Topic: Budgets of AAA games are too expensive. What would you remove to get the cost down?

After recent news of Xbox games going 3rd party to increase sales, and Playstation stating they need developers to be more mindful of budgets, it’s pretty clear the cost this generation of consoles is not sustainable for publishers. With that in mind, what would you accept to lose or see curtailed from triple A video games to bring the cost down? Your job is to pick 5 of the 10 budget cuts below that you think don’t really add much to modern gaming.

1. General detail of background graphics (real looking scenery/lighting and weather).
2. Graphical detail of characters (real blinking/breathing/hair).
3. Length of game/main campaign. (Let’s say game will be a third shorter).
4. Real Orchestrated Music.
5. Shorter loading times+ability to play in 4K.
6. Voiced story cutscenes (let’s say you lose 50%).
7. Size of playing area/map+ variety of areas.
8. Celebrity voices/faces.
9. Amount of NPCs inhabiting the world.
10. Online aspect (that is not monetised).

Who need AAA games if I can play kids games by Outright Games such as Peppa Pig, PJ Masks Hero, Paw Patrol, etc on PS5 with smooth 60 FPS and 4K ?

I'd save money by removing the colour yellow from the game.

It's not really a choice, there's just two things
1. Detail
2. Size

That's why games are expensive. Reduce those two things and games get cheaper to make. The problem is that when you remove those two things you end up with mid-sized titles. Which excluding generally cheaper indie titles and some notable exceptions from Nintendo in particular aren't the kinds of games that sell

Also marketing, marketing is huge. Look at some of the most expensive games ever made and you'll see budgets in the 100s of millions of USD. But for most of them almost half of their budgets were on marketing. Flashy trailers, billboards, TV spots, plastering the sides of busses and so on. That's where most of the money goes

An anti-hyperrealism art movement within the broader industry would help chop costs. But the industry’s marketing has long been geared toward the ever increasing scope of game worlds. One could wax philosophical about how it parallels modern society’s promoting and promise of maximizing nearly every temporal comfort and luxury at a concealed high cost, lol

Why does there necessarily have to be a reduction? Art style (whether highly stylized or hyper realistic) can potentially be achieved at lower cost and in less time as the tools become more sophisticated. I mean 30 years ago to program water that moves realistically must have taken skilled programmers months - today they just click a few switches to say that a shape is full of water and Unreal Engine knows how to make it look and act "real".

Likewise online features - I can't imagine that basic online functionality is anything like as difficult or expensive to plan for as it was even 20 years ago. The features and tools built into development platforms make it significantly easier.

That's before we talk about AAA games increasingly co-opting some of the ideas that have helped some indies become huge; extensive user content generation (Minecraft) and procedural generation (every rouge-like).

All that said - do we really want bigger and more detailed games? There's a presumption that the market must go that way but I'm not sure. Not every game has to be Skyrim, The Witcher or BoTW and The mass market could decide that quickly and decisively in a way might shock some people. Look at film over the past 12 months where the mass market completely shunned just about every comic book movie after years of them automatically dominating the box office.

Out of what you listed.

1. Character Detail. Specifically scanning the likenesses of real people (I like motion capture in terms of mapping more fluid animations though).

2. Length of Main Campaign. May be a bit unpopular of an opinion, but more 10-20 hour AAA gaming experiences would be welcome in comparison to everything being 50-100 behemoths. Just finished up Granblue Fantasy Relink's story mode (in about 20 hours) & it was a breath of fresh air.

3. Map Size. Kinda related to the above point. I like some open world games, but I generally prefer a tightly designed linear adventure. Open world doesn't have to mean bloated either. The latest Spider-Man games had great runtimes & were better for it.

4. Celebrity Presence. Related to point one. Absolutely pointless to waste a couple million dollars on presences like Keanu Reeves or the Walking Dead dude when you have the capability to create people from scratch without having to pay any likeness fees.

5. Online Modes. I'm just a single player kinda guy. Not anything deeper than that.

I would remove 1, 2, 8, 9 and 10

Voice acting, celebrity/influencer/brand inclusion and marketing, hyper realism. I miss varied artstyles but also feel we are at the diminishing returns point with graphics. Motion cap (especially when it isn’t curated. There is a character in Horizon FW that it is obvious that she thought she was no longer being recorded after she said her lines and it was beyond jarring.) That being said I would like to see varied localization come back in style. Especially now that region lock is essentially gone.

Nearly zero video games need to look notably better than Mario Kart 8, a Wii U game from nearly a decade ago, so this feels like an easy solution to things.

I own close to zero video games that look better than Mario Kart 8, and my time playing video games is in no way worse than anyone else's (outside of rich people, obviously).

