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Comment by Sydrik | Hacker News Reader

If you want truly creative games, it won't be AAA game studios but indie game devs. AAA game studios play a different game (pun intended) and it will serve its audience and more especially, their shareholders. There is enough space in the world for them and truly creative indie game studios.

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We used to have AA studios that produced something in between those though. Not all types of games lend themselves to indie scale and I'd argue that (C)RPGs are one of those.

We still do: e.g. Larian (Baldur’s Gate) and Sandfall (Expedition 33). And smaller examples like Nadeo (Trackmania).

Larian is AAA but independent (apart from the licensing deal for BG3) - they’re 550 people or so now.

Indie game devs cant deliver the kind of more cinematic experiences that Bioware could, or that Square-Enix can with Final Fantasy, at least not graphics-wise. Maybe if AI further matures smaller studios can do that too eventually, but right now AAA-studios have AAA-budgets that are required.

Perfect, I skip cut-scenes usually anyway. Ain't nobody got time for that.

The hardware needed to render those AAA cinematic experiences is more expensive than ever though.

I have a very nice PC for gaming and even still most games I play looks like it could run on a potato XD

For the most part, yes. We luckily still have AAA studios run by creative developers like Kojima

If it wasn't for Microsoft money, he would not have a studio any longer, after Sony was done sponsoring him.

Microsoft acquired Kojima for the name not the game. Blizzard is producing next to nothing but means to generate revenue with Microsoft's money. As far as I can tell anything gaming that touches Microsoft/EA money is dead. WoW Forever is quite literally the cheapest way to make a quick dollar, and extend that $15/mo subscription "forever"

Too many words that don't refute the fact that how great Kojima might have been in past productions, without Microsoft's deal, he would have had to close shop instead.

If Kojima wasn’t a revered auteur of videogames, he would never had Microsoft offer him a deal.

Fame is not a gold pass, as proven by many other revered ones that weren't so lucky, across all kind of art forms, and sports.

WoW Midnight is really showing the strain.

We don't really want creative games. We do want fun ones. Fundamentally, games are fun mechanics paired with a narrative that supports the mechanics. Note that the narrative is supportive, and fun is primary.

Maximizing profit often points the gaming cos towards gating the fun behind a paywall, or teasing the fun that could be had behind the next payment. It turns out that players don't find that fun (see Star Wars Battefront 2).

Not really. Top ten spots for highest grossing games sold are half comprised predominantly of low-budget, gameplay innovative titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Tetris + Minecraft tied for first, Wii Sports at fourth, then Terraria at 7th, and Super Mario Bros. and Human: Fall Flat at 10th.

The other half are evidence to your point with possibly the exception of Mario Kart 8. But if we look even further down the list, we see a lot of once-small, indie titles with brand-new for the time gameplay or heavily perfected mechanics like Stardew Valley, The Sims, the original Pokemons, Wii Fit, Sonic, etc.

If anything, you're speaking to a very specific subcultural market of what I'd probably call gamer bros who are obsessed with getting good K/D ratios, streaks, and other Skinner-box adjacent rewards systems. The other large consumer markets include children who prefer simplicity with depth and the huge market of non-gamer-bros who are the ones buying Terraria and Stardew.

It's interesting to me that I pointed to fun game mechanics as primary and you point to Tetris and Minecraft as counterpoints.

And the other 50% are story-heavy games like RDR2, GTA V, TES:V, etc. The Witcher and Cyberpunk are also in the top 20. It Takes Two is #35 along with Elden Ring.

My point is that there are bifurcated consumer markets and you only spoke to a narrow subset.

You're going to need a mountain of research to prove you can separate fun from creativity/novelty.

I don’t know about this. I feel like nowadays it is just as rare for an indie game to be truly creative.

There are certain genres that the big AAA studios basically pump out and certain genres that indie devs basically pump out.

I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.

This has been my feeling as well. Even less so actually. There are realllly good games release nowadays. Like literally insane level of quality. But you also get an insane amount of stinkers. And those stinkers are increasingly coming from AAA studies.

I'm not so pessimistic: while the ratio is getting worse, there are more good and interesting games coming out, and the best ones are getting better.

Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.

Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.

(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).

I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?

To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?

While the philosophy is always interesting on what an original thought is, in this context most folks use terms like "truly creative" as a proxy for "something folks enjoy that doesn't feel like a copy of something else". Emphasis on _feel_.

yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.

What, Alyx is literally "Half-Life, but in VR". It's fiarly polished but the concept is not creative at all. They barely even pushed the overall series plot forward and there's like one whopping new character.

The most recently released GTA game is over a decade old, it's a big stretch for it to fit "nowadays".

Even Alyx is 6 years old, if that's your best example of an innovative AAA game, you're already in trouble.

I agree.

The required investment is just a lot larger in AAA. So just from a risk management perspective, people look to reduce the risk level.

Doesn’t really lend itself to creativity unless people involved have a track record.

There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.

I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.

For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.

Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.

The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.

As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.

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