• MudMan@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    And that’s exactly the problem with AAA, they tend to take the lower risk path.

    No, for Kojima’s sake, it’s not the problem with AAA, it’s the problem with Ubisoft. Some of Ubisoft, at that. I’m running out of ways to say this.

    You keep trying to crunch this down to this small mental model of AAA as Ubisoft-like practices, or maybe Ubisoft, Bethesda and Activision or whatever. It’s just not accurate.

    The budget estimates you’re using are almost certainly not accurate, and neither are your assumptions about Nintendo and Ubisoft’s relative sizes. Nintendo has 50x the capitalization of Ubisoft, and is famously one of the most cash-rich companies in the industry (and in Japan). Even if your estimate of Assassin’s Creed’s budget was correct, Nintendo could fund 100 Assasin’s Creed games tomorrow and still have resources left over to make a bunch of other first party games.

    Also, no, my list isn’t “mostly Nintendo and Sony” or “all Japanese Studios”. At a glance it includes games made by ten publishers and fifteen development studios. It includes six games made primarily in the US, five made in Europe and seven made in Japan. It’s actually a pretty even split. Not that it matters, because I could put together a whole other list like that in two minutes.

    You are trying really hard to make this into a simple distinction between two types of games, broken by game size for some reason and I’m sorry, but reality just doesn’t want to play ball with that categorization. AAA isn’t just the four companies you don’t like (and, for the record, you keep mixing up publishers and developers through this whole thing) and those four companies aren’t even consistently bad or consistently producing only the types of games you describe. Your view of this is just overly simplistic.