My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.

It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.

Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.

And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.

If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.

I know right! Every time I come back to a game and they’ve changed every thing about it again I wonder why I bother. I think that’s part of the reason Melee has survived for so long, the community establishes the meta more than someone whose incentive is to keep selling you things.

Yeah totally. I’ve noticed everyone’s bandwidth dropping as capitalism worsens. It’s even more apparent when every live service game wants you to treat it like a job.

Agreed with your last point. I’m at the point where I can call how much is enough for me for any given title, and it makes me a lot happier than feeling obligated to finish games I don’t enjoy.

I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but I’m in the same boat.

• Most games tutotialize you like you have never played a game before
• “Cinematic storytelling” is everywhere. I turned off the dialogue in Need for Speed Unbound, and the game is wayyyy more enjoyable without it. And its…a racing game.
• There just are more games. Used to be I’d bring a physical copy of a game hope, and that’d be my game for a bit. Now I have thousands of games accessible at any moment. It’s hard to wait for a game to “get good” when I know that.

I’d also say that I feel no need to complete games or get further into them at this point. Especially seeing how people said Starfield is best in new game plus or whatever, that game barely has legs to stand on in a first playthrough. It’s not worth it for me to play a game for 60 hours for it to maybe get better, and I tend to know when I’m done with a game early now.

Like the other commenter discussed, I think objective when it comes to reviews is a very tricky idea. My ideal solution to it is having multiple perspectives on a game from an outlet, not necessarily in a review score, but in other formats. That’s part of what I loved about Giant Bomb, I’d typically like what Jeff did, but might not be as into a Brad or Dan game all the time.

I don’t think the idea of objectivity makes a ton of sense at this point, but an authentic perspective can serve that role.

I think a large part of why so many outlets sell out is due to the idea of infinite growth and/or revenue dropping from Youtube/Twitch/etc. taking more of a cut. Ideally this would be solved by remaining small, focused, and less dependent on revenue sources that can change on a whim.

Would you be interested in perspectives on it from developers themselves?

Very interested in the topics you point out, I think for myself I’d cover them mostly in writing. There’s a larger amount of that style of content popping up these days, but largely in longer video essays that end up being released more sparsely. I used to turn to podcasts for this sort of coverage, but I’m not as aware of gaming podcasts right now.

Totally agree with you. The hype cycle has killed a lot of interest in recently released titles for me as well, the first 2 weeks it’s the best thing ever, then the tide begins to turn.

Also agree on the Steam point. I’ve been trying to check out more indie games on Steam since it’s maybe the only platform that has decent discovery for them now, outside of Itch. It’s also so hard for indies to get any traction with how journalism and marketing functions outside of paying for it in one way or another.

I agree with you on keys/access. Part of why I think being beholden to the release calendar for content is such a problem. It was one thing when previews meant something, now that every publisher/developer promotes directly to their audience and being critical gets you on their bad side, there’s not a huge point to it.

Guests are a good point! That’s been something I’ve wanted to focus on, similar to Giant Bomb at Nite and the Interview Dumptruck. Doing post-mortems with developers could be really interesting.

I hear you on the dead community point as well. Kind of want to encourage discourse happening outside of the big platforms, but using the larger ones to help build an audience.