I think their outlook for this year is looking quite poor, so they've laid off staff to mitigate lower profits ahead of time.
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Amy Hennig: ‘AAA development has become unsustainable’
- Thread starter BAD
- Start date
I think their outlook for this year is looking quite poor, so they've laid off staff to mitigate lower profits ahead of time.
Not going to happen.
People on this very forum are complaining about titles like Sekiro not looking cutting edge.
Hardcore gamers in general have been spoiled rotten and for all the blame that AAA publishers get for this trend, them audience themselves are equally to be blamed as well.
I think the 360 and PS3 gen were the perfect balance for graphics, and the switch
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Have you been paying attention where most of this money has been gotten through? Services, services, services.
No. No its not. You may have a healthy experience at DICE but that doesn't mean it applies everywhere.
But what is said in the OP doesn't apply to all publishers and devs only certain ones.
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Depends on your role and career goals. Some artists want to really push and work in more hyper realism styles and many do come from film. They don't want cartoony stuff in their reel as they aren't interested in pushing their skills in that direction.
Same with engineering, usually the bigger titles have bigger challenges not just on the code side but management side as well. Some like to lead larger teams. Graphics engineers for example will probably prefer to seek out bigger challenges as they grow in their careers.
I know for me working on Forza was a huge deal for me. The game has so much UI and allowed me to grow and learn a ton especially when it came to scaling (over 200 menus in the game). For me smaller efforts are fine but unlikely a smaller game would be able to justify keeping someone like me on let alone a full on UI and UX team.
There is also a subset of game players who do equate more realistic graphics with more fun. They tend to be in between the Fortnite audience and COD audience. Some literally will not touch cartoony or pixel graphics.
And of course everyone wants to be a part of the big risk that turned out to be a success. The industry has huge bias when it comes to that as well as far as hiring. Ship Red Dead 2 or God of War you will get further ahead just on being involved in bigger projects when interviewing.
People also love they can tell non gamer friends and family about their work because bigger games are so mainstream everyone pretty much gets it. It seems minor but some people value that.
And I think you nailed it , it's a trade off . Companies don't mind giving more freedom when there is less invested because if you fail oh well but if that big game fails it has much larger ramifications so often you have many people trying to steer that ship.
Is this really a widespread problem?
Or is it really a problem among a certain few AAA publishers delivering half assed products that consumers aren't rushing to buy?
She was warning about this years ago, using the dev cycles at Naughty Dog as an example.
I kind of agree with her but I feel if she still worked within Sony, she may have a different point of view. Sounds like she has had a shitty experience with EA.
Thanks for the contribution and it echoes my experiences as well.
AAA game development is basically factories designed to make as much money as possible. Like other industries captured by multinational companies trying to increase quarterly profits, the AAA games industry has little to do with creativity, and everything to do with carefully designed and planned products that exploit consumers for as much money as possible.
The impression I get is that we have spent a lot more resources on making games bigger and more realistic than we have creating intuitive tools that make the process of creating games simpler and more efficient.
People on this forum are not representative for the broader market. Some of the most successful games of the last decade (Minecraft, Fortnite, PUBG etc.) look like absolute shit.
Yes which is why i said things have change in some ways .
AAA games are now mostly service base \ GaaS but there are still AAA games.
Even when we move to subs\streaming base services they will still be AAA games.
What concerns me isn't at all how we might be on the brink of financial downtrend and what it will mean to the industry.What worries me is how the state of the industry, at least AAA is pushing out creative minded employees. It's just got no room for it anymore.
Like other industries, the big publishers will not stop their vampiric behavior until another financial collapse or the workers unionize.
The only way to keep "creative minded employees" is to fight against the economic structure that binds people into exploitative and gruesome working conditions - whether it is your programmer doing crunch in San Francisco or the Foxconn worker assembling PS4 consoles 14 hours a day.
Technically, as far as I'm aware, they did achieve the highest profit this quarter, something they touted. The problem is conflating profit with future growth. Blizzard's Outlook is poor. Their cutting and reorganizing is being done to cut away for leaner times.
I completely agree with this. This problem is happening with all markets and industries.
Creative and AAA scale are not mutually exclusive.
And that 2nd statement is also super weird, considering that monetisation models are something that only a very tiny subset of the people in the content craft (persistence and UX designers in this very specific case) (who I assume you are referring to with "creative") work on. Sorry, but I strongly disagree.
And based on my reply, I think I will get the hate here. :D
They aren't no, but publishers like Sony, EA and Rockstar are still chasing after the latest cutting edge tech or going completely bonkers with production values.
