Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap

Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.

Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!

This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.

I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later

It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it

E33 did not just get lucky. They used a completely different formula.

~10M€ development cycle with 30 full-time devs + outsourcing is one order of magnitude smaller than what the big studios consider to be the “standard”. AA vs AAA.

30-40 hours of main story and no open world keeps the development resources focused and gameplay/story loops tight in a way that can’t be achieved in an “expansive” open world without unfathomable resource expenditure. But modern games from major studios literally cannot get greenlit if “open world” is not in the feature list because execs see it as “standard”.

Smaller budget also means that they did not pour 50 %+ of their capital into marketing, which allows mores resources to be put into the game and lowers the barrier to profitability. That’s an understated issue; AAA games can’t afford to fail, which is why they all end up bland design-by-committee.

Those parts above were not risks Sandfall took, they were actually basic risk mitigation for an indie studio that big studios aren’t doing based on the overstatement that bigger = more chances for “THE hit game” = better.

Where E33 took some risks was with the strong creative vision and willingness to ignore genre trends and focus group feedback (going turn-based and not lowering the difficulty to “baby’s first video game”). But for the cost of 1 Concord a big studio could afford to make 10 E33s at which point it’s really not a matter of “luck” for at least one to be (very) good. E33 would have been profitable with 1 million units sold, it did not even have to be that good.

The industry has absolutely noticed that E33 wiped the floor with their sorry asses, and I predict that in ~5 years we’ll see many more AAs popping up.

They also just got lucky. No matter how you cut it, you could do everything right and still have a flop.

Fighting your tool is how you figure how what you actually want to make to a large degree. Limitations is how you are pushed to actually decide what is actually worth it to you. Otherwise you just create endless slop with got bits mixed in cause your never challenged.

Sure after a long enough time you can still get there but it takes so much longer if you have no challenge.

About half of every triple A game is actually indie by the strict definition. Look at world of Warcraft for example. But the strict definition it’s indie

Self published is a bad metric to go by and means basically nothing. There’s a good reason the term has lost basically all meaningful definition and is just a vibes based measuring stick nowadays.

Basically every ue5 game will happily devour upwards of 16-21 gigs of ram if you have it. And if you don’t will just slam the fuck out of your hard drive like there’s no tomorrow.

It’s really easy to think games need less ram then they actually do when you don’t have enough to go around and shits just swaps more killing performance. But the ram number is lower!

Yes, many apps will use a lot of RAM if it’s available, that’s how RAM is supposed to be used. If you have 16GB and a game is actually causing swapping I’d be surprised. An app that can use 20GB isn’t necessarily going to consume all the RAM on a system with under 20GB. Higher memory pressure statistics will mean more aggressive evictions but not necessarily swapping.

I have 64GB so the “you don’t have enough to go around” bit doesn’t apply to me.

There’s plenty of games that you could say the same about that didn’t get the traction. It’s still a hit based industry. It’s not a knock against the game, it’s a reality of the industry.

They were always going to receive at least some critical acclaim. This is a AA game from a well-known and respected publisher (Kepler Interactive), so it couldn’t have gone entirely under the radar. They had a decent enough marketing budget and initially were included in the Microsoft Gamepass specifically to secure the studio’s financial future in an uncertain market. The game was objectively good so with all that help, by release day there was no way that the game was going to be a complete dud à la Concord, and I recall Broche saying in interviews that profitability was essentially expected even though the stratospheric success was not.

Also they did get “unlucky” because the Oblivion remaster not-so-coincidentally shadow-dropped a couple days before E33’s release. It’s not much of a stretch to say that Microsoft knew the game was good and (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to drown it out.

If E33 was going to truly flop, it would have been earlier in the development process IMO. They could have relinquished voting shares to investors and been forced to “ubisoftify” the game into bland nothingness. Key creatives could have left. Going all-in on UE5 might have been a technical quagmire. But when the game went Gold, there was very little that could have impeded an at least modest amount of success.

Where the industry is truly unforgiving is single A games. There’s too much to keep track and it’s entirely possible for the “media” (journalists, youtubers, streamers, etc.) to miss a very good game. Single A doesn’t pack enough of a punch to force enough eyeballs on trailers to get a critical mass of fan following, and in that context I fully agree that even a perfect game can still be a complete flop.

I think RDR2 was so memorable because the Western genre is so underrepresented these days. Sure it was such a popular genre with ton of movies and books for a while decades ago before video games were really a thing, but what was the most recent Western movie or TV show any of us have seen? I think the newest one I’ve seen was 1999’s Wild Wild West. Maybe 2004’s Home on the Range if that counts?

If we were getting 3 AAA titles released each year that fall in the Wild West genre RDR2 would just fade into the noise. Its a brilliant game but the only thing it notably did differently from any other open world RPG was unabashedly be a Wild West game that hit every possible trope of the genre including the silly ones like dueling quick draws

I work in embedded my whole life so I’m no stranger of fighting over scraps of resources and spending days trying to squeeze in something that doesn’t fit. It made me better at fighting this specific hardware limitations, and now instead of spending 10 times more time on making something that takes no time at all on a capable hardware, I spend only 5 times more.
I don’t know if for creative work it does something, but for programming it’s like chopping wood with one hand behind your back. Sure you can do it, sure you can get better at it, sure it forces you to adjust your ways, but it doesn’t make the wood better chopped, it just makes you slower and more prone to mistakes for no reason

I disagree, it’s not just the setting. I’ve played about 50 hours of it in the last couple weeks and like 250 total, and the entire time I’ve felt its level of polish and detail is unmatched in any game.

“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.

I am screaming internally.

We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.

Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.

At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.

As opposed to what?

Because the “interesting story” games also did all that work. Thankfully. Good visuals and good stories are both… you know, good art.

Apparently we’ve gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur’s Gate game that wasn’t AAA as absolute fuck.

This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You’re just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how… not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?

I hate this century. This century sucks.

“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?

What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.

“Almost like” and “behaving like an independent studio” is vastly different from being one.

Well, yes it is.

That is exactly how being things and not being things are.

If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.

I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.

If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.