EA: Triple-A Industry Reduced to 25 Studios

[Kmadden2004]

This is astonishing news...

EA has a chief creative officer!?

...Do you think they keep him in a refrigerator somewhere inside the company in cryostasis, and just... bring him out every couple of years to maybe have him say a thing.

I imagine this is probably more accurate;

http://youtu.be/dS5MtzrW1vU?t=1m41s

 

[PunkRex]

Quantity over quality seems to be the prefered dynamic here, as all these new AAA games are so bloody similar.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

So instead of diversity we have homogenization. Thanks for the info Steve Jobs-Jesus

 

[FalloutJack]

This is like a parent finding a kid complaining about there being not many brownies left after you watched him stuff his face full of them, and that there's still chocolate all over his face when he complains about it.

 

[Ryan Hughes]

I do hope this little talk was aimed at fooling investors into thinking everything is OK with the triple-A industry, because it certainly isn't fooling gamers. The way he twists the facts to suit his point is rather clever, but the facts still remain: triple-AAA is unsustainable in the long run, and while CoD and other 10 million-plus sellers may float it for awhile, eventually the whole house of cards will come crashing down.

Development costs rose from 3-6 million USD for a PS2/GameCube game to an average of 25-35 million USD for a 360/PS3 game, and that is not even counting marketing costs, which pushed many titles well beyond that. At this rate, there is no way the industry can survive, let alone take even a slight increase in development costs. Particularly in companies like EA and Activision, where the split between development, administration, and marketed tend to favor administration and marketing.

 

[Roofstone]

Well of course there are less studios. You bought em all! >_<

On a more serious note, the number of developers itself has increased, indie gaming and so on.

 

[masticina]

So EA says.. yeah I don't trust EA

But yeah many big AAA studios are dead, taken over by bigger ones and little is left. Many IP's that 9 years ago we're huge are sadly not that big anymore or ..well

Recession hurts hard.. and there are certainly other factors to. After all EA has closed down many of their absorbed studios. And the IP's.. well not all made it out alive.

 

[JenSeven]

"I've done some calculations that say there were about 125 teams in the industry worldwide working on what I'd call a AAA game on a console, and that was 7 or 8 years ago ... That number today is well south of 30; probably in the 25 range."

And this number has nothing to do with massive publishers, like EA, buying and dismantling smaller companies?

 

[Dark Knifer]

It didn't sound like he was bitching about it to me, just what he thought was happening.

Wonder if the smaller amount of triple a game studios will be similar to the movie crash where it was 5 companies controlling everything and it was really shitty for a while.