AAA Games the last few years

With GTA 6 and ES 6 on the horizon - those will be the games to challenge the $100 mark. Maybe they keep their heads about them and "only" list at $79.99 for the base game at launch, but I doubt they will be able to help themselves. These will be the most shameless money extractions outside the EA/UBI "pay to win" stuff that anybody has ever seen.

We already got a preview with Starfield and that Star Wars Outlaw game.

(ETA: While I strongly believe that GTA 6 will most likely live up to expectations, ES 6 is likely to be a let down. It just isn't the same Bethesda of 10 to 12 years ago.)

The mid majors are challenging the AAA studios to deliver more, that's for sure. I know that EA and Ubi only care about the bottom line, but Bethesda used to be a company one could trust.

To your examples - think how much value is in Hollow Knight (both of them) for the full retail price. Likewise, EX 33. And, even BG3 - that could have been a more expensive game and still have been worth it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think part of the issue is how AAA is defined has had massive creep. A decade or two ago, a studio of 30-100 people was considered a AAA studio. Just because megacorps have created massive bloated studios that churn out mass market dogshit doesn’t mean a studio with 75 people can’t put out a AAA release. AAA isn’t dead; dogshit corporate bloat is dead.

Agree. Ubisfot having like 20k employees and EA like 18k is totally batshit.

I dont like seeing people fired but some of these larger corporate gaming publishers need to massively gut staff. It makes it almost entirely impossible to make a totally cohesive game when the creative intent is butchered by the worlds worst game of telephone

quote:

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Sandfall had 33 people with a dozen contractors.

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This is seriously one of the dumbest claims being parroted about E33. Go watch the credits, far more than 45 people were involved in creating the game.

It was still far fewer people than some major AAA releases, but it certainly wasn't ~50 people.

Youre also counting voice actors and localization and music along with people from the publisher that are all in the credits.

There were 9 people in the choir and 30 musicians that worked with the genius composer. Along with 3 vocalist and the audio and music lead designer plus the composer Lorian are the only ones counted in the 33 there.

The people who made the genius animations was an 8 person team out of Korea who also are not part of the 33.

Im not sure why you got your jimmies rustled about that, and while all of these people are incredibly talented especially the voice cast. If you disregard them by original statement wasnt really that outlandish. When you hear things like 100 people made Kingdom come 2 that never includes the voice talent, random musicians, publisher people. So how come you got upset about Sandfall but not Warhorse when I mentioned both in the same post? You couldve easily said

"100 people making KC 2 is one of the dumbest lies spread about that game." .

Yeah, prices keep going up, but the games don’t really feel better for it. Most big studios are playing it safe, stretching dev cycles forever, or pushing out buggy launches.
There are still some great AAA games here and there, but nothing like the steady stream we got years ago. It’s kind of a rough era for big-budget games right now.
From the last released, I think, I really liked just Mafia: The Old Country
However, I play online games more and more often because the variety is wider, there is no need to wait for something to be released, and many of these games are not expensive, with a lot of them being free. Lately I've been into pokies, and to be honest, when I tried them for the first time, I liked them more than I expected. I still don't have that much experience, and here is the site which helped me to discover a pokie called Dragon Link, and it was something really interesting. I've been playing it since then, and I'm never bored.