The target audience for these games whilst not the vast majority(Mobile, minecraft and Fortnite takes that audience) is still significant enough for publishers to spend 100-200 million for an AAA production.
I think that's due to a few things. I wouldn't say it's less creative , but there is a larger business side that has influence during development.
But this is also because there is more on the line. If you are going to be making a multi million dollar investment over x years in a volatile industry then absolutely you bring in more of the business side to help mitigate risks.
Often smaller investment and returns just don't make sense for larger companies because of all the overhead they have.
Bigger companies tend to pay more , offer better benefits, perks, stocks, equipment, office locations and bonuses all of which increases their overhead when it comes to staff.
So absolutely they are trying to look for ways to establish patterns and garuntee returns on investment because there is no other choice in the capitalist system we find ourselves in.
To be fair it's not "publishers" only but developers in the industry. Developers at Sucker Punch for example chose to go hyper realistic and the few who preferred the Sly Cooper era moved on.
The talent the big publishers attract are usually interested in pushing the high production aesthetics. That's what they want to push for their careers.
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I read that more as a comment on the presence of loot boxes and the like taking away from the artistic integrity of the games that they appear in.
There's a red string to follow in all of Amy Hennig's topics about AAA recently and how It really shows the nature of unsustainability of AAA in that something like Uncharted 1 could not be made today. Uncharted 1 would not be passable by today's industry or consumer standards of looks, content or even the dumb price to how long to beat ratio. The bigger movement to GaaS and multiplayer is the only way that AAA is even alive as it is. It's also a detriment to many games as GaaS is not a one-size-fits-all thing to game design. But it is being pushed wherever it can be pushed in order for AAA to remain sustainable.
The amount of money it takes to make AAA has been getting more and more expensive with every new generation, and AAA is also killing its workers with the amount of work that must be put into them. Hence why there's been a call for change in the industry and unionization.
I disagree with contractor model. I think number one reason games fail to ship in the first place is not having experienced technical people and getting them to work for you is hard as hell. There just isn't many of these people so it makes sense for publishers attract these people anyway they can and stable working conditions and high pay is just one of the tools in arsenal. For areas with with more labor supply like art, there certainly is lot of contractor work and that sure as shit doesn't improve working conditions.
It objectively is healthy though as an industry that generates sales, revenue and profit. If your takeaway here is that the game industry as a whole isn't healthy then you haven't understood the article at all. And I do agree with her, that having large teams in-house over the course of years isn't necessary a sustainable model either.
The problem you have is publishers like Activision swelling their resource to obscene numbers. The fact that a videogame developer, who's only source of revenue is ultimately videogames, is able to layoff 800 people and still have hundreds left is troubling. Unless you're a corporation like Sony, Microsoft, Google etc. it just doesn't make sense, and even they're not 100% safe.
That said, I'm not sure if taking a leaf from the Film Industry's book is the right idea either. I've heard at how shit the pay for a lot of people doing the leg work on that side is, especially relative to equivalent jobs at a big videogame publishing house. People get fucked over there far more than in videogames.
The industry will just do more and more contract work which it already moving towards .
Mind you even with unionization that can still be shit just look at movie\VFX industry
Also genres comes and go which has always been the case AAA \ GaaS or not .
It has more to do with companies wanting a bigger ROI than anything else.
Still going back to the original point no matter how things change in many ways they will always be some form of AAA games.
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Holy f%$6....
"you would have a lot more external partners or freelance developers as part of a team, do more things as distributed development rather than have everything in-house," Hennig says. "It would allow for a lot more flexibility rather than feeling that constant pressure, that churn of salaries. "
Her only solution is more outsourcing, preferably in some third world country where working conditions don't even exist?
Yeah right Amy, go on. You with your 10 buddies at the helm of the project designing the game, with 200 contractors from china and another 150 from bulgaria leteraly create everything but share maybe 20% of the whole frofits. F%$^ yeah...
"you would have a lot more external partners or freelance developers as part of a team, do more things as distributed development rather than have everything in-house," Hennig says. "It would allow for a lot more flexibility rather than feeling that constant pressure, that churn of salaries. "
Her only solution is more outsourcing, preferably in some third world country where working conditions don't even exist?
Yeah right Amy, go on. You with your 10 buddies at the helm of the project designing the game, with 200 contractors from china and another 150 from bulgaria leteraly create everything but share maybe 20% of the whole frofits. F%$^ yeah...
The last thing we need is more powerful consoles, it just drives development costs up. While post-GameCube Nintendo had originally bothered me for being markedly underpowered, better graphics don't make better games.
