released, and they legitimately listened to feedback from players.
Early access is pretty much the only way to do it too. If they had gotten investors there would have been pressure to release early or cram in micro transactions to increase return.
When the players are the early investors, they just want a good game.
Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.
I mean sure, there's bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. "The game runs like shit, we don't want to play it." Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn't fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.
Early access is more about getting revenue during development and some limited QA potential. There shouldn't be any surprises in the feedback, that would be a sign of major problems. EA also generally comes with a discount for the player which is anathema to the AAA crowd.
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How about you stop releasing unfinished live service shit and put out something that is genuinely fun to play and not just another money trap for unsupervised children.
But how will they make quarterly targets without them?
It's like you aren't even thinking of the shareholders.
Shareholders like CEOs aren’t real people and their opinions should be tossed down the drain.
So copy what Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Baldur's Gate did and make good replayable games.
Also stop listening to the C suite and start listening to the gamers.
I'm curious though, viewing movies as investments has made a some studios filthy rich. Why does that seem to be different for games?
Why do they need to get filthy rich? Why not settle for rich and having a good game?
This is the problem with capitalism now. No one is happy making a good profit. They have to extract maximum profit by cutting everything else.
Capitalism has always been that way. Might be more accurate to say it gets worse when hobby becomes mainstream enough for more money to start flowing into it. Best balance seems to be when something is profitable but niche so corporations consider it not big enough for them to go all in on with their wealth.
Gaming was better when it was some loser hobby in the eyes of society than accepted like it is now causing it to grow to bring in more revenue than movies and music combined. That drew the attention of the vultures.
They absolutely don't. I'm just wondering why it works out financially for Marvel and Mission Impossible movies but not for games
Nevermind, I just remembered Call of Duty exists
Movies have a bigger audience, require less time commitment, are heavily marketed, and cost less to see. Easier to convince people to see a so-so movie as long as it has a couple of good scenes. Harder to do with games, and gamers are usually at least somewhat more aware of games before they buy them.
It is less of an effort and time commitment to passively consume tv shows or movies. You can zombie out while watching it before going to sleep or fall asleep to it.
Games are an active medium in comparison with progression gated behind level of skill, so that makes it less accessible than something like movies or tv shows that is the equivalent of an auto clicker game.
Because filthy rich is more attractive for capital.
On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It's been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it's nowhere close to the same amount as with games -- and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.
Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren't allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won't happen to the same extent for movies.
Might be because you're not just spending 2-3 hours with games, but >30h, often hundreds or even thousands of hours. Making that a compelling experience that people don't quickly get tired of is much harder.
It's not. Plenty of game franchises are similarly profitable.
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It's okay, we can just not play AAA games.
Almost all AAA games are online live service games. I have absolutely no interest in those games. I have been surviving off of indy or lower budget games pretty well while the big guys are off trying to make all the money doing boring shit.
I've been on a spree of buying or buying abandoned games or old console games lately and have been really happy with not being online at all, not updating anything I don't want updated, and paying a reasonable price for the content I got. I don't care that the graphics are outdated, if the gameplay works and is fun, its fine looking like almost anything.
Yeah. I guess I'm too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.
To me, you don't repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.
Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth "movement". After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I'm playing a game.
That era also has good control schemes. I went to replay Perfect Dark on my analogue 3d and hoooooooo boy, those layouts are like wearing beer goggles or trying to ride a reverse handle bar bike. I'll need to try the dual controller layout but I am considering butchering a cheap controller to make something that matches modern layouts.
The budgets are too big
And misspent.
And also spent by utterly incompetent management whose prime qualification is fluency in corpospeak and AAA tier ass-kissing...
... as opposed to, you know, any kind of actual project management skills.
They're all self important, self righteous idiots, in leadership roles in AAA.
... The goddamned AAAA pirate game that Ubisoft took 10 years to rework 3 or 4 times, and then shit out as basically a demo of a mobile style gacha game, that requires a fairly high end PC to run.
How is that not just like, money laundering / tax evasion / tax fraud, with extra steps?
Constraints have always led to increased creativity, and now that there basically aren't any limits with current tech and ballooning budgets in AAA there's also basically no creativity.
Lol
Yeah, that's totally the problems and not vertical integration being used to churn money as a gift...
There's plenty of constraints still, they aren't technical though. It's about making a game good despite the monetization requirements.
They aren't bad, they just aren't doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is... EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won't leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.
It's no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony's been doing well because the games they're publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that's only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.
Everything's turned into a live-service game because they're the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.
Right? After AC3 i stopped caring.
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People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.
In my opinion they weren't wrong then and they aren't wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they're using more colors than "gunmetal grey" and "piss yellow".
And then you have Clair Obscur schooling studios on how it should be done.
I just started playing this game. I cried at the end of the fucking prologue. What amazing writing and voice acting.
Buckle up, mate.
Uh oh. I'm starting it tonight.
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I firmly believe we are entering the dark ages of AAA games, with the cost to make and GenAI they are going to be shit.
Support indie devs.
Bring back games that you're passionate for and gamers will love instead of designing a gamified soulless money funnel.
There are thousands of amazing indie games created by people who have an idea and a will to make something. I'll spend my money there instead.
Wholeheartedly agree. Games these past few years have been big letdowns for the most part. There's been a couple exceptions, but for the most part it's been disappointing.
The gaming scene outside of AAA studios has been about as vibrant as it's ever been.
Most of the nominees for GOTY have been AA studios at best and this was a stellar year imo with titles like Silksong, Hades 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and The Alters to name a few!
And all of those games (other than Dispatch and Thealters, which I haven't played yet) are absolute bangers with hundreds of hours of content for the price of 1/7th a stick of RAM.
We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.
If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!
This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.
For the last little while now, I've been finding that my most played games have been on my old 360 that I decided to plug in again, and my old old PS2 collection that I ripped and loaded to an emulator because the old hardware broke a long time ago.
Third place is "new to me" games that I finally buy when they go on a good sale years after they were "new" (is. RDR2 and Cyberpunk)
I haven't bought a new AAA title in years on console because I can't justify the cost.
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Painkiller wasn't great either. Just saying.
I have played all the way through all the resident evil series, picking up the last 3 when they came out, which is rare for me. I am usually a patient gamer. I assume RES is a AAA game, but correct me if I am wrong.
Point is each one has been fantastic. Not many games hold my attention like those do. So apparently it can be done. Hoping the next one out soon is just as good.
Oh, and I played all of them on Linux, they worked flawlessly.
Games are ok, meaning there are good ones. Trying to release more and more to get more and more money - that's going to fail, yup
Also, look out the window: we have so much more to spend time and resources on
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