AAA Games Have Stopped Innovating

[deadish]

IMHO the lack of innovation is due primarily to cost of development. AAA has entered the same territory of Hollywood Blockbusters.

They all play it safe while appealing to the lowest common denominator to maximize potential audience size in effort to reduce risk. At 10s of millions of dollars + 3-4 years per game, there just isn't much room to manoeuvre.

As for the sweet spot in technology ... I would argue it was the PS1 rather than the PS2. During the PS2 era, it was already getting quite expensive to develop games, so much that developers like Naughty Dog "sold out" to Sony - their founders didn't want the stress of running such a high risk business and partly because they were looking to retire.

The PS1 was really a golden era for developers IMHO. Development cost were reasonable where a small team could knock out a decent game. Media (i.e. CDs) cost was practically free with a low lead time - in contrast to cartridges.

 

[ZeroFarks]

Ultimately it really isn't about the AAA games industry in itself, rather they are just another facet of a large global economic problem. Namely, a sinking US economy. Now I know Yahtzee lives Australia, but the people who make these games are almost entirely US based, with even their European offices answering to US masters. Simply put, a poor economy stifles innovation at all levels.

Now for the long version: At the first level of economic decay, the first thing that happens is that companies get taken over by their accounting departments. This is bad because accountants, as well all know, have the creativity centers of their brains surgically removed. They suffer from a deathly fear of creativity because it represents unknown territory. Accountants are only comfortable when sitting in familiar territory with guaranteed financial results. Even if those results are lower than the potential boom of a working new idea, they will take it anyway because it is secure.

If you look back at the points in US history that the economy was strongest you'll also find the most innovation. This is because an economically prosperous nation can afford to take risks. If the investment in the new idea doesn't work they will just shrug and move on. Once the economy starts to sink, however, a failed innovation becomes a loss of profits that they can't afford (or so the accounting masters tell their servants on the executive board).

Look no further than Nintendo for the avatar of this idea in action: Here we have a company that has been languishing in a miasma for decades, long since overshadowed by bigger, bolder companies that have sucked away most of the money to made. Does Nintendo respond by trying something daring, brave and inventive to steal customers back? Of course not! They just keep crapping out more & more sequels of the same franchise rights titles ad nauseam. What innovation they do offer comes from the fact that they put out so many of them on a regular basis, and have such a dedicated (aging) fan-base that if their "kooky" new gimmick in this month's title doesn't work, well, there is always next week's Mario product to make up for it.

But this all rhetorical by now - common knowledge. What troubles me is that indie games are falling into the exact same pattern. Every day it's another side-scrolling, 8 bit platformer, a Minecraft clone or a pointless zombie shooter. There is apparently some hidden (to me, at least) formula of what is a sure sell versus risky sell in the world of indie gaming that is guiding them down these linear, established rote of game development. Either that or these guys aren't really anywhere nearly as creative as they like to think they are. Considering the ever growing frequency of Green Light/Kickstarter "here is my idea, send me money, later suckers, bye!" that has been growing almost exponentially in the "indie" game side of the industry they are crazy if they think they're going to any sympathy from me, however. If there is one good thing to be said about the AAA games industry is that when you hand them your money they hand you a finished game (unless it's EA Games, in which case they hand you a finished game with 80% of the content locked behind a wall of microtransactions).

 

[Jingle Fett]

Ultimately it really isn't about the AAA games industry in itself, rather they are just another facet of a large global economic problem. Namely, a sinking US economy. Now I know Yahtzee lives Australia, but the people who make these games are almost entirely US based, with even their European offices answering to US masters. Simply put, a poor economy stifles innovation at all levels.

Now for the long version: At the first level of economic decay, the first thing that happens is that companies get taken over by their accounting departments. This is bad because accountants, as well all know, have the creativity centers of their brains surgically removed. They suffer from a deathly fear of creativity because it represents unknown territory. Accountants are only comfortable when sitting in familiar territory with guaranteed financial results. Even if those results are lower than the potential boom of a working new idea, they will take it anyway because it is secure.

