Is it me or AAA industry is a total disgrace ?

[ShadowOfThePast]

I'm posting this thread to see if anyone shares the same view or in fact have opposite opinion on this subject, of course in a respectful manner even if you don't agree with the opposite views/opinions, all I'm saying is that I want this topic to be as civilized as possible, now to the main topic.

 

I don't know about what you guys think about it but I think in the recent years AAA industry shows more and more, time after time how a total disgrace it is and I can't just ignore it but be even more concerned for what the future of gaming alltogether brings forwards not only for us gamers but for those who work within the said companies too.

 

Broken AAA release after release (CP2077,GTA DE, BF2042) while taking consumers for a complete fools and charging $60 or even $70 in some cases for a broken ass games, controversy after controversy including what's happening with the Activision Blizzard this very moment, many employees beeing overworked, harassed, threatened and underpaid. All of this very much factors into the overall mental health of any employee and no wonder there are some people within the ranks with a very low moral compass to add more trouble in the mix.

 

To me it looks like most CEO's or people in the power positions like a manager are total psychopaths and lost all their damn minds, they tend to prioritize money and steady income over their employee's mental health, good company culture and being a good leader with outstanding record of how true and good leadership should look like. It really looks like all that power and money have corrupted many people and the only way they got to where they are now is by screwing other people, corpse after corpse. Of course, there are many exceptions but it's more or less how it looks like to me when I look into the gaming news and see another scandal in the gaming industry, year after year. Also, those scandals seems to either blow up all over the internet and in most cases being a big deal too.

 

Am I myself going mad thinking about this whole AAA industry that seems to be very corrupted or is it a real sad reality this world came to ?

 

Share your opinions here.

[Jason]

For the most part it's absolutely rotten for sure.

 

I do think there's a slight element of the whole "music these days sucks!" stuff, where people just pay attention to the top 10 charts and judge the entire industry of that which is a little unfair as there are still good AAA experiences out there but when publishers like EA, Acti Blizz, Take-Two and Ubisoft dominate so much of the AAA space it's understandable why people think that. What's going on at Acti Blizz right now is absolutely disgusting and terrifying for their staff, and to see their CEO being aware of it and not caring is horrific, then you have EA running casinos for kids which is about all you need to say there, Take-Two's rapidly lowering standards, poor treatment of their communities and constantly pushing the line on monetisation in games (be it loot boxes, overpriced mtx, in-game ads, premium next-gen upgrades, etc) or Ubisoft with their bajillion game editions and packed day 1 DLC stores, and their own harassment scandals of course.

 

It's just bad and you can't spin it any other way. But there's stil some good experiences coming out, mostly from MS / Sony 1st party now. Stuff like Horizon 2, God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 will no doubt all be good games that put player entertainment first and foremost, or Xbox with it's first party that's getting better every day and great value services like Games Pass. Capcom and Squeenix occasionally put out good stuff too, the Monster Hunter games, the Resident Evil series, or for Squeenix the new Guardians of the Galaxy game which is just a pure love letter to classic video gaming with none of the modern downsides.

 

Which is what I mean by music industry comparison, there's still good stuff out there, it's slap bang in the middle of a swamp of sh*te, but it's there. People need to start supporting and engaging with the good products that treat customers with respect and decency and stop supporting and engaging with the sh*te. Though that's harder for some genres than others, say the football (soccer) genre which is a complete dumpster fire now as Konami have all but pulled out and EA's option is a age 3 and up casino, leaving the only option being to... not play a football game, which is a bit crappy.

 

But yea, the AAA industry overall is just not in a good place. I'm personally in favour of governments stepping and making regulations, definitely for lootboxes but at this point I'm also open to it for things like game prices and charging extra for "upgrade" editions and the like. Normally that can be a bad thing, or at least a very slippery slope, but seeing these publishers just run wild with no chains is getting us further and further into the sh*t with no end in sight. There absolutely needs to be some oversight now as they cannot be trusted in any shape or form anymore.

