That’s not all ea has to be, it can be more than that, all we have to do is make it look like more money can be made that way for AAA and we can have our cake and eat it too.

Capitalism has always been that way. Might be more accurate to say it gets worse when hobby becomes mainstream enough for more money to start flowing into it. Best balance seems to be when something is profitable but niche so corporations consider it not big enough for them to go all in on with their wealth.

Gaming was better when it was some loser hobby in the eyes of society than accepted like it is now causing it to grow to bring in more revenue than movies and music combined. That drew the attention of the vultures.

EA is great for small and medium sized studios to get games out that might be a bit more ambitious than they could manage with traditional models. The point of AAA is that they have the money to do big impressive things. They can already do focus groups and closed betas to get community feedback. The thing that might attract AAA attention is you could make a good amount without actually releasing anything.

Idk, id love to see it properly done from AAA. That would be a great way to prove you right or wrong.

I just started playing this game. I cried at the end of the fucking prologue. What amazing writing and voice acting.

It’s okay, we can just not play AAA games.

Buckle up, mate.

Uh oh. I’m starting it tonight.

The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.

I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.

Uh oh. I’m starting it tonight.

Some dude pushed himself to finish it all in a weekend because he had a busy week ahead and was in shambles. Man was not made to handle that much feels in such a short period 🥲

This is… but the prologue. Steel yourself. You’ll need it.

The gaming scene outside of AAA studios has been about as vibrant as it’s ever been.

Most of the nominees for GOTY have been AA studios at best and this was a stellar year imo with titles like Silksong, Hades 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and The Alters to name a few!

And all of those games (other than Dispatch and Thealters, which I haven’t played yet) are absolute bangers with hundreds of hours of content for the price of 1/7th a stick of RAM.

::: spoiler spoiler <e: apparently spoilers don’t work for some users> :::

Right? After AC3 i stopped caring.

I firmly believe we are entering the dark ages of AAA games, with the cost to make and GenAI they are going to be shit.

Support indie devs.

Because filthy rich is more attractive for capital.

We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.

If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!

This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.