I disagree that Until Dawn wasn't AAA. It had real actors and graphically it holds up even now.
Amy Hennig On Why People Aren’t Buying Linear Story Based Games
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I disagree that Until Dawn wasn't AAA. It had real actors and graphically it holds up even now.
When I use the term "AAA," I'm referring to the overall size of the budget -- say $100 million or above (to pick a figure) -- not just the quality of the visuals or the voice acting.
I don't think Until Dawn's budget was at that level, for two reasons. One is the studio, which despite its name (Supermassive) isn't a big, AAA factory. Their game catalog is filled with smaller-scope games (http://www.supermassivegames.com/games). They're now assigned to VR titles. Second reason is there wasn't much hype or advertising around the game. AAA-budget games usually have a ton of money devoted to marketing. There was very little advertising for Until Dawn. People talked about Sony "sending it out to die." So for those reasons, I wouldn't consider it a AAA (budget) game.
Still though it looks like a pretty penny was spent on Until Dawn. Not 100 million but its up there.
She's right, single player only linear games like Uncharted or even something like the new Wolfenstein series have a tough go at it nowadays. A lot of today’s gamers expect some sort of multiplayer to provide more value and extend its life. If not they feel that the game is a one and done affair not worthy of the full asking price and either ignore the game, wait for a sale or buy the game used. Open world single player games have it a little easier since they can cram in loads of content to keep the perception of value there.
Doesn't matter what they did before or what they are doing now.
Also, very few games get near 100 million dev costs. Which begs the question: Do games really need 30-50 million advertising budgets in this day and age?
I was using the series as an example of a story driven franchise. Uncharted multiplayer while fun I suspect wasn’t the main draw for many fans of the series. The first game was really well done and the second added multiplayer for added value but certainly didn’t need it.
The point is a single player only linear game is a tough sell in today’s gaming climate. That’s why I think you see a publisher like Ubisoft not make any of those games and instead for single player narrative driven games they go the open world route.
IMO, no.
There's not even a lot of videogame ads in the first place. And the ones out there are for the big name titles and usually with a MS, Sony or Nintendo backing to it. Yeah, you get some EA and Activision games and some UBI, but the majority of games get zero media advertising, with the marketing coming from internet stuff and tons of games sell fine.
Marketing is the hardest thing to analyze in term of effectiveness as there's so many other variables out there.
Just because there is huge marketing spend doesn't mean it's good. In fact, lots of it is a waste of $$$. But large companies have so much profits they can blow "to ensure their marketing budget gets comped for next year".
So what you get is some marketing departments blowing money at year end so that Finance (who often doesn't know the details of it) will budget that amount again for next year, so marketing has money to play with. No department wants budgets cut.
Hold on. I was told that single player or story based games weren't even a thing. That every game should have single player and multiplayer or there's no value. Personally, i'm a huge multiplayer fan. I wouldn't be able to get through the days without firing up some Call of Duty or Gears on a rainy day. It's like playing a board game or Tetris back in the day. It gets repetitive but it's always fun to pass time for me. With that said, i wouldn't be a gamer without story based games. It just wouldn't interest me at all anymore.
The politics in gaming have turned me off. Can't be bothered to care anymore really. I've lost interest in this gen and talking about gaming in general because of these very topics. Omg loot boxes. Oh no, single player game without multiplayer. A good game is a good f***ing game. If people don't buy story based games and only Sony can sell them then that's all there is to it. GOAT status confirmed. If devs don't have the funds to do big AAA story based games then they should do something smaller if that's their passion. Don't settle for a half baked game just trying to make the biggest profit. That's the quickest way to lose money.
The politics in gaming have turned me off. Can't be bothered to care anymore really. I've lost interest in this gen and talking about gaming in general because of these very topics. Omg loot boxes. Oh no, single player game without multiplayer. A good game is a good f***ing game. If people don't buy story based games and only Sony can sell them then that's all there is to it. GOAT status confirmed. If devs don't have the funds to do big AAA story based games then they should do something smaller if that's their passion. Don't settle for a half baked game just trying to make the biggest profit. That's the quickest way to lose money.