[TheSantader25]

Just like any other industry, The gaming industry had an impressive start but was then captured by greedy scumbags who only care about their pockets. It's the way of life unfortunately.

[Jabalous]

I forgot the last time I played a cutting-edge, innovative AAA game that pushes the boundaries in many fronts, or creates new worlds and lore with high production values. These are very rare nowadays, and for me, RDR2 (3 years old) was the latest in this regard, with TLOU2 being worthy of mention in comparison. There's nearly a lack of experimentation and new IP generation in this space since the PS3 era (Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Alan Wake, L.A.Noire, Infamous, Uncharted, Crysis, Red Dead Redemption, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Borderlands, Bioshock... and many other titles). Now it's almost only 1st party studios that are producing new IPs and it's mostly Sony that's doing so.

 

5 hours ago, TheSantader25 said:

Just like any other industry, The gaming industry had an impressive start but was then captured by greedy scumbags who only care about their pockets. It's the way of life unfortunately.

 

I think part of the issue is that publishers are incentivized to push games out of the gate fast so that they can the best ROI and fight against a currency ($) that's infinitely being devalued due to the monetary policies of the central banks. When the money is being cheapened, so are the creations (i.e. food, houses, infrastructure, art, movies, games and so on). This sort of thing is discussed in the book The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking and below is a quotation from one paragraph in the book.

 

Edited November 25, 2021 by Jabalous

[TheSantader25]

34 minutes ago, Jabalous said:

 

I think part of the issue is that publishers are incentivized to push games out of the gate fast so that they can the best ROI and fight against a currency ($) that's infinitely being devalued due to the monetary policies of the central banks. When the money is being cheapened, so are the creations (i.e. food, houses, infrastructure, art, movies, games and so on). This sort of thing is discussed in the book The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking and below is a quotation from one paragraph in the book.

 

I think it's mainly because of greed. How much money is really enough for these billionaires at the top who have bought everything? Apparently nothing is enough. They are truly sick individuals. They want every single extra penny they can get even if it means destroying art to release it as soon as possible.

 

There has to be regulations on how much wealth these individuals can gain while people are starving to death everywhere. Corporations with these CEOs will be the end of human creativity. We are truly entering dark times. Capitalism has gotten out of control. I'm not a socialist by any means at all. But there has to be a balance. It's completely out of control.

[Jabalous]

15 minutes ago, TheSantader25 said:

I think it's mainly because of greed. How much money is really enough for these billionaires at the top who have bought everything? Apparently nothing is enough. They are truly sick individuals. They want every single extra penny they can get even if it means destroying art to release it as soon as possible.

 

There has to be regulations on how much wealth these individuals can gain while people are starving to death everywhere. Corporations with these CEOs will be the end of human creativity. We are truly entering dark times. Capitalism has gotten out of control. I'm not a socialist by any means at all. But there has to be a balance. It's completely out of control.

 

The thing is that central banking is the antithesis of capitalism. If you're interested in the whole subject, I recommend you reading the book I quoted (no, it's not about promoting Bitcoin. But you will understand its purpose and usefulness even in this context we're discussing "status of AAA space". The value of present and future money affect everything and the games industry is no exception. We have to consider this angle when discussing the subject).

Edited November 25, 2021 by Jabalous

[G.T.]

Gaming industry heavily relies on fresh new ideas to thrive in business. The current situation seems like game developers are running out of new ideas for their games. If you noticed the games today, they are repeating the same formula over and over again although under different title and story, but the main substance is the same as the previous games released.

[Mexicola9302]

Compared to older titles it's a discgrace.

 

I got a 3600€ RIG, by now it barely helps, because new games are so crappy optimized.

 

Seriously f*ck them all.

 

I got like the second best PC on the entire world and i get sh*tty FPS in some games. That says all.

