The triple-A game production and releases have reached a crazy number. Sales needs to be in the millions, double digits in fact, production is no longer 2 years but at least 5, everything needs to be more dense, bigger in scope, broader, so on.

Is this truly the road we should be going down?

I ask the question because just like anything related to capitalism, it reaches a point that things need to be escalated down, most of the time it’s required (companies going out of business), but it should be needed to. For the sake of people’s sanity.

It’s hard to imagine seeing the final product, but that little game you got was someone’s life for quite some time. 2 years, maybe more. And it wasn’t just one person but a large group of people, working together to make something out of nothing. The issue is that the insane amount of work required can and most certainly will cause people to not want to work on it anymore.

A Turning Point

Open-world games (wide-open sandboxes as TvTropes calls it) are all the rage and have been around for over 30 years. No, GTA3 was not the first game like that (and it’s not the first GTA game either), but modern capabilities put an emphasis on making explorable worlds that loop back on itself, making it feel like an open-world. It’s all an illusion but a good one.

However almost every game needs to have one, because apparently that’s what sells. Game series that didn’t have it now have it, and entire genres pop-up because of it. But the drive to make it better than last time is what causes things to get out of control, and very quickly.

But for some, these types of games are a turning point for certain companies. For an example, From Software. Elden Ring is seen as one of their best games, but it was essentially a serial escalation from their previous works. They were making semi-open and quasi-open world games for a while, but never a game that it was truly open world. Their games were getting larger and denser and so, an open-world experience was inevitable. And it did happen.

So, what would be next? Elden Ring 2, with a much larger world, right? No, it was Nightreign, with a smaller world, but a bit more denser. And considering the next games they’ll make, they’ll go back to smaller and denser games, because they already reached their crescendo, there’s no need to keep the wave high.

This is what I mean when I say ‘escalate when required, de-escalate when needed’.

You escalate because the only way is up. Once you’re on the ‘up’ the only way is ‘down’. And thus the cycle continues. The only way to continue to go ‘up’ after you’re already ‘up’ is to work on something that will take twice as long and will have twice as much stuff on it, making it so you work on it forever.

You de-escalate because, otherwise you’ll go insane. The budget required will be too much, the time spent on it will be too high, and the return has to be just as big, so you need to cut things down.

Smaller Focus

It’s easy to say “Just cut stuff away lol” to anyone that is working on a large project, because who says this doesn’t understand what is going on. But it’s very much clear that projects that go for too long are not sustainable. If your business is to sell games and if you’re taking too long to make them, you’re badly mismanaged. Not saying that a game should be out the door every six months, but there’s a limit on what you do to get away with it.

Which is why I feel that companies should work on smaller projects that, while it can be risky, they should be willing to accept it because smaller risk means smaller loss. If your projects costs half a billion dollars total, you need to make that half a billion back to not call it a failure. And if it doesn’t, well…

So instead of chasing the slop, we should chase what’s good for ourselves first. The investors will make their money if stuff work, but if you’re badly managed, this is what happens. Should I blame the investors? No, the companies are the ones that should be blamed. I wouldn’t blame myself for investing on a bank that promised returns, I blame the bank.

Closing Words

Everything has a reason to be, and if triple-A production is like this, it’s because it’s someone thought it was a good idea. And it might have been at the time, but now it’s clearly not possible to keep it up. With all costs rising for some reason, this also affects production as a whole, and it spirals out of control from there.

So we most certainly need to escalate when required and de-escalate when needed because otherwise… The target will always go up when it’s not necessary, and the failure can (and will) be catastrophic.