Is the next AAA-games crash imminent?

[redgarl]

Sony, naughty dog, santa monica and insomniac are laughing.

Nintendo to...

 

[ManuelV]

AAA games have also gotten significantly longer.

Where do I find the time to play >30 hour games like Far Cry 5, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War and Shadow of the Tomb Raider? Let alone all the lovely indie games that came out this year. That's enough to keep me busy for an entire year.

Yeah, I just played 60 hours of zelda breath of the wild, I know what you mean, it is really to much commitment. Maybe kids have that amount of time. But those games you mention aren't for kids, hmmmm.

 

[noel24]

I generally agree, although 6 moths seems to be too short. CDPR also lost some share value over six months but only because they peaked at CP2077 announcement, and They missed some on Throne Breaker. Still, their 5 year average is in the green.

 

[Pastuch]

Is free roam about to run it's course? What made games interesting to me is the stories behind them. I played Fallout 3 and New Vegas which were my introduction to open world game play. They certainly fun and I enjoyed the freedom. After a while though, it became monotonous. I was just collecting stuff. When I played The Last of Us, I was gripped and into the story and had to follow and investigate to what happened next. Resident Evil also had a good story to pull you in. We need new stories, new gameplay.

The tough thing is we all want something different. My favorite games of all time are almost entirely devoid of story telling. I haven't spent thousands of hours playing XCOM2, Diablo, Battlefield (BC2, BF3/BF4), Ori and the Blind Forest, Frost Punk, Shadow of War, GTA5, etc for the story. Even games like Dragon Age Inquisition, I loved it for the cool party command mechanics and multiplayer, not for the story.

To be fair, I have never in my life loved a game for the story and I'm 37 years old. I want a title that will swallow 800+ hours of time based solely on quality game play. That is a tough thing to find in the era of battle royale.

 

[Danny101]

The tough thing is we all want something different. My favorite games of all time are almost entirely devoid of story telling. I haven't spent thousands of hours playing XCOM2, Diablo, Battlefield (BC2, BF3/BF4), Ori and the Blind Forest, Frost Punk, Shadow of War, GTA5, etc for the story. Even games like Dragon Age Inquisition, I loved it for the cool party command mechanics and multiplayer, not for the story.

To be fair, I have never in my life loved a game for the story and I'm 37 years old. I want a title that will swallow 800+ hours of time based solely on quality game play. That is a tough thing to find in the era of battle royale.

As they say. To each their own. I find life itself to be a multiplayer battle royal. Games and stories are my escape.

 

[ET3D]

If you sent modern AAA publishers who treat any new idea on par with Leprosy and the Bubonic Plague

I'll reiterate what you failed to understand: what's silly isn't the idea of lack of creativity (it's largely true). What's silly is that people think that creativity is what's needed and what sells. Unless you think that blockbuster movies are very creative, that should also have been clear from the analogy. The most successful games are sequels. That's what most people want. Sure, their success depends on how good they are, and there's some creativity there, but you saw people's response to the lack of a Diablo 4 annoucement: hundreds of thousands of people are anxiously waiting for a (creatively stagnated) Diablo 4. Extremely well received games, like the Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2, are what if not another installment in a series. Occasionally a good new franchise appears, like, say, The Last of Us, and what do people want then, another installment.

And your list pretty much made the point for me: this has been the case for at least 20 years. And far as I remember, the claim that video games are dying has been around just as long, with the same reasoning behind it. Yet, it hasn't happened.

Far as I see it, people simply like to say that the sky is falling, and they back it up by ignoring the past, which is typically very close to the present (for example, Square Enix always discounts its Western games quickly). It's kind of tiring seeing the same old broken record, which people for some reason keep treating as a new revelation.

 

[cliffordcooley]

The most successful games are sequels.

Not entirely true. A successful game will likely make sequels. But it doesn't become successful because it is a sequel. The elements that make a game successful and in return a sequel are what is needed. And the elements are creativity of some form.