Yeah, I'm sure it is. I'm just speaking in general terms. If advertising wasn't successful, there wouldn't be so many billions poured into it. I'm not saying every marketing decision is a good one and every dollar spent on ads is a dollar well spent. I actually think advertising/marketing is a ridiculous, manipulative thing that contributes to all kinds of psychological and cultural problems. I avoid as much of it as I can. But we can at least assume they (the companies) think it is a good investment, generally speaking. Whether it actually is or not in each individual case, we can't really say.
It's certainly wasted on me. But then, everyone thinks that, lol...
Marketing debates are funny at work.
Marketers will push things like Nielsen ratings, page views, impressions and such. But giving any kind of hard stat regarding Media X = Sales Y is basically non-existent.
But it is valuable. You need some of marketing or PR to get the word out.
You'd think something like videogames would be easy to analyze. Most sales are front loaded.
But if a game is announced, who knows what kind of effect media (like TV ads) does if the game already went through E3, various previews, Amazon pre-orders deals, EB clerks pushing pre-orders and all that. And the expensive tv ads don't come on until a week before launch in November. The game sells 1,000,000 copies in the month. Who knows how many copes were sold because people saw tv ads.
Nobody will be able to find out. The best answer is something doing theoretical calculations and trying to prove people in a room their math is the best formula.
Yeah, it can get kind of small-minded at times. People lose the forest for the trees. I debate this stuff but don't really care much. It's more a way to idle away the time. If I start taking it seriously, I know it's time to take a break.
The industry will do what the industry does. I don't have any control over it. I'll just continue to look for the games I I enjoy. As long as they're around, I'm good. There's no sign of them drying up. There are plenty of great SP and MP games being released. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Well, one factor is that when people pour a lot of hours into an online MP game, that doesn't leave much leftover to play other games. The player feels like they've gotten their money's worth (and they have), but they aren't spreading the love. You've also got plenty of people who only buy 1 or 2 MP games a year (and usually the same ones -- CoD, GTA, etc.), and that's all they buy. So although a couple dozen MP games are highly successful, there are many that just can't get traction.
Everyone is so skewed to a small number of shooter franchises that in order for a new MP game to break the mold, it's got to be really good. Evolve had a good premise.... I don't remember any big name shooters where one guy's the monster and a team of 4 have to take him down. But the game wasn't great. And the game was heavily based on team work and getting a party going to take down the beast.
Most shooter's most populated modes are DM or TDM. Or even it's an objective mode, half the people play it like straight up TDM. So it shows one thing about MP games. Even though gamers want competition and a social aspect playing with other humans, just about all of their most popular modes are ones where someone has freedom to do what they want and not be strapped down playing as a cohesive team.
Most objective based modes have most players on mute.
Maybe last gen and certainly gens before that the marketting budgets made sense, but this gen with all the streaming, clips, youtube vids and more general things like forums and news websites it just seems silly.
I mean do EA really need big ad board advertising at huge premier league grounds/games? That s*** is expensive.
It is surely a tumultuous time in the industry.
Checking the xbox and playstation stores, I regularly find many sidescroller, pixel based single player games. It feels like gaming is starting to mirror american class division at times. AAA budget games are few but astronomical in price, smaller indie projects have become increasingly prolific, but the mid-point of multi or single player focused games is disappearing. Success stories (or success outliers?) do happen. Divinity Original Sin was crowd funded and successful enough to get a sequel, which I hear is even better.
Outside of steam, which is kind of a wild west of platforms, I just don't see that kind of mid budget game in the release listings anymore. My original xbox library is full of such games. Xbox 360 library is full of the big names mostly. It's been a steady decline I guess.
Checking the xbox and playstation stores, I regularly find many sidescroller, pixel based single player games. It feels like gaming is starting to mirror american class division at times. AAA budget games are few but astronomical in price, smaller indie projects have become increasingly prolific, but the mid-point of multi or single player focused games is disappearing. Success stories (or success outliers?) do happen. Divinity Original Sin was crowd funded and successful enough to get a sequel, which I hear is even better.
