Are AAA games killing themselves?

[Hitcher]

Stupidly high initial prices; monetisation coming after release (cleverly after all the glowing reviews); followed by huge price drops as people just stop buying into this shit - BLOPS - £28, Fallout 76 - £20, Battlefield V - £20 all in a few months of release. Skill Up even pulled his review of BLOPS after the Red Dot fiasco -

 

 

So are we seeing the end of AAA games?

[Luseth]

Is it triple A games or is it larger studios & publishers?

 

You only have to look at how many of the triple A titles have been from say EA with the lootbox controversy and the such. I think we have just gotten to the point where people have just about had enough of them taking the piss and I suspect the next iteration of Fifa may even start to feel the hit.

 

There are still some fantastic triple A title's about but it's those that are produced by 'greedier' companies that are generally in the news and for the wrong reasons.

[Kryptonian]

What was the BLOPS red dot fiasco?

[Padaxes]

4 minutes ago, Kryptonian said:

What was the BLOPS red dot fiasco?

 

Selling a dot for $1. Literally. 

[esar]

Fortnite is free and makes the most money, big publishers are just making their games cheaper earlier to encourage more people to spend money in the game itself so they can make even more money. I think they'll be alright.

[RubberJohnny]

Not really.

 

Like blockbuster movies, they've basically got a successful formula that's no ones favourite but is the most acceptable to the largest number of people, i.e. a blend of exploration, combat, stealth, cutscenes and crafting. I've heard loads of times that they'll die and it's really just "well I find this a bit boring".

 

But this isn't really about that, is it? It's just a thread for the bizarre near constant circlejerk of aggrieved gamers, something that's now being parodied? Gamers rise up, etc. EA bad, Geraldo good.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

The AAA field is dominated by online geared affairs that can add as much after sales revenue as possible and can't be pirated, and yeah it's pretty greedy and depressing cos stuff that would have been hugely successful in the past is considered a failure as it costs the same to develop but can't compete in terms of profit. It makes perfect sense from a business perspective to chase the lootbox and skin carrot, and you'd be crazy to argue that SP narrative led experiences haven't suffered as a result.

 

Even with that said though, gaming has never been better thanks to indies and smaller budget games. I don't touch CoD or Battlefield or FIFA but don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I just wish top tier SP games weren't considered such a risk by publishers.

 

[Uncle Mike]

AAA is a bad term for this, because it seems like you mainly mean online-focussed games? (And even then, stuff like FIFA continues to do OK, so we're just worrying about games with guns?)

 

Spider-Man, God of War, Forza Horizon, Assassin's Creed all did fine without stiffing people or making them feel bad, I thought? And you'd be hard-pressed to argue they're not AAA.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

The last Assassin's Creed had some pretty horrible grind or pay upgrade mechanics.

[Uncle Mike]

Oh, did it? I missed that, what with not getting them.

[BadgerFarmer]

Are people getting sick of it? The price drops aren't necessarily a bad sign for the publishers as a lot of these games are about getting players onto the game-as-platform and keeping them there as long as possible.

 

If anything perhaps it will begin to make more sense for the CoDs and Battlefields to take the approach of Destiny or Fortnite, and not actually have full price releases each year but put out a base release then keep expanding the platform from there.

 

Of course, there's probably only space for a handful of such games to succeed as they each take up a large chunk of the market and will only eat up more of it as they grow. Hopefully there'll still be enough room for the other kinds of AAA games (single-player focused), indies etc.

[Cosmic_Guru]

6 minutes ago, Gizamaluke said:

The last Assassin's Creed had some pretty horrible grind or pay upgrade mechanics.

 

Or was a perfectly enjoyable experience without spending a penny of real money or grinding at all.   Grinding to me means farming experience or loot drops, usually through repeating areas ad nauseum, not exploration and side quests, but there you go.

 

 

[Pob]

16 minutes ago, Uncle Mike said:

Spider-Man, God of War, Forza Horizon, Assassin's Creed all did fine without stiffing people or making them feel bad, I thought? And you'd be hard-pressed to argue they're not AAA.

