LogFAQs > #897450977

I had a lovely illustration of the state of AAA gaming the other day.

My parents have a vacation home near where I live and they came out for a couple days, so I went over to visit. My Dad isn't a gamer - at all - with one notable exception: the man loves him some racing games. So we head upstairs to play some GT Sport.

Or not. See, he hadn't updated the PS4 in a while, so it needed to download a system update. Which took about 30 minutes or so. That finally concluded, so we went to hop in... but the game had been patched as well. That patch queued up and we were looking at a 4 hour wait. Can't play the game offline, because of bullshit reasons (game will only save if you're connected to the internet), so we gave up on that. His PS4 came with Battlefront II, so I offered to show him how that one works.

...except Battlefront II takes close to an hour to install and had a patch to download that would have taken 12 hours.

And this is all without touching on all the crap surrounding microtransactions and accounts and points pay-to-win and DLC and other extraneous bullshit that gets in the way of the actual fun. Indie gaming seems to have this part figured out, because it harkens back to a time when playing a game involved plugging it in and turning it on. Nintendo still seems to understand this, but even they are starting to drift on that front.

I was huge into AAA gaming until last gen, when I slowly found myself drifting more and more into the indie scene because the games were more creative, simpler in execution and, frequently, more fun. I still have a Switch and a 3DS and love them both, but I have yet to buy a PS4 making it the first Sony console I didn't pick up within two years of launch, and I can't help but think that AAA gaming has simply become too bloated and expensive for its own good.

Hearing from people inside the industry, AAA gaming is being corroded by spiralling development costs, unsustainable business practices, horrendous turnover at the developer level and (consequentially) a management model that relies on outside talent that simply doesn't know gaming. In spite of the fact that profits are high, it feels like the whole thing could come crashing down at any time.
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