If you look back at the points in US history that the economy was strongest you'll also find the most innovation. This is because an economically prosperous nation can afford to take risks. If the investment in the new idea doesn't work they will just shrug and move on. Once the economy starts to sink, however, a failed innovation becomes a loss of profits that they can't afford (or so the accounting masters tell their servants on the executive board).

Look no further than Nintendo for the avatar of this idea in action: Here we have a company that has been languishing in a miasma for decades, long since overshadowed by bigger, bolder companies that have sucked away most of the money to made. Does Nintendo respond by trying something daring, brave and inventive to steal customers back? Of course not! They just keep crapping out more & more sequels of the same franchise rights titles ad nauseam. What innovation they do offer comes from the fact that they put out so many of them on a regular basis, and have such a dedicated (aging) fan-base that if their "kooky" new gimmick in this month's title doesn't work, well, there is always next week's Mario product to make up for it.

But this all rhetorical by now - common knowledge. What troubles me is that indie games are falling into the exact same pattern. Every day it's another side-scrolling, 8 bit platformer, a Minecraft clone or a pointless zombie shooter. There is apparently some hidden (to me, at least) formula of what is a sure sell versus risky sell in the world of indie gaming that is guiding them down these linear, established rote of game development. Either that or these guys aren't really anywhere nearly as creative as they like to think they are. Considering the ever growing frequency of Green Light/Kickstarter "here is my idea, send me money, later suckers, bye!" that has been growing almost exponentially in the "indie" game side of the industry they are crazy if they think they're going to any sympathy from me, however. If there is one good thing to be said about the AAA games industry is that when you hand them your money they hand you a finished game (unless it's EA Games, in which case they hand you a finished game with 80% of the content locked behind a wall of microtransactions).

I was with you up until the Nintendo part. I'm not a Nintendo fanboy (I'm mainly a PC gamer) but lets give credit where credit is due.

Nintendo is one of the only AAA companies that actually has both the balls and financial means to go ahead with risky or innovative stuff--in fact their biggest problem is more that they've been innovating stuff when they didn't really have to, to their detriment. Remember the Wii? For better or worst, their idea to go with the motion controls made them the most profitable of the big 3 for that generation (despite financial analysts like Michael Pachter predicting otherwise). They weren't able to properly capitalize on that with the Wii U but as it stands, the Wii U is the only one of the current gen consoles even attempting to do something different.
Furthermore you're making the bog standard fallacy of assuming that Nintendo sequels = other companies sequels. There's a load of difference between say Mario 3d World and Mario Galaxy and Mario Sunshine, and even more between those games and New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. Saying they're the same is like saying Halo 5 and Halo Wars are the same. A new Mario game every year isn't the same as a new Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed every year.

As to the indie game part, this isn't a new trend. It's essentially survivorship bias combined with sturgeon's law. Indie games have always been 99% crap--people just only ever hear about the 1% (more like 0.001%) that become successful which makes it seem like they're all great and successful. Whenever a new indie darling shows up, everyone talks about how great it is and how innovative it is, and so on. It's only now that we're starting to notice the millions of others that were crap. The truth is they always were mostly clones of something that was popular and the dev wanted to make their own version. The main difference between now and before is that the indies have now been given a podium thanks to Kickstarter, Greenlight, Early Access, etc.

For a while on the Unity forums, "MMO Mondays" became a recurring joke because of how regularly they'd have 15 year old newbies wanting to make MMORPGFPS With RTS Elements Greatest Game EVER . Which was usually just an uninspired amalgamation of whatever popular game they were playing at the moment. Usually World of Warcraft and/or Call of Duty. When Minecraft became popular, guess what they all started wanting to make?
Retro pixel platformers are particularly popular for indies because they're relatively easy to make, they're well understood...and the people who grew up with pixel platformers are now old enough to make them.

 

[CaitSeith]

The industry has certainly innovated in 2 fields - criminalizing its customers with ass-backwards and toxic press releases (anti-piracy and anti-used sales and whatever, also don't forget GamerGate), and pulling every cheap fucking trick they can to maximize profits by releasing completely broken shovelware, day 1 DLCs, season passes and micropayments, all in the name of double-dipping and "whaling" (ugh).

