Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
Part of it is that modern games are getting too expensive to make, especially with all the assets to the fidelity given by current technology.
I doubt it, this kind of logic is the same as “medical costs are insane because modern medical tech is expensive.”
It completely ignores the entire economy all functioning under advanced technology to create and produce advanced goods more cheaply with the technology that costs money. It’s also mismanagement in the same way the movie and TV industry has seen, they don’t want to hire writers cause they don’t want to pay them, so instead they just spend hundreds of millions on reshoots because having a writer being paid 60k on staff 24/7 was too costly apparently and some suit got a promotion for “saving” that money.
Someone made a better version of “the day before” with a few grand in purchased assets and a couple months using UE5. If you were creating your own resources instead of buying them and you had an actual vision then you absolutely can make a game for less than hundreds of millions that will return that money back to you. How much did pal world take in? How much is helldivers 2 currently making? What were their production costs?
Just because some inept studio run by corporate bean counters can only churn out tech demos for millions of bucks doesn’t mean that’s the actual standard for cost and production of gaming.
It’s only expensive to make if studios decide to make them incredibly expensive. There are plenty of high quality indie games made by a single person.
The problem here is they went all in on “THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!!!” And it flopped because of the lack of story and gameplay. The lesson here is to not make it incredibly expensive to develop by focusing all efforts on graphics, and instead focus on gameplay and story and people will tolerate much less flashy visuals.
Games are getting too expensive to make because they’re adding extra shit that no one cares about, not because of the cost it takes to make a decent game. Too many admin managers in charge at companies and not enough artists or engineers at the management level.