AAA game industry
Video games are big business, biggest source of entertainment spending. Jewel in the entertainment industry crown. Decades video games faced prejudice from executives. Every single major entertainment brand gets a video game tie in these days. Industry has changed over the last decade. Moving towards a service based model, selling the product with services. Cosmetics are now common place. Mobile games pushed the model with free to play games. Practice was picked up in order to push up profits by retail released games.
Downloadable content is common place with months worth of updates promised. Constant updates over months to keep players wallets open. Problem however unclear road maps putting faith something shows up. Studios often promise content, pre ordering future content. Season pass or battle pass acting as content pre ordering. Unclear what content is coming. Speaking of pre orders something else companies have been pushing. Every game now has different versions offering different content.
Triple A studios have promised giant profits growing year on year. Impossible task to keep growing, profits to keep growing. Video gaming companies have record revenue, that not good enough. Shareholders are demanding impossible growth on returns to continue. Only so many customers with limited growth per year. Couple weeks ago major companies began to cut costs during record results. Big triple AAA studios have been aggressive extracting maximum value from every customer.
Turning average buy in from $60 to more $120. Single player games have suffered, online focused content following trends have taken over. Big studios avoid certain genres which not trending. Newest trend at the moment, battle royale focused on player interactions. Before that modern shooters before that crafting games. Best innovation has come from home grown indie titles. Small producers helping to shape or create new markets. Bigger companies focus on what becomes a success. More video games per year are produced competition is high. Don’t forget video games are now fighting for screen time. Media streaming services are fighting video games, who rules the TV.
Competition is driving publishers to create platforms to sell video games. Valves business model is largely video game distribution service, studio stopped producing major titles. PC platform has seen rapid growth in distribution services. Indie titles now have own distribution services. No longer need big publishers. Big budget titles no longer exclusively publish to stream. Valve have taken big freatures from console gaming creating a closed platform. Stream not just distribution service brings together friends under one platform. Even console gaming has seen platforms open up. Cross platform gaming new trend with cross progression.
In the past publishers have used old media video game journalism. Using marketing campaigns, pushing exclusive previews. Big closed door media events have been replaced by social media influences. Normal people with big enough following becoming free marketing machines. New industry has followed old school media journalism. Getting harder to avoid negative problems. With limited funds many are holding out, waiting for first impressions to come in.
I started to speak with my wallet, investing into games which value my time. Which offer something and don’t seek to milk my wallet dry. Industry feels like the triple AAA sector is overextend and over producing.