this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.
At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as "Spider-Man 2" and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.
Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.
It has been a trend that we see fewer AAA games per year, for a very long time. I think that can easily stabilize at a number of AAA games similar to what we saw last year, when we stop designing games that take up infinite time to play. Likewise, a great year for games doesn't mean that so many of them are concentrated in the AAA space. Hollow Knight Silksong, Mina the Hollower, and Penny's Big Breakaway could, potentially, all be some of the best games we've ever played, and not one of them will have come close to a $100M budget. (I don't think this year will top last year, but my point is that it doesn't require massive budgets to do so.)