Ugh. I remember Square-Enix latest attempt of such "innovation": Augment Your Pre-Order. I'm glad they cancelled that fraud attempt.

 

[Norman Rafferty]

I'd suggest your thesis needs more work, because I'd suggest the antithesis:
How often have triple-A developers been the innovators?

The early consoles were promising "the arcade experience at home!", first with Pong and then later with Space Invaders, Asteroids, etc. Porting an already-popular cabinet-game to your home is not exactly "innovative." Atari even attempted to stifle innovation when they sued Activision to prevent the production of third-party cartridges for their system.

The NES dominated the US market later, and some of the hit titles of that era (such as Metal Gear and Castlevania) were ports from other game systems. Super Mario World was originally an arcade game -- and itself, a sequel to something else -- which eventually started a franchise that Yahtzee often criticizes as being anti-innovation.

The Sega Genesis started the 16-bit wars with the bane of early 1990s gaming: the platformer. Platformers were everywhere, especially on the SNES. Sega took its tech-demo of a platformer -- Sonic -- and ran its goodwill into the ground. And does the FMV of early CD games such as the Sega CD count as innovation? And later on ... Isn't the Dreamcast library largely filled with the last of the arcade ports?

Sony's early Playstation entries were a lot of fighting games ... and a genre that Yahtzee has often criticized for being anti-innovative, the JRPG. Final Fantasy 7 set epic sales for the console, but does it count as innovation, as it used such hoary chestnuts as menu-based combat and random-encounters-from-stepping. Do the FMVs and full-image backgrounds count as innovation?

When Microsoft first broke onto the console scene, they notoriously bought whole studios outright. Bungie had already made a networked FPS (Marathon), though Halo offers true console-specific innovations. But what about Oddworld Inhabitants or Rare, whose failures on the new platform were total misfires? And heck, at least Rare tried something different with Ghoulies, before falling into sequelitis.

And on the PC... well, who counts as a AAA developer on PC games? In the 1990s, id Software started as a small company, and their coders bragged about the "$50,000 xcopy" when a larger studio bought the rights to one of their engines so they could make a boring FPS out of it. Yahtzee's own ego reviews have talked about the failures of point-and-click games to hold attention ... so does Sierra count as an "innovator" for Phantasmagoria's 7 CD set, or is that just a AAA developer exhausting itself on gaudy graphics? Was Myst innovative?

True innovations are few and far between. It's too easy for rose-colored glasses to pick out the few sparkles of the past while forgetting about the huge piles of boring, imitative stuff.

 

[iller3]

He says Triple A's gone no where... but I'd like to point out that dollar for dollar & by sheer adoption rate.... things like Steam, UnrealEngine, even Unity ... ARE 'AAA' now. ...I heard that Rob Pardo, the guy who's almost single handedly responsible for Blizzard being where it is today (not it's Executives... not stupid Vivendi or Activision ... ONE MAN who embodies game programming itself) went to represent Unity because even the olde guarde like him just wants to get those levels of big budget polish into the hands of everyone. Not just leave it in the hands of hollywood studios. Then there's also Valve working with API / GPU engineers to make a new OpenGL. Autodesk, the TipA industry standard for effects & modeling, started leasing out its programs for $30 a month.

No most of these Organizations don't have the same amounts of money behind them that Triple A have NOW (b/c venture capitalists in a banker-bloat market thanks to 1% Federal Reserve rate), but they've got AS MUCH resources behind them as the triple A's had back in the early 2000's along with potential for far better graphics and a vastly superior Aesthetic.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

I think this is a reason that I'm content to be behind the bleeding edge. I don't need to the best and most up-to-date graphics to enjoy a game, and titles that I'm interested come out faster than I can play them. As a result, I was happily working my way through the PS2/Gamecube backlog through to January 2009. I've been happily playing PS3/360 games through this 8th-gen so far and I don't yet have a compelling reason to get a PS4/XBONE.

I will be getting an 8th-gen console soon: the WiiU, because it the most 8th-gen games that are actually worth playing and my kids will love it.