It costs so much to make an AAA game these days that it must earn an enormous amount of money to be profitable, which means it needs to appeal to as broad a market as possible, which means nothing niche or unusual. I think movies are having the same problem.
The problem is that it’s actually not as expensive to make a triple ehh game as people are led to believe. What’s expensive is overpaying all the greedy executives and their unearned bonuses. More people need to be aware of this.
This is why you support indies
This might come off as being a old gamer, but I feel like they’ve been saying this about AAA games since 2000s.
Sure, 90% of them will play it super safe. But there’s always 1 AAA game that breaks the mold and suddenly, the AAA games will follow that. Or imitate whatever indie game is doing with a higher budget.
Sam Lake is still out there fighting the good fight. Kojima too - whether you think he’s a genius or think he produces incomprehensible nonsense you can’t deny he is at least flying the flag for the weird.
I respect that he burned a giant hole in Konami’s pocket and tried his best to block them off at each turn.
Then they fired him before the game was finished and released Metal Gear Survive lol.
Also respect that he made a fucking AAA hiking delivery game, with fucking jar-babies, and Princess Beach.
Sure, but look at the PS2 catalog, for example—way more weird games with relatively high production for the time.
