#AAA Game Development Studio

[zatun-game-studio]

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[meglosthegreat]

If one more company puts out a statement saying they're becoming more "agile" and "focused" when what they really mean is "we're laying off dozens of experienced developers because we don't feel like paying them anymore and would rather bring in new hires that will work for less" I stg

[roguemonsterfucker]

Capitalism hell

[coylesboytoy-moved]

wanting a $100 game to be fully finished without 3000 game-breaking bugs isn’t unrealistic or a high standard.

[annelidarchive]

notable traits of the playstation 3

line in the sand demarcating the irrevocable shift towards HD game development, which knocked the bottom out of a lot of small and medium sized studios due to the increased cost of doing business & and predicated the truly defined AAA-indie split to come

distinctive aesthetic profile oriented around infamously drab colour palettes (as a result of a widespread desire to push for grounded, realistic visuals in order to make the absolute most of the hardware leap) and processing-intensive lighting effects (a lot of bloom, a lot of wet or otherwise glistening materials)

notable traits of the playstation 4

bloodborne is there

notable traits of the playstation 5

bad demon's souls

[catthattalks]

Pixel styled games my beloved<3

[were--ralph]

See this is the problem though. We've hit a point where tech is expected to advance and be twice as good and with all these advancements, and not just in graphics departments, it makes games that much more complex and time-consuming to develop

Genuinely unreal 5 is incredible but games don't need that much more power. games don't need to be 4k ready for consoles because a lot of people cant afford 4k televisions. And yet we're prepping for 8k now. AAA studios have become obsessed with making things prettier and utilizing hardware to its fullest when its wholly unnecessary.

I genuinely don't like Nintendo as a business because of the way it treats its fans but i do respect them using less powerful hardware and making that work. Games don't need unreal 5 to be good. Games don't need complex system programming to be good. there is like this inherent expectation that more powerful hardware will yield more impressive games and that's not necessarily true

[askagamedev]

Thoughts on the Bioware restructuration/lay-offs?

I've long said that any AAA game studio, no matter how strong, is always 2-3 flops in a row away from closure. Bioware did very well with Inquisition, but Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem's sequential failures resulted in DA4 being their make-or-break release.

One factor was that 2024 was the first full year since 2012 that Bioware didn't have SWTOR on their books anymore - SWTOR went over to Broadsword in late 2023. For the past decade, all of the money earned by SWTOR (which is significant, the game isn't growing but it does more than earn its keep) was considered in Bioware's accounting. That sizable income helps offset the money being burned in other areas like ME:A, Anthem, ongoing DA4 efforts, and other internal projects (like the many failed KOTOR 3 pitches) to the accountants and executives. Without SWTOR to inject additional cash over the year, the Veilguard costs look a lot worse to the money people.

DA4 itself was a bit of a mess during development too. The development of the project that eventually became Veilguard was actually restarted at least twice - they were already working on preproduction for DA4 as of late 2015. The process was long and arduous, and the finished game was... mid? It wasn't underwhelming, it wasn't overwhelming, it was just... whelming. Veilguard also made the somewhat controversial choice to hang everything on sales and not go with post-launch DLC to help monetize further. This gamble really did not pay off. Veilguard missed its sales target by 50%, which was the third nail in the coffin. Each of these failures seems to follow the same pattern - significant dev time spent going in circles because the leadership can't commit to core elements of the game, resulting in something thrown together at the end in order to ship something.

As a result of these issues, the Sword of Damocles that dangles above every studio fell on Bioware. While Bioware remains as a label and the next Mass Effect game continues development, Bioware as a studio is no longer a stand-alone entity capable of building a full game from start to finish like it used to be. Bioware is likely no longer going to have as much of a cohesive identity like it used to - it will be a label more than anything else. If Mass Effect gets a green light for full production, they'll likely have to "borrow" a bunch of floating developers from EA's other studios to build it out, then disperse those borrowed devs to other EA projects once it ships and leave a small team to incubate the next "Bioware" project, at least until they can get two sequential big hits again and warrant a larger injection of funding to start growing again.

