LogFAQs > #983145177

willythemailboy posted...

For anyone looking at those numbers, there's only two real options. Either make a game that is guaranteed to sell 10 million copies - good luck with that - or find a way to make similar quality games for under 100 million dollars. Short of AI doing a lot of the work, it's hard to see any other way to make a modern AAA game on that budget.

Plenty of studios do just fine working with more modest budgets and/or making games that are just straight up better than those. Concord's budget got bloated by how long it spent in development hell, and it was doomed from before it even launched by poor marketing and a failure to do anything to stand out in a crowded genre. Star Wars Outlaws managed to hit a double whammy of consumer apathy in that everyone's been inundated with both too much Star Wars and too much Ubisoft open-world. Skull & Bones also spent too long in development hell, mostly because they didn't actually have a solid idea for the game and just had to string along the grant they had from Singapore's government for as long as they could (then eventually released the half-baked product they had when the government's patience ran out). All of these high-profile failures have very obvious reasons for their failure, not simply that the whole idea of making expensive AAA games isn't commercially viable.

There's also the super-secret third option of just not making AAA games if you don't have an idea that can reasonably be expected to sell well enough to justify a AAA budget. Not every game has to be a photorealistic cinematic extravaganza with a budget bigger than some countries' GDP, and in fact many of the best games of the last couple decades haven't been.