The golden age of AAA video games is over but that’s a good thing – Reader’s Feature

Like every other gamer, I have watched the events of the last several weeks with a mixture of confusion and despair. All the corporate doublespeak has left us with no real idea what Microsoft and Sony are doing, just the vague impression that triple-A games are going to become a lot rarer in the future. Why it’s taken till now for them to realise game budgets are out of control I don’t know, but finally the message seems to have got through.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. It might not have been obvious to them that things were out of control long ago, but I think it was to ordinary gamers. I assume it was only allowed to go on as long as it did because big budget single-player games were so important to the PlayStation 4’s success and, at the same time, money wasn’t really important to Microsoft, while it was trying to buy up the rest of the industry.

Now though, the morning after as it were, they’ve realised none of this is sustainable. And yet, by accident or not, they’ve trained people to expect amazing looking games, that last for 60 hours or more… which they can no longer afford to make.

It doesn’t take much to imagine how some gamers, those that don’t following the back and forth of the industry, are going to respond to the idea that single-player blockbusters are going away. I imagine the thought of dealing with that issue is part of why it’s taken Microsoft and Sony so long to do anything about it.

But now that they’ve admitted the problem (sort of, I don’t think they ever actually just came out and said ‘games are too expensive now’) hopefully we can see some necessary changes. I don’t know why any of it had to involve people being laid off but hopefully that’s over as well.

What needs to happen now is that publishers need to get into a position where games have sensible budgets and take no more than two to three years to make. Yes, that probably means they won’t be as long or as pretty as some more recent games but I really don’t think the difference would be that significant.

The increased power of the current gen consoles should make up for a lot and there’s some PlayStation 4 games that still look better than PlayStation 5-only games. Also, a lot of games have a problem with bloat, so removing that and focusing on smaller game worlds should make it possible to keep the levels of detail intact.

You look at what some indie developers do with their games today and I’m sure the downgrade in graphics would be barely noticeable, and perhaps not exist at all. While at the same time the fact that the games weren’t so expensive to make would mean they could afford to be more experimental and original.

I really don’t see a downside to this. They just remade The Last Of Us Part 1, which is a PlayStation 3 game, on PlayStation 5 and it still looked and played almost identically. High end games will still look amazing and if lower budget ones, from smaller developers, don’t like quite as good as they used to I really think that’s a small price to pay for the whole games industry not imploding in on itself.

I don’t want to be playing only mobile and live service games for the rest of my days and if that can be avoided simply by putting a cap on budgets I think that can be very easily forgiven.

By reader UberBandit

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.