Profile of emuleman

The era of small rockstar studios died with Ion Storm's demise. You constantly need bigger budgets to produce AAA games, and bigger teams. There are dozens of small game studios, most of which the general public has never heard of, that die every year because they can't keep up. I mean the kinds of studios that make licensed games for movies, for children's games, etc. Your examples are of the extremely few HUGE studios, all of them publishing their own content. These includes Ubisoft, Activision, EA, Zenimax/ Bethesda, Blizzard, Valve. They are the big rockstars of the industry, but everyone else is hurting, and bad. Its an extremely high risk industry.

AAA development is in dire straits, if publishers are asking such huge numbers to continue smaller series. Publishers are looking at advertisements, DLC and other monetization as a way of improving profits. It's hard to tell from the outside at what point greed is taking over necessity.

As more studios are closed and publishers are reporting losses, something has to change. AAA studios are still operating the same way as they did in the last decade. But with the rise of cheaper, more accessible titles and the move to digital, the marketplace has changed.

It has become very difficult to justify spending $60 on any game these days, but that is still the standard retail price publishers are asking. And with the rise of monetization, gamers are getting less for the same amount of money.

With the next wave of consoles fast approaching, it can only mean further raising the cost of AAA development. This is not good for the publishers who have to invest the money and the gamers who are still feeling the effects of the economy.

We need to ask how much longer large studios can sustain the costs and development under a publisher-developer relationship. Further complicating matters is the rise of Kickstarter this year, allowing developers to fund a game of their choosing without a publisher's intervention.

My prediction is that either publishers will have to find a way to cut costs and hopefully lower the price barrier of games, or they will have to switch focus to smaller budget titles. The last decade could be summed up with the description "the rise of the digital market", if publishers aren't careful this decade could become “the crash of AAA development."

Jump back to quoted post13 Feb 2013, 23:50 PMBasilone

hello