Outside of steam, which is kind of a wild west of platforms, I just don't see that kind of mid budget game in the release listings anymore. My original xbox library is full of such games. Xbox 360 library is full of the big names mostly. It's been a steady decline I guess.
I agree. I think Andy talked about this a while ago now with what seems like the death of the mid grade game. Either you're AAA or an indie. IMO games like Darksiders and Alan Wake seem like they would have a much harder time this generation than last.
Fortnite Battle Royale was made by the Unreal Tournament development team at Epic, which had 19 employees. Now it's the biggest game in the world.
AA efforts aren't going anywhere. In fact, they're doing fine. Go take a look at some top 50 games of 2017 lists. They're loaded with AA games.
Yes, I really enjoyed that AA category of game, last gen and the one before it. It has really declined this gen. AAA games need to have huge mainstream appeal, so they're usually not very creative or interesting. You get more risky, weird, and interesting games in the AA space. That's where I'd find the hidden gems and the games that really seemed unique.
The best counter-example I can think of is Hellblade. The idea there was AAA production values on a AA budget. Because of the model they used (digital only, no publisher, shorter length), they only needed to sell 300K copies to succeed. That gave them a lot of freedom to do things their way, rather than trying to appeal to Joe Gamer. As a result, they were able to risk developing a very creative and unique game.
There are other examples. Most Japanese games, for instance (save FF, Zelda, and Mario), are developed with what are probably AA budgets. Dontnod's stuff is AA. I'm guessing Supermassive's Until Dawn was AA. Recore might have been, too (not sure; I didn't follow that one). They're still around; just much fewer than in the past.
Me personally, I don't classify Fortnight as AA at all. The reason being is that its original concept game, Fortnite (PvsE) had an AAA effort and budget behind it. At one time, the game had 90 people working on it and had exceeded the first Gears of War budget. Now while I'm sure it did only take 19 or so people on the UT team to make the standalone Battle royal mode, I doubt they made it from the ground up without reusing assets and resources that were already previous made.
As for the death of the mid grade game, I should have clarified myself. As we were talking about linear story based games that's what I was referring to, the death of AA single player linear game. That's why I included Darksiders and Alan Wake as an example, though you can argue Alan Wake was AAA.
Hell blade is an oddity isn't it? It proves it can be done, making an AAA on a AA budget. I wonder though, if you're one of the big boys in the industry that is a large publicly traded company, can they afford to try new things and potentially be niche or alienate Joe Gamer due to the fact that they still have be accountable to the stockholders?
I don't know whats going on in the Japanese industry right now.
I suppose it's such a blurry concept but I disagree with your Fortnite take. Gears of War cost $12 million dollars to make, which was AAA money back in 2006. To put that in perspective, Destiny 1 cost 140+ million in 2014, a mere 8 years later. The cost of AAA gaming has skyrocketed in recent years. I think that $10 to $20 million dollar range is exactly what you're looking at in terms of AA budgets. AAA to me, means something over $80, $100, $120+ million. I also don't think Fortnite has the look or feel of a AAA game. God of War, Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption etc...Fortnite Doesn't belong in the same category as those games.
Plus, if you read this https://www.polygon.com/a/epic-4-0 it sounds like Epic completely turned their back on AAA development after their run with Microsoft and Gears of War.
As for your other point, I...disagree again. If a publisher is going to greenlight a 8 to 12 hour, linear, single player only game going forward, it's probably going to be either a AA studio or an indie studio. I just can't see anyone willing to spend $80+ million dollars on that type of game anymore.
I'm sorry to be so disagreeable.
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Look at gaming vs the movie industry and they both have the same problem. Rising costs means people are risk averse.
In Hollywood, they plug the same actors into the same tired plots and pump out the same movies. They literally have a formula for how much a movie will sell (mostly overseas, they actually don't care if America or Western Europe like it). (did you wonder why they turned a monk from Tibet into a white woman in Dr Strange? Because that was the way to get the movie past the Chinese censors).