 

Mainrig:
Windows 11 Pro, ASUS TUF GT501, ASUS TUF B550-PLUS, be quiet! POWERZONE 850W, Ryzen 9 5950x cooled with ASUS ROG RYUJIN 360, ASUS TUF RTX 3080 OC, Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB 32 GB DDR4 3800 MHZ, Samsung 970 EVO PLUS 1TB NVMe, Samsung 860 QVO 2 TB SATA, Western Digital Gold 16 TB HDD.

Laptop:
Windows 11 Home, MSI GL63 9SFK-1001DE (39,6 cm/15,6 Inch/144Hz) Gaming-Laptop i7-9750H, 16 GB DDR4 2666 MHZ RAM, 512 GB PCIe SSD + 1TB HDD, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070.

Oldrig;
Windows 10 Pro, i7-4930K, ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1070 OC, 32 GB RAM (Quad Channel), 1 TB SSD, 2 TB HDD.

Edited November 27, 2021 by Mexicola9302

[Bloodytears1666]

Could be wrong, but main reason of low standards is not a fault of companies, but customers. Bach was niche in his time, and people who could afford to hear it were known the best, and others had to enjoy a local indie bard with his experimental stuff, because it was cheap and reachable. Currently this thing has been fliped, and now companies taking a role of affordable bard which been sold by a price of a Bach's concert, but real art still remains a niche and now played by local indie bards. A good example, something like Dark Souls, it was a niche game for a very limited circle, and right now is a best selling trend, but everything else lowing standards in each take, but people buy it, and somewhat not going to jump to the next true art project untill an AAA development company make a take on it. 

 

CEOs may be a psychopaths, but also just smart bards who know how to disguise as Bach, and until customer buy it, it will remain low quality expensive content, because we all know it is a great formula we asked for and those niche hardcore genius just can not deliver it to mass in an appealing shape.

 

To put it in once centence, you should seek for a concert at concert hall, not at local market.

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by Bloodytears1666

[GiveMeLiberty78]

I empathise with those of you feeling frustrated with developers who over-promise and under-deliver. I am not an expert or a content creator myself, but in my experience standards globally (e.g., across the world and most industries) appear to be decreasing.

 

In a nutshell, I agree with you @Bloodytears1666; some vendors may be charlatans, but some of them are also shrewd enough to know that they can do and charge whatever the market will tolerate. Maybe it's the oldest reasons in the world: Greed, power, and money. With everything that is happening in the world right now, I find it interesting and concerning how much some people are willing to pay literally and otherwise (I am not just talking about the sometimes low-quality of quality control in video games).

Anyway, maybe I am just getting older, but some developers do seem to take the so-called Ryanair approach to video games: "Pile them in and stack them high".

[CryptReaperDorian]

I'm still with my PS4 and GTX 970/i5 6600k PC. The absolutely-embarrassing state that a large chunk of the AAA industry is in doesn't give me any motivation to spend time and money hunting down new hardware (for experiences that are inferior to titles from a few years back). What AAA studios still have a good reputation (for now)? I can think of FromSoftware, Santa Monica Studio, Sucker Punch, and id Software. That isn't leaving much. All of their most recent titles are on PS4, as will Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarök also be.

[SageFan]

The heart of gaming has been missing in recent years. Even just over a decade ago, games were very much... games. They weren't movies or anything trying to be a movie. Even games with long cutscenes made up for it in their gameplay, which was always fairly unique. If they didn't, they weren't generally well-received. Nowadays it seems that the most popular and critically-acclaimed games are pretentious snorefests written by soyboys crammed with pointless exposition and pseudointellectual commentary. The gameplay for these games either take a back seat to the poorly-written narrative or the gameplay is just a cut and dry copy/paste job from adjacent games. Sony games are the most notorious for this. I have no idea how games like The Last of Us or God of War manage to astound critics. To me they've always seemed generic and uninventive, as though they were created by an AI and sorted on an assembly line. 

