Why are AAA games so dark?
Grand Theft Auto III became one of the reasons why I study videogames, and not for a happy reason. I was living in Phoenix at the time, and would meet people who loved playing games. The big one was GTAIII. An open world game is something I loved, but I got sick of the fact that I could only be one type of person in it. That person was an evil narcissistic douchebag, who gloried in death, and power over others.
In fact, there was a point where I heard about BMXXX, and went home wondering what had happened to my beloved hobby. So, when I decided to research why the hobby seemed to go so very dark. Every time a GTA comes out, the promotion of it is something akin to a blockbuster movie, but it ends up being something much much less.
It seems Richard Hutnik felt the same way, and posted it on his blog, and on the vgchartz website. In fact, it was his final hurrah for the vgchartz forums. He decided to answer some questions I had about how he viewed the state of gaming.
He said in his post that it seems that most companies are now trying for the giant, over the top game that sells extremely well. It has gotten so bad that mid-level companies are going under.
Mid-level were the companies producing the bulk of the videogame content. B-level (AA) games, say stuff like Frontlines: Fuel of War, and others you can think of, ended up here. The thing is that these companies got squeezed out. The definition is tricky on what it is. You can see one person's attempt at it here.
So then the only games that are able to sell are AAA games.
Not sure if the idea has been to promote them, but the idea is to get as much funding as you can, build up as big of a team as you can and hope you get a lot of marketing behind it, to create the next big thing. It has gotten harder and harder to go this route, particularly with new IP.
DLC has evolved to be a main way for companies to keep making money on a title they have sold. It has become a must. They have been toying with how to do it right, and make it acceptable. I believe you are going to see an increase in open world games on the AAA side, because they can justify selling DLC to gamers. Doing what Capcom did and putting it on the disk and selling to unlock is out.
I asked if there would always be a blockbuster mentality in gaming.
By default, some title will always rise to the top, and be a blockbuster, if the market is there. Some titles will slip through. The issue is sales and market size and if they will be successful. The Old Republic is one example of an MMO that had a huge budget and hasn't really been doing it. APB was another one.
He has been gaming for a long long time, and remembered how games were played. When we began to discuss modern games vs older games, and even vs boardgames, he came out with an interesting idea.
Without the Internet, games were viewed as having to stand alone, and used stuff like random level generation to be able to able to get people to replay them. Look at Simcity and Civilization as examples of that. Boardgames also are stand-alone products pretty much, where you can't really patch them and so on. And boardgamers aren't going to put up with X hours of gameplay. Both boardgames and older videogames have been around awhile, so there would be some connection.
Keep in mind what is considered a "game" is pretty broad now, so things that are interactive fiction are considered "games". Designing a boardgame is a different effort. What I can say is working in the boardgame/tabletop game area, you are more inclined to design things that are traditionally classified as games. As part of this, a strong attribute of boardgames is replayability. While with the videogame side, there is talk of X hours of gameplay is said. With boardgames, no one buys boardgames expecting X hours of gameplay out of them. People buy a boardgame/tabletop game and they expect to get a lifetime of enjoyment out of a game they bought.
By the way, you do ask about boardgame stuff. With boardgames, they also get stuff like DLC in the form of expansions.
I see [DLC/Expansions] being more of a sign that a game has sold enough to support it. Like the videogame market, it is a way to be able to have a greater shot of making money off a game out there. It helps also to get additional money for publishers so that they can put out other content.
Boardgame expansions are likely more organic and follow out of play, while DLC is much more of a play for money. With boardgames, there is degradation of content, which means that when it is sold, you get a worn product. Videogames don't suffer this as much.
When we discussed what games he would like to see, he started into the Alternate Reality, or Simulated Realism idea.
The idea I had for a game was a procedurally generated world, and you start out as a citizen in it. You work your way up through the ranks until you become king. At that point, you manage the kingdom like Civilization or Simcity. An MMO would be ideal for this actually.
Ideally, I think it would be good if people could learn life lessons in open world games. Also, I would rather the world function organically, rather than scripted. If you see games like Elite, you get an idea what I am thinking of here. A world needs to function this way. It has to not care the player is in it, but allow the player to make it respond.
During the interview, he pointed out that many of his ideas were said better on the vgchartz forum by Badgernome.
How exactly is GTA destroying its own environment? In a generation that has lasted almost eight years now there have been exactly two released. And while they have sold extremely well to the tune of millions of copies, there are many, many more gamers who never play GTA.
It's kind of a strange argument, tantamount to saying that there should be no super successful games because they hog all the market. But it's hard to argue that because if there were no GTA (or COD, or WoW, or LoL, or Minecraft, or whatever game you might feel like bellyaching about) you can't know how many of those dollars would just flow to other games. A good many of them wouldn't because those big event titles bring back lapsed gamers and bring in people who were never gamers before or who don't play games other than those. They are the subject of mainstream media stories and get people to think and talk about gaming who otherwise wouldn't. I mean, if Nintendo suddenly ditched Mario, would all of that Mario money just go to Metroid and Fire Emblem?
The problem isn't a few games hogging all the market, but too many games chasing the same dollars. Maybe that sounds like the same thing, but it's a distinction with a difference. It's understandable that every publisher wants to have the next COD. But they try to accomplish this by making something that appeals to the COD audience, which is already well served by a game called Call of Duty. There are more audiences than just males between the ages of 18 and 35, and not every 18-35 male wants to play GTA or COD. So increasingly AAA gaming becomes about winning over that smallish but enthusiastic audience. If you can do it, you'll have a smash success. If not, you'll have a flop. And more and more games become bastardized versions of themselves as Splinter Cell and Dead Space and Dead Rising and Resident Evil and on and on all throw what made them unique under the bus to appeal to that one single audience.
Meanwhile something is happening in the non-AAA space where guys like Jasper Byrne and Jonatan Söderström and Jonathan Blow and Mike Bithell and Vlambeer can all practically (or sometimes literally) work out of their bedrooms and make games that sell hundreds of thousands of copies because they are unique and creative: i.e., everything that AAA gaming isn't anymore. You have new studios cropping up by the day, formed by refugees from Naughty Dog and Rockstar and Ubisoft and Bioware, who are finding success in this space. To believe that everything is bad and the GTAs are eating gaming you'd have to completely ignore this increasingly unavoidable phenomenon of game creators escaping shareholder-driven game development and being successful at it.
When I asked Richard about Indies, He had this to say.
I would expect that one who is a gamer overall, and that is their main activity, they will end up buying more content period than other people. And because you had more AA and Indie than AAA, it would make sense the buying purchases would map with the area with the most content gets bought more.
In regards to Indie games, there is just a LOT more of it. The production value is, as expected, lower. But, because there is a lot more, Indie stuff is more likely to rise to the top and get buzz on the net than the AAA stuff. The indie stuff also reaches niches not normally hit by the AAA stuff. For example, you take Minecraft, it is by a very small studio, and became one of the top titles. It does stuff you don't see on the top studio side.
The state of gaming is in flux right now. Many of the people I interviewed have agreed to this. They have pointed out that AAA games seem to be where all of the companies try to go, but there is little space for it. Richard gave me a link to a comment by Ubisoft, and an article on Polygon to prove his point.
In case you are wondering, the doom and gloom I felt about gaming has changed a bit. Although Grand Theft Auto continues to be a top seller, it doesn’t sell systems the same way Wii Sports does. BMXXX was a complete loss, and the company that produced it went under. I still study games, and am trying to figure out why we had that era of Dark Games only, but I expect that within the answer is that it is a very small segment of gamers.