I wouldn't mind if AAA would die off, I think we would be better off without it and gain more variety and experiments in new game's
Maybe she should take a step back for sure since whenever she seems to be in charge she gets booted or game gets canceled so perhaps "her" vision is not something the industry believes in.
I admit this is seriously an issue mostly in the West.. but even then you have devs like Quantic Dream renowned for working on a tiny budget, maybe its more of an American culture take on it.
Publishers have to go all out, especially with graphics for the sake of market differentiation. With that said.. Capcom in DMC V Im sure would probably say DMC V, Resi 2 and even Resi 7 were probably the most expensive console games theyve made to date.
I feel like the AAA market today is one big bubble.. growing and ready to burst, but at the same time, AA development isnt an answer, because the truth is.. the moment a big publisher steps out the AAA bubble, a rival publisher (maybe a Chinese one with a billionaire investor) is going to step up, take their place and keep growing that bubble anyway.
Ok it's possible you might have a partly valid point on this, because less than 1% of my posts are in the Off-Topic forums. I rarely look over there (mainly because it's clear that the majority of ERA posters have different world views/leanings than me).
But during the many topics on Gaming side about dev work hours, there are many posters who are oblivious to other work professions and ignore any comparisons. Like they're burying their head in the sand about the outside world, and only want to rail against video game industry. It only makes sense to compare other fields when discussing the topic, whether the thread is on Gaming or Off-Topic side.
CPA hours are on a seasonal cycle, yes that is true. But you ignored the other professions:
Residency Doctors -- Absolutely average 60 to 80 hours for multiple years.
Investment Bankers -- Depends on which company and where you're located, but at least for my cousin in NYC and other friends, they work 60+ hours for 40+ weeks in the year.
Attorneys -- Depends on the cases you have going on. But I live in Texas in a huge oil city, and there are many oil & gas disputes which last 1 to 2+ years.
Salary positions are not overtime. It's not for "free", it's part of the expected job description before you sign up. It's not a company lying to you or changing their policies after you sign up.
Now don't get me wrong... *personally* I have no interest in working 60+ hours per week for the full year. So guess what, I choose not to take a job with those descriptions. However I'm in Sales, and I would roughly estimate that out of my 8 days off per month, I average coming in to the office maybe 2.5 to 3 of those days. No direct overtime or extra compensation (but I'm on 100% commission). But it's never for the whole day, usually one to three hours. So I don't consider it a big deal.
This is something I'm always a little shocked gets overlooked about the cancellation of Silent Hills. Everyone always mourns the cancellation of what sounded like could have been an amazing AAA take on SH with strong talent behind it, but we always gloss over the reality of it being AAA.
I guess... As long as the AAA market doesnt disappear and we arent left with mobile ports with a higher resolution and framrates. Or massive oversaturation of the same type of games, that in turn makes people shun one or the other games where businesses close and people lose their jobs because of that.
An industry without AAA differentiation is alot like the mobile oversaturation of games on the Android / Ios store. Its more dangerous and risky for publishers than people think..puts jobs in the games industry at greater risk.
You know, narrative and IP building is also often handled by a smaller group within the large development staff and it's fundamental to the design of the product. Monetization is not getting a free pass just because "a tiny subset of people" are responsible for it. The fact that we now use "monetization experts" and the like is by premise a detriment to creativity in games development.
Maybe stop trying to make the next AAA blockbuster and just make good games instead?
Also start firing execs instead of the entire dev team.
Also start firing execs instead of the entire dev team.
The 1k devs is correct, the no profit without microtransactions is bullshit.
Edit: everyone saying it's not profitable have to take a look at how much the CEOs are earning before "There's not enough profit"
Exactly. And it's a part of the corporate charter, almost an unconscious sort of evil. Their only duty is to increase value to the shareholders, by hook or by crook. I really recommend everyone check out the outstanding documentary 'The Corporation', as it's not just a problem in the gaming area, and the world is approaching the end stage of capitalism. Automation and the rise of AI to AGI/ASI is inexorably going to eradicate all previous economic systems, as no human labor will have notable value whatsoever.
It's going to either be the best thing that ever happened (Kurzweil track), or the end of humanity (seems more likely due to greed/fear/hate).
That easily applies to some comments in this thread as well. Watch that hyperbole train roll on through!
She was working insane hours as ND too, probably takes a toll
EA could have made Anthem 2 games with a different specific target audience each (like rpg and multiplayer shooter) instead of trying to appeal to the everyone market with a AAAA mess. This is how Capcom does it since the audience of RE, DMC, Monster hunter and Street fighter are all very different demographics.