Do you think there's something in three of those being prestige platform-exclusive games? Like, they're potential loss-leaders designed to get people onto the PS4 platform, whereas other AAA games are platforms themselves? As it happened they all sold gangbusters.

[partious]

31 minutes ago, Gizamaluke said:

Even with that said though, gaming has never been better thanks to indies and smaller budget games. 

 

As a big fan of Sega, colourful games with a joyful atmosphere, the experience of arcades, arcade racing games and local multiplayer, I die inside a little every time someone posts this phrase.

[RubberJohnny]

10 posts until a MY NOSTALGIA post in a completely unrelated thread, a new record.

[bradigor]

The sooner Activision, EA, etc just decide to make CoD, Battlefield and the likes F2P the better. Just look to Warframe and Fortnite and see how to still earn megabucks. Both of those titles for example are big enough they would get a huge slice of the pie. 

 

The argument used to be that the $60 was still bringing in a huge amount of money and player base, but the quick price drops maybe show that isn't the case any longer. 

 

Or maybe I am wrong so should keep it shut. 

[gone fishin]

49 minutes ago, esar said:

Fortnite is free and makes the most money, big publishers are just making their games cheaper earlier to encourage more people to spend money in the game itself so they can make even more money. I think they'll be alright.

 

This, to an extent.... ;-)

 

I think the publishers are catching onto who plays the AAA games - you get the total fanboys who will pay full price on release day, or even more to get early access.

 

Once they've captured all those customers, they now reduce the price so that more average punters will play it - because in both cases the model is now based on "long tail revenue". Like I mentioned in the HMV thread, EA makes an average £140 per year from a FIFA player, because FIFA is now built around further digital revenue once you've bought it. Just like the titles mentioned in the first post have all been reduced in price because they know they'll get further digital revenue. But if you're going to use traditional sales measurement (number of units sold at a price point) then it looks like they're failing, when most aren't. They've just shifted their business model.

 

Fortnite is a bit of a curve ball as it wasn't particularly successful at first, then changed direction and found incredible success. The Free to Play model is a tough one to crack, but they did it.

 

I don't see AAA games moving totally into Free to Play as they cost too much to make, they'll just continue doing what they do. Gouging fanboys and gamers in general.

[K]

11 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

10 posts until a MY NOSTALGIA post in a completely unrelated thread, a new record.

 

Oh, do you have an irrational hatred of nostalgia? You kept that quiet.

[Uncle Mike]

10 minutes ago, Pob said:

Do you think there's something in three of those being prestige platform-exclusive games? Like, they're potential loss-leaders designed to get people onto the PS4 platform, whereas other AAA games are platforms themselves? As it happened they all sold gangbusters.

 

I don't know. Tomb Raider, Mordor, Far Cry, are all big budget, and less prone to all this nickel-and-dime action? You get some ridiculous special edition tat, and some unnecessary DLC to buy, but they still seem to sell OK? Not that I'm an industry-watcher, so I could be way out.

 

It just seems possible we're creating a 'trend' here out of some unrelated bad sales. Fallout has its own well-documented problems of fundamentally being a bad game. I don't know anything about BLOPS etc, but am perhaps not surprised if online shootymans are all falling before the Fortnite juggernaut.

[mdn2]

Remember when RubberJohnny used to contribute to threads in Gaming instead of complaining about nostalgia? Those were the days. 

[Harsin]

For me modern AAA games are becoming too much of a time commitment. They're starting to feel like a second job, get in from work, oh wait I have to do my daily quests in Game X or I'll miss out on whatever the limited time rewards are. It’s disheartening starting up a lot of games and realising just how long it will be before you get to play with any of the fun toys. Jim Sterling put up a decent video about how the rush to make every release 'games as a service' and publishers wanting their game to be the one game you play long-term just isn't supportable, much like MMO gold rush of years gone by.