I find it amusing that anyone is even considering to pick Voice Acting as a response here. If you want to get an idea of what these things cost have a look at the number of people who are credited for each of the departments. For a game like BotW if you look at the breakdown of credits by department, ignoring localisation, it breaks down into this:

And that's just credit counts. It doesn't consider the expected salaries for some of these roles or the length of time they would be on the project. For example people in the technical department would be working almost from day 1 right up through and even past launch and would be fairly decently paid. While a voice actor, especially one for a side character, isn't going to be involved for very long and probably doesn't get paid that much

But really, whatever way you slice it, the thing that kills the budget of these games is the art department. Asset creation. Mostly environments. It's not the voice actors or the score or the speed the game loads or how well it runs. It's not 4K or HDR or online play. It's not the fact that consoles have more power than they used to (if anything that makes the technical guys jobs easier). None of that comes even close to the amount of energy they have to put into making varied environments for large worlds. Varied character models, different interiors, different climates, different terrains and on and on

To be fair, BOTW is not the best example, as most modern games with voice acting have more voice acting than BOTW, and I have my doubts most of them were given a lot of takes.

Either way, if voice acting is a notable cost, its because of celebrities and if the game is given a wide variety of language options, and not likely a third reason.

It also has to be said that, Zelda's escalating development time and budget aside, Nintendo are masters of the AA game. You're mostly looking at cartoon or lo-fi art styles that cost less to make and age more gracefully than realistic ones. They aren't huge, only typically taking 10-20 hours to play, with tight levels rather than open worlds. And there's rarely that much in the way of cinematics and voice work.

The only thing where they probably spend as much as the AAA studios is QA testing, because it's unusual to see them ship with a lot of bugs.

Sadly we know that the recent approach to saving money is firing a third of the staff.

But, if we had to kill 5 things on the list in the first post:

• I don't think voice acting is bad but I would happily yeet over-the-top-graphically cut-scenes.
• Celebrity anything seems pointless.
• Real Orchestrated Music is neat but unless you're a franchise like final fantasy with actual big concerts, it seems excessive. You can still make super good music on a smaller scale.
• Online additions to non-online-focused-games can be fun, but I can live without them.
• length of game really depends on the genre and specific game, but plenty of games are more than 1/3rd filler anyways.

So I guess I chose 3, 4, 6, 8, 10.

Some of the others depend:

• Not quite sure how to interpret 1. and 2. because they say detail of art but in parentheses say the word 'real'. You can have expensive detailed art without being 'real' — think of all of Mario Wonder animations. Even pixel art can be super detailed in that style. If the question is 'make art more bad' I will say don't do that since art styles are so important to games. If the question is about hyper-realism.... I don't like that style myself but I feel like half the reason people buy those games is for that art style so it might be counter-productive to remove it.
• Map size and npcs I put in with art (and length of game for that matter) where... it depends on the game. If the devs are just making things bigger and fancier for no great reason other than buzz-words then sure, cut stuff. But world/art/characters are so fundamental to what a game is, you will end up with a different game if you change these attributes too much.

The only one I won't compromise on is loading time because it's bad in a lot of 3rd party Switch games and it has been annoying me lately. 😛

I love the more realistic graphics with optimised lighting effects.
I find it quite jarring when I pick up my switch and there's more cartoon styles graphics, although it's not to bad for a few rounds of Mario Kart - Stray is a great example how a smaller title can still look and play amazingly.
Framerate is where I wished most developers prioritised, I didn't buy a 120hz TV to be capped at 30fps.

I wonder if it's worth considering that AAA games are not too expensive to make. AAA games are made by massive publicly trade media conglomerates. These companies don't lay off workers to save money. They lay them off to keep more money for themselves. I wonder how much of the cost of AAA games goes into the pay and profit of people who do nothing to produce the games.

Gameplay > graphics. Most of my all-time favorites are older generation games and I'm not the biggest fan of overly realistic graphics with so many effects going on. I much prefer stylized graphics over anything else, which is why I'm so fond of BOTW/TOTK's graphic style

I wonder if we'll see the industry shift away from the those genres? I mean, if someone says "AAA" I immediately assume either an open-world third person action/adventure, first person shooter, or an MMO / Free 2 Play game. These are games with an average budget of 60 million or more and a team of around 100 people.

Immortals of Aveum had an 85 million dollar budget plus a 40 million dollar marketing budget. Almost nobody showed up for it. Steam reported an all-time peak of 751 players. Cookie-clickers have more players. Just...ouch.

This video game industry is a tough hustle, yo.

Motion capture of celebrities is expensive and if the gameplay or story suck it will not payoff.

I would cut all celebrity crap and tone down the motion capture stuff.

I think Nintendo's, slow and steady approach is the right choice. Personnely, I do not mind if the Switch successor comes in two years or maybe even more. When it comes to the visuals, the graphics are not important for me, I only care for the games to be good looking and even NES games can be good looking.

So as a gamer who cares for the game itself, I have no need for expensive visuals. Oh and please cut the modern audiences stuff. To me, it is like a red flag of a dying company.