A reader is worried the time, money, and staff needed to make AAA games is increasing so fast the next generation needs to take a step back.
Triple-A gaming has become a bloated burden on the industry.
Exponential growth is a problem.
In 1952 a professor in Cambridge named A.S. Douglas created a game called OXO, a noughts and crosses simulator where users try to beat a computer at the classic children’s pen and paper-based game.
Fast forward 25+ years to the mid-1970s. A man named Toru Iwatani and his team created the soon to be global phenomenon Pac-Man.
His team consisted of three core members and around half a dozen other designers across development.
Next up from my cherry-picked examples, that support my case, is 1983’s Super Mario Bros. Only five people made up the team of designers to make the game! [Super Mario Bros. was 1985, Mario Bros. was 1983 – GC]
These projects are part of a rich history of video games across the world, spanning arcades, homes, and even stadiums full of eSports enthusiasts. Realistically they aren’t comparable to today’s AAA gaming experiences, but you get the gist of where I’m going with this.
Minecraft was created by a team of less than 10 people in the late 2000s and by the time the franchise as a whole was sold to Microsoft in 2014, they had a whopping 40 staff members!
Today Mojang has around 600 staff… six hundred. Let’s say only 20% of that team are working on Minecraft itself. The rest are divided up on other projects, internal staff, advertising, merchandising etc., etc. That still leaves 120 people working on the core game.
Call Of Duty 2 (just 2, not Black Ops 2 or Modern Warfare 2) was release by a team of 75 people in 2005. Some, hopefully sensationalised, reports in 2022 suggested over 3,000 people worked on the Modern Warfare 2 reboot.
Comparatively, Call Of Duty 2 took up 4GB of space and ran at 720p whilst Modern Warfare 2 takes up 131GB (when everything is installed)!
There’s a huge amount of pressure and expectation to make a game that;
Looks great
Has an engaging story/gameplay loop
Improves on the last game
Is relatively bug/glitch free
Costs less than £70
When you have games that are consistently doubling in size each generation, racing to 60fps as standard, boast 4K graphics (likely to go beyond that very soon) and then, on top of that, have 10-300 times the number of staff, the little things like ‘is this game actually any good?’ might be an afterthought to be patched in later.
I’d much rather the industry as a whole took a step back. Have these excessive, self imposed standards of frame rate and amount of pixels/polygons halted for a generation. Let’s stick with what we currently have for a while before we need a spare 800GB per game and a 16K TV.
The industry is trying really, really hard to sprint forward while it’s barely able to manage an over-encumbered waddle. The people making the games would be able to actually fix games before they get review bombed. Once everyone knows what they are doing it would take half the staff to make these AAA titles. The extra designers could add all the things promised but cut for time or allow for work on new projects internally.
A few could even go on to form a plethora of new companies. Collectively giving the consumer something wild and exciting to play each year instead of waiting 5-10 years between entries in a copy-pasted series.
Imagine a shiny new generation of consoles that can fit more than four games on their SSD before needing to fork out for external storage and are stable enough to run everything at 4K and 60fps!
Games wouldn’t have as many teething issues, if developers actually got more than one shot at using all this new software before it was replaced by something with exponentially growing complications.
The expectation that a great game comes from 500 staff, five years of development, 4K graphics, and 60fps as standard is understandable.
The reality that we, more often than not, receive a bloated, padded, and watered down compromise suggests that the industry as a whole needs a serious rethink of what it considers its best practices.
Consumers need to stop complaining that a game only runs at 30fps or doesn’t need overclocked components to run. We should embrace the current level of gaming as the standard for a while longer before we push the boundary again.
So, in short, I guess… we all should buy… Nintendo Switches?
Wait! No! That’s not what I mean…
By reader Jay