[Jarik]

How's World of Warcraft doing these days?  I remember when everyone used to point at that as the top of the heap when it came to games you played long-term & how any other MMO or games with a similar level of time commitment were wasting their time even coming out.  I don't hear many people talking about or even mentioning it anymore though.  Is it still there, a backbone of long-term play, or is it losing ground to other long-term games?

[yashiro]

It's not worth the sub fee.

[Bojangle]

5 minutes ago, Jarik said:

How's World of Warcraft doing these days?

Still has millions of subscribers.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

3 hours ago, Uncle Mike said:

Oh, did it? I missed that, what with not getting them.

 

2 hours ago, Cosmic_Guru said:

 

Or was a perfectly enjoyable experience without spending a penny of real money or grinding at all.   Grinding to me means farming experience or loot drops, usually through repeating areas ad nauseum, not exploration and side quests, but there you go.

 

 

 

I didn't spend any money either, but I did end up dumping a load of Uplay credits on materials packs after realising I needed another 6 bazillion soft leathers to upgrade my best sword from 25 to 30 or something.

 

The crafting in general in Odyssey was much more resource heavy than Origins. I could not keep up with the material requirements in the game at all.  I guess if you don't upgrade and ignore it, that's fine, but it was obvious this bump was geared towards getting people to spend additional money.

 

 

[Nate Dogg III]

34 minutes ago, Harsin said:

For me modern AAA games are becoming too much of a time commitment. They're starting to feel like a second job, get in from work, oh wait I have to do my daily quests in Game X or I'll miss out on whatever the limited time rewards are. It’s disheartining starting up a lot of games and realising just how long it will be before you get to play with any of the fun toys. Jim Sterling put up a decent video about how the rush to make every release 'games as a service' and publishers wanting their game to be the one game you play long-term just isn't supportable, much like MMO gold rush of years gone by.

 

I think this is exactly it. It's not that games are getting worse, that tastes are changing, that prices are too high or even that the nickel-and-diming monetisation stuff is putting people off. It's simply that games are so big, and take up so much of our time, that we need to buy less of them.

 

People like us are the exception, too invested in the hobby to ignore all the shiny new stuff. But I find talking to non-enthusiasts about this stuff quite instructive. The kid who cuts my hair is a huge Battlefield fan, shows me videos of him sniping people from halfway across the map with iron sights and stuff like that. Saw him just before Christmas and he hadn't picked up BFV yet because he was still playing BF1 every night. He only stopped playing GTA Online when Red Dead came along. There's always been this type of person, the two-games-a-year guy who gets FIFA and COD and that's it. But those were people who didn't actually play games all that often. Now you can buy two games a year and still have something to play every night. 

 

GaaS is a rubbish term that's useful for the industry but not the players. 'Games as pastimes' is probably more apt, and we can only fit so many hobbies into our lives. 

[Steven]

2 hours ago, Strategos said:

 

Selling a dot for $1. Literally. 

 

They'll be asking for red dot redemption before long.

[Gorf King]

5 hours ago, Nate Dogg III said:

 

I think this is exactly it. It's not that games are getting worse, that tastes are changing, that prices are too high or even that the nickel-and-diming monetisation stuff is putting people off. It's simply that games are so big, and take up so much of our time, that we need to buy less of them.

 

People like us are the exception, too invested in the hobby to ignore all the shiny new stuff. But I find talking to non-enthusiasts about this stuff quite instructive. The kid who cuts my hair is a huge Battlefield fan, shows me videos of him sniping people from halfway across the map with iron sights and stuff like that. Saw him just before Christmas and he hadn't picked up BFV yet because he was still playing BF1 every night. He only stopped playing GTA Online when Red Dead came along. There's always been this type of person, the two-games-a-year guy who gets FIFA and COD and that's it. But those were people who didn't actually play games all that often. Now you can buy two games a year and still have something to play every night. 

 

GaaS is a rubbish term that's useful for the industry but not the players. 'Games as pastimes' is probably more apt, and we can only fit so many hobbies into our lives. 

