Xbox One EA: HD Gaming Costs Mean There Are 80% Fewer AAA Teams This Generation

[FordGTGuy]

There are substantially fewer developers working the ever-inadequately defined “AAA” circuit this generation, EA’s chief creative officer Richard Hilleman has alleged in a new report. What’s to blame? HD gaming, apparently.

”What is true today is that there are fewer AAA games being built than at the same point in the previous generation,” Hilleman wrote in a white paper picked up by CVG. “I’ve done some calculations that say there were about 125 teams in the industry worldwide working on what I’d call a AAA game on a console, and that was 7 or 8 years ago. That number today is well south of 30; probably in the 25 range.”

— OXM.CO.UK

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[sc_shark]

the economy didnt help any either. where they had teams of people bigcompanies may have come in and bought up the shop..

 

[LALucien]

Hmm, this is pretty sad for us as gamers really and probably only us, as devs are still getting the satisfaction of making games and selling them, even if they aren't AAA ones.
However we, are still paying full prices for games that are worth half the money of the Mario 64's and the GOW's that were built to blow us away and immerse us in a gaming world.

I think it's partly to do with the economy and partly to do with big companies buying up smaller devs, however, I think technological development coup,ed with our society as consumers has had a bigger effect on the way games are developed, marketed and played.

We are living in a time where technology has enables us to have quick fix gaming almost anywhere we go so, the need or want to sit and immerse into a game is depreciating. Also tablets and more powerful mobile devices like android phones and apple etc have created a consumer culture where people pay 0.69p for a game that has a play time of around an hour which is only prolonged buy forcing you to buy in order to progress or restricting you buy limiting how many moves/plays you can make in a day.

The result of that is dev create games that are cheap and quick to make, designed not to give the player a long and detailed immersive and innovative play but rather a quick burst of fun to quench the urge to play.

 

[Svoboda1]

Makes one wonder if the DRM that Microsoft had planned could have revived that? The old adage of "be careful what you wish for" may apply here.

 

[Nymph]

Well, whether or not this is a bad thing depends on what constitutes your idea of an AAA game. Is it purely the graphics, the storyline, the multiplayer, the novelty maybe a combination of any of these four? It says that even though the number of teams have decreased, many have merged and the size of each team actually increased by a factor of four. So, I don't really believe there is much of a loss, especially if it means an AAA game can be completed that much faster. At the end of the day, though, I think the costs of producing such a game can be offset by how well it sells. It'll take a bit of experimentation, but many games and franchises that can be considered AAA are still being made for the next gen consoles, so I don't think there's anything to worry about.

 

[AthleticTypist]

Other than the fact it sounds like that guy pulled a number from his behind, game developers started to focus more on cinematics, rather than the game itself. We all love a good story line but AAA changed from a great quality game to the most expensive to make, especially when you're a giant company like EA. The companies are partly to blame, because they're spending more on crap like voice actors, than they are on making a great game. There were so many games this generation that were nothing than interactive movies.

And don't forget, EA closed 100 studios themselves, so this is just nonsense to charge us more as consumers.

 

[Khronic]

Gaming industry is hilarious. It's never the person selling the goods that is at fault but rather than the consumer. It's completely backwards when compared to every other industry out there. Game's budgets have become so bloated that it's just insane. There are still plenty of small time and mid-size devs out there that can make great games for less than the millions that it takes to make a mediocre rehash.

 

[OniBlackMage]

I don't know what "AAA" means properly (does anyone?) but it seems to be understood as a high-budget game, or published under some big name. Regardless, I'm mixed on my reception of this news. On one hand, its true the money handling and budgeting for a lot of these publishers and developers are full of problems all around, so its good to force them to slim up. On the other hand this may mean that we see a drop in innovation as we see more sequels and remakes over new IPs so companies can play it safe in making a buck.

 

[Reptar_On_Ice]

As Jim Sterling once said, Triple A game titles are setting themselves up for failure, these days. The costs have gotten so high (with the obsession with celebrity voice actors and facial motion capture and other advanced technology) that they can't possibly make their money back. He pointed to games like Dark Souls, which had a small development team and re-used a lot of assets, as an ideal for game development since they still managed to make a fantastic game and make a ton of profit off of it at the same time.

 

[Esperahol]

Makes one wonder if the DRM that Microsoft had planned could have revived that? The old adage of "be careful what you wish for" may apply here.

BS. DRM wouldn't have done anything, because the problem is cost versus quality. AAA has come to mean how much something costs rather than how valuable something is. It's like the movie industry - after a certain point people are just going to wait for the stupid film to come on FX instead of pay 17 bucks opening weekend. Yet Hollywood continues to make pictures that costs 50M and more only to see no return on their investment. So the solution is to better use resources at less cost rather than use all the resources at an impossible cost. That isn't something DRM is going to fix.