LETTER OF THE MONTH

AAARGH!

Hi guys. I’m beginning to find myself more and more disillusioned about the state of AAA gaming. I don’t know if I’m just being cynical, but 90% of the stuff that comes out nowadays just seems to be a sequel or a remake, and that remaining 10% just seems to be made up of unoptimised console ports. The indie scene is much more exciting. Not only are games being made with the PC as the first priority, indie games aren’t all sequels or remakes. There has been talk for a while that AAA development is slowly dying and that smaller development teams are going to take over. Can this really be a possibility? If we want genuinely new games it seems to be the only option.

Matt Sims

Hi Matt. I think that the claims that AAA development is going the way of the dodo are a little premature, given the fact that games are becoming even more profitable, even when budgets hit marks that would make Hollywood execs blush. A Hollywood analogy works when looking at the budgets of game development. You have your massive budget summer blockbusters, the AAA titles, and you have the more agile, lower budget titles that can take more risks than their bigger budgeted brethren. There’s enough room in the ever growing industry for the big studios and the indies to keep working alongside each other. As far as the indie scene goes, yes, it is more exciting for the most part, but whilst they may not do sequels and remakes all the time, indies do seem to follow gaming trends almost religiously. For a while everything was a twin stick shooter. Now it’s pixel art and rogue-like development. Developers go where the money is, whether their budget is hundreds of millions or just hundreds.