 

This goes for Rockstar too. I won't lie, I haven't played the entirety of Red Dead 2 but I managed to cop an hour or two into it a year or so ago and it felt like the game was playing itself. The story takes itself way too seriously. I enjoyed RDR because in classic R* fashion, it knew when to be humorous and campy. It also knew when to give the control back to the player. Maybe that's true for RDR2 later on, but boy is it a f*cking slog. 

 

This is also why I actually prefer the stories many Japanese studios tell. They can be over the top sometimes, but it's fun and it feels like a video game. The characters exist to fulfil the narrative and not shoehorn in some retarded political message. Western studios are trying to have their cake and eat it too in making their games look like Hollywood blockbusters but also having them give off the semblance of being intriguing and thought-provoking on the same level as the most profound literature. I would much rather a game that's completely honest about what it is than a game that pretends to be intelligent but is actually very shallow. 

[sabitsuki]

20 hours ago, SageFan said:

This goes for Rockstar too. I won't lie, I haven't played the entirety of Red Dead 2 but I managed to cop an hour or two into it a year or so ago and it felt like the game was playing itself. The story takes itself way too seriously. I enjoyed RDR because in classic R* fashion, it knew when to be humorous and campy. It also knew when to give the control back to the player. Maybe that's true for RDR2 later on, but boy is it a f*cking slog. 

 

This is also why I actually prefer the stories many Japanese studios tell. They can be over the top sometimes, but it's fun and it feels like a video game. The characters exist to fulfil the narrative and not shoehorn in some retarded political message. Western studios are trying to have their cake and eat it too in making their games look like Hollywood blockbusters but also having them give off the semblance of being intriguing and thought-provoking on the same level as the most profound literature. I would much rather a game that's completely honest about what it is than a game that pretends to be intelligent but is actually very shallow. 

Agree with most of this, but too much camp in a game also isn't a good thing. The new Saints Row reboot is a really notorious example of this. You can have the best gameplay in the world and still turn people off if the premise is hot garbage.

 

If anything, the setting has to establish some degree of unstated absurdity in order for the campiness to work. Yakuza games, and the earlier Saints Row games, are prime examples of this.

Edited November 29, 2021 by sabitsuki

[Badman_]

If you're talking about companies rushing their games and releasing them in an alpha/beta state for a full price then yes, it is a total disgrace. And the worst of it all is: they still get away with it. What a crazy world we live in indeed.

[Daz]

 

AAA games have been sh*te imo for many many years. Not just content but quality. What I have noticed is that since approximately 2016/2017 I have only focused on in depth detailed more hardcore styles of games that really go deep into their genre. Hooked on PUBG, Tarkov, and in the early days DayZ, more specific experiences that (originally) did not shift from their focus and value. I don't know if it is due to the increasing lack of new titles that make these others seem worse due to the fact most popular games now don't get sequels and now go on forever with constant updates, such as GTA5, Destiny, Rainbow Six Siege, fortnite w/e. In any normal gaming cycle we would have had multiple sequels to these games with improved tweaks and engine changes. I can't tell which version is for the better, as yes now we rarely need to buy new games, but we do end up being forced sometimes to buy increasingly lower quality content in place of a new game, and at least years ago they were forced to actually provide a whole new game's worth of a product, but instead now we get very little and mostly just skins and useless sh*te.

 

Since 2017, I have only and still only play PUBG, Tarkov and Fallout 76 on occasion when new content arrives. But I was only drawn to that through a free weekend and a year after release when it got better. Now I only generally play to get new sh*t, and not out of 100% fun value. I feel like all major AAA titles have gone this way now, I really don't feel like people are playing games because they truely want to, or want to enjoy the gameplay alone. They do it because they will get progression out of it, or a skin, something to show the worth. So in the end everyone gets a job basically within a game, which I am definitely sick off. And I only tolerate it now with Fallout because I do genuinely think it offers something unique and I always have liked the universe. Though I am sure many would disagree.