My heart really goes out to all of those who are affected by this - the Veilguard devs were really behind the 8 ball when they started and the current economic situation in video games isn't good. I hope that they're able to find something soon, hopefully at a studio that makes better high level leadership decisions.

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[kdinjenzen]

People on social media posting that we’re experiencing a “VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY CRASH” are all fundamentally wrong.

A market crash, for any industry, is caused by a sudden and significant decline in overall market value.

The last several years, including this one, has seen a surge in not only video game popularity but also revenue and value rising basically across the board.

Literally there are more people playing and buying games now than EVER BEFORE.

So it is NOT a crash in the slightest. The games industry as a whole is making TONS of money.

The problem is that, since 2020, the amount of actual players in the game of BUSINESS for gaming has shrunk with Sony, Microsoft, Embracer, etc all buying up countless other studios then laying people off and/or closing those studios all together.

Developers of all kinds in the AAA market now have less people on their teams, less time to make games, less money paid to them, and have not been able to recover from any burnout of crunch which has only gotten worse since all these closures and layoffs.

It’s not a market crash. It’s market manipulation on the part of major corporations who don’t (and likely never) even valued the art of game development in the first place.

[koboldfactory]

It’s tragic to me that the video games industry could be unfathomably successful and provide so many jobs if CEOs took a pay cut and executives stopped pushing for multimillion dollar budgeted hyper realistic 400 gameplay-hour 10 year dev cycle games. No devs ever need to be fired for a higher ups mistakes. Devs need to start unionizing or do something else to execs that if I said would probably get me banned.

It’s very clear that the AAA industry is in a death spiral, and as much as I would love to say “this means devs can find success in the indie space!” That just isn’t gonna happen on a large scale because indie companies cannot afford to give jobs to the mass swathes of AAA devs being laid off. And those AAA devs in general do not make enough money to just go found their own studio and take a risk developing a game with no income for years.

[anphivenas]

AAA game studio: we need to make the samest shooter of all the shooters that are the same ,for money . In 3 weeks

indie game dev: finally after 5 years i have finished developing Horse With Broken Leg simulator

AAA game: (tanks, loses shit tons of money)

Indie game: (makes its creator rich)

Snow woman with realistic breats:

[isaidyoulookshitty]

"i wrote lucanis as a bisexual disaster" vs "oh he's actually pan-demisexual and a virgin" well which one is it, girl. do either of those statements mean anything (rhetorical: pro- or retroactive commentary from devs/writers means fuck all to me if none of it is actually reflected in the product i paid for) or did you see how disappointed players were with the underdeveloped, rushed, and badly paced romance your baby boy ended up with and just slap a "grey-asexual" sticker on his forehead to explain it away. like anyone on the asexual spectrum is any less deserving of a well written romance plotline.

hi; i'm demisexual myself, so i know a bit about how this is supposed to work. there is NO chemistry between rook and lucanis, they have NO in-depth conversations about what they feel for each other, and there is NO foundation for emotional rapport to build on his supposed demisexuality. most of lucanis's thoughts, feelings, and motivations are revealed to the player through secondary npc's! but go ahead and throw out a bunch of queer fandom buzzwords on socmed to make it more marketable. a little more lipstick on that pig can't hurt.

as i've said before, maybe this is true of the other romance options. maybe they are all similarly flat, awkward, and disjointed. but i wouldn't know because at the time i wasn't allowed to pursue anyone else AND lucanis, and after i finished my first playthrough i skipped the credits and uninstalled the game. and i never will know because i have no desire to ever play it again. i get that the devs all worked hard and fought through a decade of mismanagement, layoffs, and development hell, but the harebrained spin job and damage control bioware keeps trying (and failing at) rather than acknowledging any of veilguard's shortcomings are nauseating at this point.

""""found family"""" """""hurt/comfort"""" """""slow burn""""" oh my god i'm TIRED. are we talking about an ao3 summary or a $70 video game?? if you absolutely must yoink fanfiction tropes for your professionally developed, AAA studio title either do it competently or leave it to the fic writers. after this dumpster fire i know they're already hard at work.

