alt Hacker NewsI think the best answer is AAAA+ scale projects. AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months. The "meso" scale of game development is extremely difficult to work in. Constantly walking a tightrope between too easy and too hard. Rockstar games does seem to have the right idea. They can remain viable by simply never reducing their feature scope and spending unlimited amounts of money.
Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now. The individual developer simply cannot keep up despite being able to do more than they ever were before.
If you seek evidence of Jevon's paradox I think you may find it here. Albeit in a very undesirable form. Even if I can now do 100% more work per unit time, my prospective customer is demanding 300-400% on top of that in terms of the final delivered experience. The water level has gone up everywhere and continues to rise rapidly. Even outside of game development. Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
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Imho the strength of Indie games was being able to try ideas too risky to bet AAA budget on, or to target niche audiences deemed too small to make AAA profit
Neither of these is going away. The marketing strategy of teasing your game for months or years to build a fan base is going away. But if you life by "put up or shut up" I believe there is still room to win on vision alone.
If you don't have a unique enough vision (like most AAA, visions are risky) then I agree that you have to migrate up and just outspend everyone else
> AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
> Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
Again, not sure how this relates to BioWare. Andromeda and Veilguard were both widely regarded as embarrassing failures and both of those were pre-AI. They hadn't released any titles in the AI age before dissolving.
> Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now.
Phantom Blade Zero just came out. It was made by S-Game, which apparently has fewer than 20 core staff members, though the game was worked on by around 200 people when you include contractors. It sold 4 million units in 3 days and is currently the #2 most played game on Steam.
Smaller game studios can do fine. They just need to make good games.