 

The only games I get excited about now are remasters, or small indy games with low budget, where they are forced to make good gameplay over any other feature. That do not have the budget to spend trying to make realistic graphics. Which at this point I believe to be a farce and entirely unnecessary considering recent successes of more cell shaded titles.

 

GTA Definitive edition works fine on the series x for me, and aside from the odd hard crash, there are no issues, and it is one of the very few games I have genuinely enjoyed playing, just for fun, in the last 4+ years. The others include Skater XL, Skate City, Streets of rage 4 (though it being a bit of a let down). Deadside, Microsoft Flight sim and Enlisted. Not including PUBG, Tarkov, and Fallout 76 mentioned above. Hitman was ok, not as good as the originals, and they did release barely any f*cking content through 3 games worth. But it was at least fun gameplay with some depth, unlike anything else nowadays.

 

I have 0% hope for any new AAA title to be good, let alone at release anymore. Battlefield 2042 was the last chance of hope and it shat the bed. The game could be there, but it runs so bad being not that more visually stunning than BF4 which was 2013 for f*ck sake. It has a quarter of the content or less, for twice the money if not more. They expect us to pay £110 for a game broken and completely undetermined DLC which could just be more santa outfits for the f*cking characters that suck.

 

I am 99.9% out on AAA games, unless they are offered cheap, I don't want them, and no longer buy at release, it is all garbage we have played a million times before, and the only innovations come from the outside and not from the mainstream.

 

Edited December 6, 2021 by Daz

[Darth Absentis]

I would say yes, but then again i have many promising indie game makers do the same.

Get sloppy, greedy, get tangled up in bad deadlines and just dropping to a quality standard level that is unacceptable.

It is amazing though what certain people get away with though.

 

[sabitsuki]

I've sort of reverted back to playing PS1/PS2 games on an emulator and it's been a blast.

 

The biggest issue to me is that games are way too expensive of an investment and bureaucratic development-wise to feel 'complete' at this stage, as a result you get games designed to hook you in with your wallets ready rather than games designed for fun. Combine that with the incremental payments style of business model introduced by techbros in the late-2000s, non-union labor, toxic egotism by creative leads and the increasingly for-profit mindset of many publishers and devs and you get a perfect storm of a situation like right now.

 

As much as I hate to say it, I think the only way for AAA gaming to get back on its feet is for another crash to happen.

Edited January 3 by sabitsuki

[Mister Pink]

I think there are many variables that contribute to AAA games being perceived as lacking in recent years:

 

1.  The space of innovation shrinks as games get more AAA and as gamers mature: 

 

As gamers get older the pool of "new" and exciting games gets smaller and smaller. As we become veteran gamers what once seemed like a limitless format becomes finite. We start to see repeated patterns as trends as we graduate from casual to hardcore and novice to veteran.  That coupled with the fact is only so much innovation an dev company can do, particularly in the AAA space. More accurately, in the AAA space which is high stakes the room for innovation is riskier.  It's the same in the cinema space where superhero movies dominate and there is less space for innovative indie-flicks. Because for studios there is a huge risk in putting 200-300 million in a film that it has to hit certain formulas, have the right amount of humour and sterile level of family friendliness. The nature of AAA's ensures that it gets harder to have one man's vision do so something leftfield and innovative - because there are so many studios and investors and producers involved - essentially too many chefs in the kitchen which results mass produced blandness like a generic Ubisoft game, rather than something more niche and auteur. 

 

2. The internet and "we'll patch it later" effect

 

The idea that devs can push an unfinished game and then update it means that the margin for missing deadlines is greater. It's not like back in the day that once the game went to DVD production or cartridge production, that was the end and the final product.