[transfaguette]

always sucks when one of the biggest companies in a space is also The Worst

Unity, which for a long time the majority of indie games and several AAA titles have been developed in, recently announced a new “Runtime Fee” that would charge developers $0.20 per install of their game, starting January 2024. Retroactively!!!! Yes you heard that right. Got a new computer and want to reinstall your favorite game you bought 3 years ago? That’ll cost the dev $0.20, when they themselves make no additional money. A bad actor could, in theory, install a game hundreds of times just to hurt a developers bottom line. But even just in benign scenarios, its enough to threaten the viability of small indie studios. Even if devs wanted to jump ship now, number one they’d have to port all their games to a new engine, a monumental task on its own, and they’d have to learn a new engine and new workflow, new pipeline, etc. This is catastrophic to the indie scene.

And this isn’t handled through the platforms they sell their games on like steam or itch.io, it’s woven into the backend of the engine itself. Unity claims they have systems to detect piracy (but they’re proprietary and secret!) and developers won’t be charged for illegitimate installs. But none of us can be actually sure of that. They are literally making “piracy costs the devs money” a real actual legitimate argument.

And to top it all off, their ghoul of a CEO dumped his shares right before the announcement. They Knew this would be hated and they’re trying to get away with it anyway.

Do note, this only applies to games that already meet the threshold for profit sharing. If you are a hobbyist or making a project for school etc, this won’t affect you.

What can you do? Keep in touch with your favorite developers and indie publishers on social media. Hopefully with enough backlash and support for indie developers, they will retract.

[mariacallous]

Ashley Poprik has never been the model for a video game character. As a writer on projects like Spider-Man 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, they work on games, not as characters within them. In 2023, however, a cabal of angry gamers was convinced otherwise. They were furious over how Spider-Man 2’s Mary Jane looked; more specifically, they complained, she simply wasn’t hot enough.

The problem, these gamers falsely claimed, was that Poprik—then a writing intern with no ability to change a character’s face, let alone one based on a real-life model—had inserted themself into the game. Gamers concocted this conspiracy based on a photo of the writer, placed side-by-side with Mary Jane; in the photo, Poprik and MJ both sport long hair with a middle part, are smiling, and have a similar face shape.

Poprik, who identifies as gender-fluid, describes themself as having androgynous features. “A big narrative spun up that I was a trans woman, and so I was getting hate from any alt-right winger,” they say.

“I was getting so many death threats, pictures of decapitated women, and YouTube videos about me that were just straight made-up information,” Poprik says. “It forever changed the way I feel about video games.”

Eventually, things got so bad that Poprik had to wipe personal information from the internet out of fear for their safety.

Poprik has faced months of ongoing online harassment as well as in-person accusations of making things “woke”—especially for features within the games they had no involvement in. Yet in each case, Poprik says, they received no support or security resources from the companies they worked for.

“When a marginalized dev is harassed, they’re on their own,” Poprik says.

Today, being anything other than a cisgender game developer in the United States is more dangerous than ever. Online, transgender and gender-nonconforming developers become harassment targets at the whims of reactionary grifters railing against anything socially progressive or the result of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Offline, President Donald Trump seeks to deny their existence with executive orders aimed at “restoring biological truth to the federal government,” restricting lifesaving health care for minors, and removing trans people from the military.

Other executive orders, though, pose a more imminent threat. Trump’s move to eliminate government funding for programs that battle discriminatory practices are already being mimicked by tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon. Developers fear their own employers could follow suit. Given that so much of what’s come to be known as “Gamergate 2.0” has focused on gamers railing against real or perceived DEI efforts, these worries don’t seem unfounded.

WIRED spoke with seven developers across the industry in workplaces ranging from AAA studios to small, independent companies. Many spoke to us only under the condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety or because they did not have permission to speak to the press on behalf of their companies. (WIRED independently confirmed all their identities and employment.) What emerged was a consistent narrative of fear, stress, and alienation that follows them into the workplace and is thriving in the online culture surrounding video games.

As Poprik notes, “being a queer person in games can feel really lonely.” Very few people seem to reach out to their affected colleagues, they add, and “sometimes it feels like the lack of any sort of support means they’re happy with the state of things right now.”

