hibikir

The issues of AAA, super expensive productions aren't just for game subscriptions: You are in the same boat with a media subscription. If someone subscribes, skips the theater release, watches all the movies you released that year and leaves a month after, the movies better have been cheap, because someone watch 8 of them for $15. Same with a TV series. Binge and leave. A subscription works when it keeps people connected, and the cost of producing each hour of play is so low, you end up ahead of just releasing your games on Steam for purchase. Cheap to make doesn't mean bad, or slop like a new reality TV series, but it still directs the kind of choices of what games to produce.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, what they bought is often the opposite: Have a large studio/set of studios work for 5 years, and have a game that people consume in 10-20 hours and leave. It's the opposite of what you want in a subscription. So it only kind of works out if your expensive game is a live service, battlepass-like thing, which happens to be included in the subscription, and most people pick. But then again, if someone is dedicating so many hours to a lifestyle game like that, they are not using the rest of the subscription... so then why add the other games? The value-add situation is just not going to line up right vs, say, releasing Overwatch or Diablo as their own things and hoping they build an audience. Because having access to A battlepassed-included overwatch and diablo in the same subscription doesn't really add value at all, as it's unlikely you'll want both, so the price has to be much closer to just having the battle pass for one.

It's just a confused product, and it seems crazy to me that they weren't thinking about this, when Netflix was sitting right there, changing what they produce, and what they license, in what is basically the same kind of market.

What matters is the budget. If you can have huge production values and sell for $20, then go right ahead. But a lot of the value-added things in some games from big publishers are still expensive, so you still need huge sales to have a prayer, so the game is doomed from the beginning. See the Prince of Persia metroidvania:: It could never, ever win. Meanwhile, Silksong controlled its budget, still gave us good graphics and amazing music, and thus was able to come out at a good price, and become an economic success.

There's no sustainability when a game needs to produce constant content to keep attention. Without this, there's no cultural phenomenon, and games have to be a lot less ambitious.

Even in indieland, teams get wiped out all the time. You make Hyper Light Breaker and collapse. Studios were dying left and right in the 90s too, before the forever updated game became popular.

It's not a matter of squeezing profit margins: It's that without healthy profit, there's no next project, or next expansion. We have companies like Paradox aiming for the small and consistent userbase... and they still have budget issues, and games just die if not enough people buy the next expansion. Or see the state of Civ, a game that received overinvestment, is relying on that kind of model too, and is probably going to just blow up entirely, because it's really that difficult to make a good enough game this days.

Too many companies chasing too many dollars? That's likely, but it'd still happen if you ignore all AAA studios. Just look at the number of games released on steam every year. There's never been a worse time to be an indie game developer.

Epic across the board might be making money, but this is normally evaluated per division, and down to per project. Fortnite's staffing was set for the old sales. Fewer players, buying fewer things, means you cut staff, even if Epic was generally fine.

Alright, so out there in the world we have people complaining about the mainy failures of $70, $80 games, how the huge budgets for AAA mean early closings in multiplayer games and cowardly design decisions in single player games. Talk of how most games that came out in 2025 don't look significantly better (or better at all) than cyberpunk, which came out what, 5 years earlier? How every big company is at the edge of failure, and there's layoffs because the companies aren't making money. The best games of 2025 were made by indies on AA budgets or below (in Silksong's case, way, way below)

So my sister in christ, how in the world are we not going to have talks about using AI for cost cutting? When the price is too high, and the games aren't getting better for the budget they have, either they make more for less money, or they don't have a business! They lay people off because they think the project will fail, or has already failed!

Asking for the games to be $30, with better graphics, better stories, all while they are done completely by hand by teams in high cost nations with great work conditions and job security? That doesn't work out. Ever. At all. You have to accept some tradeoffs. Just like nobody is making $300k a year writing one piece of videogame jouralism a month. Accept reality.