Video games are the same way. Costs are big, so a flop can easily kill a studio and eat millions of dollars. So, what do businesses do? Play it safe. Don't take risks, don't innovate. Use the cookie-cutter method to pump out the same old same old.
So, we end up with very vanilla products. And just like movies, when quality declines, most of us just sit and wait. I watch most movies at home much later for cheaper, and I wait for the price drop on SP games most of the time.
In Hollywood, they plug the same actors into the same tired plots and pump out the same movies. They literally have a formula for how much a movie will sell (mostly overseas, they actually don't care if America or Western Europe like it). (did you wonder why they turned a monk from Tibet into a white woman in Dr Strange? Because that was the way to get the movie past the Chinese censors).
Video games are the same way. Costs are big, so a flop can easily kill a studio and eat millions of dollars. So, what do businesses do? Play it safe. Don't take risks, don't innovate. Use the cookie-cutter method to pump out the same old same old.
So, we end up with very vanilla products. And just like movies, when quality declines, most of us just sit and wait. I watch most movies at home much later for cheaper, and I wait for the price drop on SP games most of the time.
I can see your position as well. I guess the sticking point would be what any of us consider an AAA budget. For me, super amateur game industry watcher, I'd consider anything into the double digit millions range on the high end of AA and low end of AAA. But that's subjective. As for the look/feel of an AAA game that too is subjective, so I won't say that you're incorrect with your position. Just to me, Fortnite has the polish and effort of a AAA game. Again somewhere down the line a more substantial definition of what an AAA game is probably needs to be made from a publisher or dev.
You may be right about publishers green-lighting linear games going forward. But I think the major players aren't quite ready to turn that page yet. Bethesda is probably going to green light a Wolfenstein III , Evil Within 3 and Dishonored 3 ( full disclosure: I don't know how to classify Dishonored. Non-Linear, non open world?) Again they may just be slow to adapt to the market but I hope they stick with it.
IMO, I would like to see the industry move to the Titan-fall 2 model if it has to change. Pretty good single-player story mode with a separate non-intrusive mutiplayer mode with little to no lootboxes. Probably a pipe-dream given how commercially unsuccessful Titanfall 2 was but I like the model.
For me, I classify games based on A ratings more about the quality and presentation of the game as opposed to budgets. Nobody even knows what game budgets are anyway.
I'd rather classify a really good and polished indie game AAA over a piece of shyt like MoH: Warfighter. I don't care how much money EA spent making it or how fancy their animation and sound studios are.
For example a game like PUBG, what is it? A, AA, AAA?
- It's sold a ton
- It's got good reviews
- It's a game with huge scope and a unique twist on shooters
- But the graphics, sound and game engine is clunky as hell and looks like a last gen game
- Low budget, and reasonable Bluehole employee count
I'd rather classify a really good and polished indie game AAA over a piece of shyt like MoH: Warfighter. I don't care how much money EA spent making it or how fancy their animation and sound studios are.
For example a game like PUBG, what is it? A, AA, AAA?
- It's sold a ton
- It's got good reviews
- It's a game with huge scope and a unique twist on shooters
- But the graphics, sound and game engine is clunky as hell and looks like a last gen game
- Low budget, and reasonable Bluehole employee count
That's fine as a personal definition -- everyone uses "AAA" differently -- but in the context of the thread, AAA would refer to game budgets.
For the heck of it, I ran some google searches on "What was the budget for _____"
Witcher 3 - $81 million
GTA 5 - $265 million
Skyrim - $85 million
Far Cry 4 - couldn't find
FFXV - couldn't find
Horizon Zero Dawn - $47 million, but that's just the development budget; I didn't see what the marketing budget was
Quantum Break - don't know
Metal Gear Solid 5 - $80 million
Heavy Rain - $55 million
Shenmue - $47 million (originally believed to have been 70)
Edit* 47 mill with inflation is $69,233,093.35