Ellen, a trans developer working in AAA games, says the thought of rolling back DEI initiatives in the games industry is particularly disconcerting because, while these programs offer support to employees, they also positively impact the larger games culture by fostering an industry that produces titles that speak to and welcome a larger group of players. (Ellen is a pseudonym.)

“At the corporate level, you're making a case why it's good business,” Ellen says. “But on a personal level you're trying to make sure your community has a space carved out in the company, and your fans have a space carved out in your games.”

Like the other developers WIRED spoke to, Ellen describes daily stress that bleeds over into her work. “The news comes like an assault,” she says. “Times like this just enforce that it's important to keep going, that art like only trans people could make needs to exist in the world more.”

Even as she wonders if she should leave the US altogether, Ellen is fearful of traveling within the country as well, given that protections for trans people vary by state. Laws related to even the basic ability to use the bathroom according to a person’s gender identity shift from place to place, and Trump’s recent moves are further complicating such matters.

Return-to-office policies in the games space, for example, are removing developers’ ability to work remotely—including in states where they may feel safer. Developers who travel internationally for work could also be at risk of losing their passports. The State Department, following the president’s executive order on “gender ideology,” is no longer issuing documents with “X” gender markers, and has begun confiscating passports and related documents indefinitely when people attempt to renew theirs.

Professionally, this spells trouble for affected developers. Many gaming events take place across the US, from Los Angeles to Boston. These gatherings are business opportunities for game developers, where they can network, learn from peers, scout new jobs, find funding, or show their games. Next month, thousands in the gaming industry will gather in San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference. But some developers will be forgoing the show out of concern for their safety.

“I'm concerned I'm going to get trapped in the US,” an American developer based in Canada tells WIRED. It’s also unclear if they’ll even be able to enter the States with their current passport. “No way I'm going to risk it.”

The video game industry has a poor history of standing up to targeted harassment. It’s only in the past few years that companies have begun instituting policies and taking serious action against abusive individuals. Developers themselves have complained that their companies are not doing enough to weed out harassment online. More than a decade later, the impact of Gamergate remains as a playbook for mob-driven harassment, and the communities to utilize it.

Three developers WIRED spoke to pointed to the events of Gamergate—a large-scale misogynistic and transphobic harassment campaign by online trolls in 2014 that profoundly affected all of gaming culture—as a sort of canary in the coal mine.

“Even before the bathroom bills, around the time of the first Gamergate, you could see people getting more and more bold with their anti-trans beliefs and folks just brushing it off as a ‘joke,’” says one developer. “But then jokes became memes, and memes became popular, and then an entire culture of spreading anti-trans hate became acceptable and something we are supposed to tolerate.”

Over the past year, anti-DEI efforts intensified in gaming communities as people blamed perceived flaws and flops on diversity efforts, while ignoring the macro factors of a struggling industry. Conservative circles targeted small companies and consultants they perceived as having influence on progressive values in video games. They went after anything they considered antithetical to games they wanted made—stories without minorities or queer characters, fictional women they think are attractive, and narratives bereft of what they view as leftist political agendas. Similar anti-DEI sentiments have since ripped through the tech industry and expanded nationally.

The trans community in games has felt these attacks acutely. Controversies around inclusion on something as small as optional top surgery scars in a character creator made developers targets. “It's felt like a slow creeping horror of watching right-wing party after right-wing party realize we're a softer target than the rest of the LGB community,” one developer says.

Many developers feel frustration that the gaming industry overall has remained silent so as to not alienate an imagined audience. “It signals to players and their own workers that the company lacks a spine in standing up for their work, while signaling internally that the bottom line will always be dollars,” says another developer. “Can’t piss off the bigots, because they spend money.”

It’s even more disheartening for trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary developers who work at the very companies that won’t publicly defend them. “I know there's a lot of the rainbow capitalism, ‘Hey, we're all in it together. Look at all these flags we're waving,’” says Dax, a trans developer at a AAA studio. (Dax is a pseudonym.) “But in the end, it's a company making money. They want to appeal to as many people as possible.”

