Take off your rose-tinted glasses. We would be having this issue with physical goods as well because every game would still be competing for the attention of the customer with every other game ever released. The only thing physical goods would do is chop off the legs of the indie scene because it would simply be too costly to put their random ideas on a disc. Vampire survivors wouldn't exist without digital releases, Balatro also probably wouldn't exist. A lot of even weirder indie games wouldn't exist because the cost of physically releasing them would be too much to take these random chances of releasing something weird.
I will highlight the existence of shareware, freeware, and other indie physical distribution channels. Both IBM compatibles and other PCs had "homebrew" scenes, not dissimilar to the "indie" scene today. The Amiga is still noted for the PD offerings it boasted. Many of the big companies now started as Indies. So, no.
Maybe I'm not old enough but I don't remember a time where shareware and freeware were part of a physical distribution channels. Most of my shareware I found on the internet and my knowledge of the Amiga public domain comes from Aminet, which started as a FTP site. I still had to get physical discs for full games, but shareware and abandonware I could easily find on the web.
As for for many big companies starting as indies. I'm not arguing "indie" didn't exist back then, my point was that it was too expensive for most people to be indie. The fact that we had 10-20 "indie" studios (kinda hard to call them indie when most of the time they also ended up being publishers for other studios) back in the day and now we have thousands of indie studios supports my point that it is easier to be indie today than it was when physical media was dominant. Part of it is because of easier development tools, part of it is easier publishing.
I would hope most of the industry learned a big lesson from Apex Legends. The day before its release, no one knew of its existence. The sole reason that it blew up was because it was fun.
Viral sharing of interactivity is likely the most cost effective way to run a marketing campaign for games - not bus ads, pre-order hype, etc. In other words, Make good games.
Good games fail to make their money back all the time. It’s not enough to just make a good game. In the case of Apex Legends, a game that needs to keep you playing long term at the expense of others, it needed to not only be good but also be earlier to market than its competitors, which is impossible to plan for. Its success involves a lot of luck, too, and using it as an example is survivorship bias.
me looking at most of the graphical-atrocity indie games I play non-stop still being in “Early Access” after 10+ years Yes, games taking too long to make definitely is the problem. Quantity over quality. Work faster, not smarter. Sounds like a winning strategy AAA-studios, good luck!
It is shitty in many ways. First, I view videogames as art (because they are art) and taking out the human element just makes them a product created by a machine. Coding is a form of human expression. I understand the capitalist urge not to pay people, but replacing people with AI is a moral wrong. Microsoft, for example, after purchasing many studios over the past few years, has fired over 15,000 people in 2025 alone, despite making record profits and charging us more for new games.
I would be terrified if I were a full-time coder. Like many other occupations, programming jobs are in jeopardy. I would be considering other fields or specializations because these corporations plan to replace them all. Google already is saying that more 25% of their code is written by ai. That will only increase and bleed over to game development.
Second, by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary, you are creating an inferior product. Just throwing a game in early access because it isn't complete isn't a good solution and there are hundreds of games currently in that status. Personally, I avoid anything that is early access, with a few exceptions. I get the point in the article about making games with lesser graphics, which I am fine with if the project warrants it, but it feels like these companies don't care what the product is as long as it sells. They are going to create ai-slop and charge us more for it. This is how the AAA industry dies.
I’m a coder, and I’m not in fear of losing my job. Definitely not long term. They can chase this trend all they like, but they’ll soon realize what they need people for. Or, something I find less likely, they don’t need those people, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Sometimes new technologies shrink the need for a certain kind of job, like farming, or they erase the need for it altogether, like telephone switchboard operators. I don’t see AI shrinking this profession all that much, and if it does, there’s nothing anyone can do that will undo it. Even Comcast can’t make people stick with cable using all the nastiest tricks in the book; sometimes things just become obsolete.
by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary
“By any means necessary” are your words, not mine, nor the article’s. I too took issue with the article saying that early access can just be a fallback; that’s not actually solving the problem and just kicking the can down the road. But we got tons of great games made in under 3 years, even with high production value.
This is how the AAA industry dies.
As we know it. But it might be how it finds a path to sustainability rather than the feast or famine of betting your career on a project that took 7 years to make. Rather than perpetually updated live service games, AAA used to make sequels on a rapid cadence. Rather than games that take dozens of hours to finish, often filled with a bunch of busy work, we used to get games that took a fraction of that, often with far better pacing.
You’re gonna be disappointed as fuck. Open world games are so formulaic and actually easier to shit out than a well-crafted linear experience. Especially when youre using generative tools. Huge maps are NOT hard to create or fill when you don’t give a fuck about quality.
There are, were, and always will be games made in shorter development cycles. It’s just that people are finally coming to the conclusion that longer cycles shouldn’t be the norm.
It’s not a gurantee, but cutting the time down when QA is already paper thin ain’t gonna make shit better and likely won’t even retain the quality it currently has.
That’s the fear the author raises, yes. I always say people are fluid, and we expand to fit our containers, whether that’s our schedules, filling our homes with junk, or anything else. Hopefully what the industry is coming to realize is that their container is smaller than they think it is, but yes, scope creep is a real threat. I’m rooting for the industry to scope down.
A problem with AAA games is the development time is longer, the time spent working on the final game is not.
Time and time again when a game as been “in development” for 5/7/10+ years, the game that shipped was only really being worked on for the last year or two, once they finally got the design and gameplay nailed down and worked on the final game. Anthem is one of the more egregious examples in that some of the developers working on the game learned at the E3 presentation a year before launch that the game involved flying.
There’s an iceberg of effort and only a fraction of it gets released.
Does that mean you would prefer sequels to just be glorified map additions to the game you already own? If Doom 1 and 2 were done today, Doom 2 would have been a DLC.
Nah dude, today we have Death of the Outsider, and Blood Dragon, both doesn’t need the base game to run and is standalone, even though they use the same asset and engine from their base game. Not to mention ODST and Reach, both come out within 3 years of Halo 3. All phenomenal, even though they’re using same engine, same asset, with some additional content and new map. The scope is also significantly smaller than the base game. They’re all standalone even though they’re DLC.
Also Tear of the Kingdom use the same map and asset, and it’s considered sequel instead of DLC. same thing goes for Majora’s Mask which they did within a year after Ocarina of Time. It’s totally fine to do that as long as the game is good.
I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.
More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.
The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.
I definitely want to see more publisher-driven “game experiments”. Imagine a studio putting out a 3-hour vertical slice of a PS2-era-style experimental game idea for $5. Now imagine, a publisher puts out about 20 of these such games a year (and mostly loses money on them - since $5 isn’t a lot and those 3-hour segments need polish) but then, occasionally one of them hits it big - and then the publisher grants them a greenlight to make a trilogy of 14-hour games after figuring out that people enjoy it.
To clarify, the idea would be to have smaller studios each independently making games. So for half a year, one studio may only have the responsibility of a single 3-hour demo.
That will backfire hard when AAA gaming implodes next year and consumers will demand quality over quantity. But I expected no less from a bunch of execs high on profits who never even booted up a game in their life. The bonus crap they promise you for a pre-order or a deluxe edition at the end of many trailers paint a grim picture. We’re not just talking about cosmetic either and I know some games have done this for a while but it’s across the board now when AAA sales are actually going down. Nobody has time or money for that slop.
My plan is to buy less games, if anyone enjoys sandbox games, physics, etc. I recommend just spending a month learning blender instead, then it becomes funner than most "creative" games available.
i want AAA to mean more gameplay options, more horizontal and vertical progression, tired of the graphics focus, lost comsetic progression, elden ring at least brought it back
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