 

Aye, that's basically what it is. Many AAA games are such a huge time commitment you skip a lot of them - or, at least, I do these days. I'd rather play one or two games extensively, which can take an awful lot of your time up, than play lots of them at a surface level and then move onto the next after I've finished the basic campaign or whatever. For that reason I just skipped Red Dead altogether - I was preparing for/playing the latest Destiny DLC - and even in doing that, we've really struggled to get a raid team together more than just on the odd evening here or there because people have been doing (or playing) other things. There's a real sense of burnout, simply because there's such an overwhelming amount to do, just in one or two games.

 

In the case of Destiny it's almost like Bungie can't win, because the complaint that many including me had about vanilla D2 is that there just wasn't enough to do. So they changed tack and built up a far more challenging and long-lasting (and admittedly far more grindy, or grind-to-get-to) endgame, and now many people just don't have the time to devote to it. And - thankfully - there's no way to just buy stuff to avoid that grind or that difficult endgame activity. You just have to make the time and effort do it.

 

Yet they still keep coming, these massive AAA games with online modes to extend their life, or these pseudo-MMOs, or games as service, or whatever. In the next couple of months alone we'll have Division 2 and Anthem. I'm going to see what the latter's like, but I'll simply have no time for the former at all. Between stuff like this and Destiny, I'll only really have time for another game this year when it's something I absolutely must have. Like, I'd turn up for a Last of Us or something, and then occasionally something that's really short and sweet looking. But really, I think there's only time for a couple or so big games each year. And I'm sort of ok with that. And nothing of what puts me off is to do with microtransactions or nickle-and-diming, neither of which I can stand. It's purely finding the time and, in proper team multiplayer games, enough people who are available to commit all that time on the same nights you do. Like Harsin says, it sometimes feels like you're running a second full-time job.

[Thor]

Regarding the time commitment, we're all getting older, and for most of us our time is more limited than it used to be. @Harsin, you joined rllmuk December 2004, that's just over 14 years ago. I'm guessing back in 2004 you had a lot more spare time to play massive single player games like GTA San Andreas, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-life 2, KOTOR 2 ... Driv3r (lol!). 

 

It's easy to forget on this forum, but we're 90% middle-aged (35-45) people, aren't we? Long-term relationships, kids, demanding jobs etc. 

 

Games have been massive for years ... I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what point I am making here, and I'm not even trying to counter Harsin's point either. I'm just making on observation.

 

But regarding the OP. No, AAA games are not killing themselves.

 

[Pob]

22 minutes ago, Thor said:

Regarding the time commitment, we're all getting older, and for most of us our time is more limited than it used to be. @Harsin, you joined rllmuk December 2004, that's just over 14 years ago. I'm guessing back in 2004 you had a lot more spare time to play massive single player games like GTA San Andreas, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-life 2, KOTOR 2 ... Driv3r (lol!). 

 

It's easy to forget on this forum, but we're 90% middle-aged (35-45) people, aren't we? Long-term relationships, kids, demanding jobs etc. 

 

Games have been massive for years ... I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what point I am making here, and I'm not even trying to counter Harsin's point either. I'm just making on observation.

 

I'd argue that games are much larger and also much more demanding of your time this generation. Even if they're not always larger/longer in terms of content - although lots certainly are, like RDR2, Assassins' Creed and MGSV - they are often designed to make you grind and replay. I'd suggest that vanilla Destiny has less 'content' than a Halo game from 360 generation but it's designed around playing remixed and repurposed content.

 

There seemed to be a few years where AAA games were so labour intensive to make they ended up being quite short (e.g The Order) but those days seem to have passed. The move towards open world has contributed as it's relatively easy to pad those out once you've created the world.

 

I don't even mind this trend to be honest. Like @Gorf King, if you find a game you really love and which has the requisite depth - Hitman in my case - then having the developers constantly providing you with new ways to enjoy it is fine by me. You just have to be selective.