"Triple-A is in crisis" and games "don't have staying power because they're bad," says ex Gears of War director and Painkiller creator
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It’s interesting because the live-service formula is kind of antithetical to what they want. They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine. They really should just invest in actual money printing machines and churn out fake money, because that’d be a more successful endeavour.
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
It’s just so bizarre to me that they want people to invest time and more importantly, money into the game, when they themselves aren’t willing to do so.
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).
The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.
These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.
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We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.
If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.
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Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation’s system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.
Thats why I love the ps1 and og consoles in general. For one. Yes, they had to work their asses off. For two, THE GAMES WERE (usually) FINISHED BY THE TIME YOU PLAYED IT.
The model of make game-test game-release game-DONE was tried and true, and something rarely experienced today.
There are amazing games today of course. But still, we have definitely shifted and I dont prefer it for the most part.
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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.
Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.
But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.
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"Triple-A is in crisis" and games "don't have staying power because they're bad," says ex Gears of War director and Painkiller creator
Triple-A fatigue is real for me, so I ask Witchfire creator Adrian Chmielarz where big-budget titles - especially FPS games - might be going wrong.
PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com)
I don’t think the industry has the willpower to spend less money. They’re always going to chase the highest graphical quality.
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The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).
The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.
These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.
I think Digital Extremes, at least currently, is still very aware of what made them successful.
John Bain for example spoke out about the games potential very early, earning them a big influx of players, and they’ve previously stated that Warframe wouldn’t have been a thing if not for him. I guess it can be particularly contrasted with the fact that Warframe was kind of a Hail Mary project for the studio. They’d pitched it around for a while but no publisher responded positively. When they were running out of money they just said “fuck it” and went to work on it, publisher be damned.
I’ve been playing on and off for years now, since around the release of The Second Dream. It makes me really happy to see that they’re doing well. I hope they’ll continue to do well, and do well by the community.
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Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation’s system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.
I don’t know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you’re not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.
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I don’t think the industry has the willpower to spend less money. They’re always going to chase the highest graphical quality.
Sometimes you get both. And then it’s really special (especially 8 years later when you can turn the settings up), see RDR2.
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We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.
Can’t think of a game that really needed more than like 10GB of RAM. It’s all VRAM for textures and even then 8GB is enough
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Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap. I’m thinking of Frontier’s “Planet” games, or some of Paradox’s stuff.
I’m confused at some games not taking the DLC happy route, TBH. 2077, for instance, feels like it’s finally fixed up, and they could make a killing selling side quests smaller in scope than the one they have.
How does Paradox DLC work at all? The EU4 bundle with all the DLCs is on a 50% discount right now and still costs $142 CAD. Crusader Kings 2 is also over a hundred bucks at half off for all DLCs. And these are their old games that they already have sequels for. I’d literally play these games all day every day if I could but the price is prohibitively expensive and prevents me from doing so.
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Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?
and rest of the budget on ads
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"Triple-A is in crisis" and games "don't have staying power because they're bad," says ex Gears of War director and Painkiller creator
Triple-A fatigue is real for me, so I ask Witchfire creator Adrian Chmielarz where big-budget titles - especially FPS games - might be going wrong.
PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com)
That’s because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!
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I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur’s Gate 3.
Pretty good tbh.
Nightreign pretty damn good too
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The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2…
I didn’t know they made Power over Ethernet into a game, let alone a sequel.
There’s even more than one Power over Ethernet 2s, and both of them are good games, often played by similar groups of people.
(Pillar of Eternity 2 and Path of Exile 2)
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How does Paradox DLC work at all? The EU4 bundle with all the DLCs is on a 50% discount right now and still costs $142 CAD. Crusader Kings 2 is also over a hundred bucks at half off for all DLCs. And these are their old games that they already have sequels for. I’d literally play these games all day every day if I could but the price is prohibitively expensive and prevents me from doing so.
Heh, that’s correct.
This meme video about sums it up:
The answer is “you play at release and buy them over time, like a crab in slowly boiling water,” though the absolutely incredible rate they introduce bugs into the games kinda knocks you out of the habit.
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Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.
But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.
It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.
Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.
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It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.
Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.
All they care about is the next forknight.
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It’s interesting because the live-service formula is kind of antithetical to what they want. They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine. They really should just invest in actual money printing machines and churn out fake money, because that’d be a more successful endeavour.
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.
It’s just so bizarre to me that they want people to invest time and more importantly, money into the game, when they themselves aren’t willing to do so.
They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine
Problem is that they can’t micromanage that into existence, ConcernedApe more or less created a money printing machine with Stardew Valley all by himself, at least at first. It would be so much cheaper for studios to find like 15 inspired independent devs/designers that need money to make their dream a reality, give them just a lil equity and room/time to cook and they might actually get something amazing. But ain’t no way execs and shareholders would let that happen, they’d yank the plug after year one of a three year contract.
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"Triple-A is in crisis" and games "don't have staying power because they're bad," says ex Gears of War director and Painkiller creator
Triple-A fatigue is real for me, so I ask Witchfire creator Adrian Chmielarz where big-budget titles - especially FPS games - might be going wrong.
PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com)
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.
I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.
I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.
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Thats why I love the ps1 and og consoles in general. For one. Yes, they had to work their asses off. For two, THE GAMES WERE (usually) FINISHED BY THE TIME YOU PLAYED IT.
The model of make game-test game-release game-DONE was tried and true, and something rarely experienced today.
There are amazing games today of course. But still, we have definitely shifted and I dont prefer it for the most part.
Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.
Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).