 

3. Big budget games, demand big sales and mass appeal!

 

I kind of touched on this in my first point. As gamers, we demand a lot in the AAA space. But in order to be commercially viable, those AAA titles have to have mass appeal.  Some things can have mass appeal and just be good. But IMO, I think they are outliers. GTA is an example of a games that can seem to have mass appeal to all types of gamers from causal to hardcore. Put it this way, a hardcore gamer of RTS games is far more likely to have enjoyed and day-one buy GTA, than the reverse - than a large part of GTA fans would go out and buy an RTS game. GTA just has that mass appeal. But I think GTA is the exception, not the rule. Going to my point of big sales and mass appeal - that AAA games need mass appeal and by doing so they innovate less (take less risk to innovate) and they follow formulas of previous successful games.  The must play it safe and appeal to all kinds of gamers. In doing that you might not get a game super appealing to your specific wants. It's a case of 'try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no-one.' 

 

4. Great games can exist in the AAA space!

 

Some games can exist in the AAA space but are more Niche and they know their audience and please them. Like the Souls games or Hitman series. Hitman/stealth games aren't for everyone but they are damn good games. They tried to go AAA/mass appeal with Absolution and it backfired in a large sense. 

 

Deus Ex games more recently have been highly rated and exceptionally good action/RPG/stealth cyberpunk games. However, they pleased the audience they appealed to. They pleased lovers of those genres but unfortunately, those games didn't have the mass appeal to make them commercially viable and the series was put on hold. I don't know what they would have to do to those games to make them more widely appealing but I'm sure whatever it is would probably water the game down a bit and make them less appealing to fans like me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Badman_]

https://wccftech.com/gow-creator-david-jaffe-slams-aaa-games/

 

I agree with him. Plus the original God of War is one of my favorite games of all time.

[Jason]

He's right, but he can word it better I think.

 

AAA game design has become more formulaic than ever. Ubisoft, Sony and Activision for me are more guilty of this than anyone. Ubi and Sony's game design is very similar except Ubisoft seem to be prioritise insane amounts of content and post-launch support while Sony value production values. Beyond that, their open world design in particular is pretty much identical. Meanwhile Activision just pump out yearly reskins with a balancing patch and call it a new game.

 

I dunno if I'd call it unsustainable, or that AAA is dying because of it, cause these games still sell very well, but I do think that when there's a game that breaks the mould and does something fresh there's huge success to be found there - you just have to be ambitious.

 

Rockstar are an easy example, while their games always have a Rockstar-ness about them so you could say they have their own formula their game design and open world design is still very unique and it stands out from the crowd, especially when combined with their production values... and their 1-2 games a decade release schedule, lol.

[Creed Bratton]

AAA is almost not worth it anymore. There are so many smaller studios making better games that I struggle to think of any reason to pre-order or even buy 99% of AAA titles on launch. And with discounts literally happening a month after release, that is reinforced even further. Then there are all the DLC's, which make me want to wait for the full version of the game before I make the purchase. And with AAA publishers preparing to infest their games with NFTs, I just don't see myself buying almost any AAA game in the future. Also, I'm older now and don't have as much time, so when I finally decide to sit down and play a game, I want it to be good quality fun. I don't want it to be something that feels like a second job.

Edited January 3 by Yokelsson

[Jason]

In the past, despite it's much better pricing, I intentionally avoided CDKeys.com as it was a bit of a grey market key seller that while perfectly legit (as opposed to the dodgy as f*ck G2A etc) I always wanted to support developers properly. But with game prices going up and the reasoning for this being complete horsesh*t I've started using and plan to use it going forward for games.

 

NFT stuff is... iffy. Generally speaking I see NFT's as nothing more than a quick way for the companies making them to make money, but from what I can see the way they've being implemented in games is simply as microtransactions you can legally sell to other players. Stuff like that has existed for yonks, good and bad, but a good example is the Steam Market. In an ideal world I'd be all for it, the idea I could sell my cosmetics after I burn out with a game or whatever, to help put some dosh towards a new game or whatever. That's cool.

 

However NFT's won't be implemented like that so it's a pipe dream, but there is a way they could be a good thing for the industry.