Even among progressive colleagues, Dax feels disappointed in what she feels are empty platitudes: apologies with no action, or sentiments that appear to be empathetic of her experience, but reinforce the idea that she’s suffering alone. “I remember being a cis white man, and I was scared of saying anything, or doing anything,” she says. ”I wanted to stay in my lane and not bother anybody, and that's what they're doing. The second I transitioned, I was treated differently in the industry, overall.”

Over the course of reporting this story, WIRED reached out to companies that have previously participated in corporate pride events or included trans or nonbinary characters in their games, including representatives at companies such as PlayStation, Xbox, Riot Games, and Activision Blizzard, and asked about supporting their employees. Only one company replied: Devolver Digital. In a statement, the indie publisher said that it respects the rights of all individuals and does not tolerate discrimination, victimization, or harassment based on a person’s race, sex, gender identity, or gender expression. The company added that it will continue to support its colleagues by ensuring their voices are heard.

The developers WIRED spoke to are asking for more from the places that employ them, the people they work with, and the players that enjoy their games. “We should be out there being shown off,” Dax says. Companies should not shy away from hiring or representing queer communities in their games, many of the developers tell WIRED, and they want to see company DEI initiatives highlighted, rather than hidden away.

The industry is already bleeding talent through mass layoffs; refusal to support its own employees may push many more out the door. Even before the current administration, trans and gender-nonconforming developers faced discrimination. “I went from being trusted with my knowledge to being questioned,” Dax says of her transition. “They suddenly are not giving me the same respect or understanding.”

Dax says that some people are casting blame on the trans community and its current predicament for being “so out and proud.” She disagrees with that idea. “I want to see [companies] take bold choices and stand with us instead of cowering, wanting to appease this very loud, very small group of people who just can't stop slurring and screaming and being unreasonably hateful. By saying nothing, they're siding with hate.”

[felassan]

Mark Darrah's recent YouTube video 'Why Do AAA Games Take So Long?' is an interesting and insightful look behind the curtain about this aspect of modern game development and the industry: [link]

Description:

"Why are AAA taking and longer and longer to make? We aren't getting any younger but the time between releases seems to be ever expanding. Chapters: 0:00 Why so LONG? 0:15 They Don't 4:28 "Size" 8:16 The Fidelity Death Cult 11:08 The Team 14:35 Iteration 16:44 Delay Inception 18:23 Culture? 19:55 Because They Can 21:10 Opportunity for AA and Triple I"

Mark: "What's the longest you've waited for a game? What's a game that you're waiting for that's coming out this year, and is it Dragon Age?"

---

Comment on the vid: "3:03 so you're saying that the reason why DA4 was announced the month before Anthem shipped was so EA couldn't do anything bad to the studio without breaking a promise made to the Dragon Age community? ^^" Mark: "I'm not NOT saying that."

Comment: "I have definitely been waiting patiently for Dragon Age: the Veilguard." Mark: "BioWare is definitely pulling out all the stops."

Comment: "Another reason for very early announcements I've heard talked about (beyond messaging shareholders) is recruitment drive. Do you think it's a plausible reason?" Mark: "Yes this is real. We need to be able to tell people they are going to be working on Dragon Age, so we need to announce"

Comment: "At least for DAV, I bet it is the change of gameplay, live service, no live service, open world, no open world. Rpg with action elements then Action game. Seems then leadership change is more interesting than the game itself." Mark: "There is a story here"

Comment: "i think Dragon Age would've been out a few years ago if the team worked on Dreadwolf from the beginning instead of all the other canceled visions of the project" Mark: "There are several off ramps for DA"

Comment: "The Mass Effect game following Andromeda will likely end up being the longest wait I’ve ever had for a video game lol" Mark: "It will be a while"

Comment: "Can you explain why they changed the combat in DAV" Mark: "DA has always been changing its combat."

Mark: "Almost everyone at BioWare is working on DA ATM"

Mark: "Yeah stylization lives longer" [re: graphical fidelity cult]

Comment: "Games are made quickly but then consultants like Sweet Baby Inc come and change the story to be worse and characters to be uglier. Adds plenty of dev time." Mark: "LOLOLOLOL"