AAA Gaming is now Cringe!

BREAKING NEWS: AAA gaming is now, I'm sad to report, ?? Cringe. (And btw if you don't know what I mean by cringe like some of my investors did (won't name names), I'm sad to report that you are also cringe! -- JK if you invested in Notorious Studios, Inc. you are very obviously not cringe)

Its sad, right? We spent so many years of hard work to get into an "AAA" studio like, idk, Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two or whatever and now we're cringe. Ugh. But can we un-cringe ourselves? Can we make ourselves Based again? Read on...

You're probably wondering: bruh, what makes AAA cringe, anyway? (Players are prob rolling their eyes like "tf you're 10 years late")

• Making Games People Don't Want to Play - The biggest way AAA is cringe is making games that gamers look at and go - who is this for? I have to be ??professional so I won't name names, but you know what I mean. How do these games get greenlit in the first place? I could do an entire 10-page post on that reason alone, but lets just say it boils down to the leadership being out of touch with the zeitgeist/market. I got off a call last night with another ex-AAA dev ranting about how they pitched a Helldivers-like game internally at their "AAA" studio only to have the Top Men nuke it from orbit cause "no other game has made a $1B with a game like that." Meanwhile their latest AAA game flopped and didn't make 1/1000th of what Helldivers 2 grossed. That's Cringe.
• Obsessed with Production Values (High Budgets $$$) - Modern AAA was created by GenX who were obsessed with making games like Hollywood. Huge budgets! Celebrities everywhere! Jaw dropping graphics! Zoom in into Spidey's suit and look at them details! But this has ballooned production budgets to an astronomical degree where you "need" $100M+ to make a "mid game" (in AAA dev standards~) and that doesn't even include marketing! WHAT? Meanwhile AAA is getting dunked on by teams smaller than their production departments, some of whom didn't even know what rigging was or using deprecated engines! LMAO. That's Cringe.
• Production or Analytics Driven Development - The most important thing for a game is the Player Experience (and in this era, an absurd and unique player experience like Pokémon with guns or Liber-tea!). The producers/PMs and insights team aren't going to be able to define you a great player experience. They might be useful at some stage of gamedev (keyword: ???might???), but certainly not at the early stages -- they analyze the present and past, but can't tell you the future. Games are an art form, and the "artists" in this case are the designers (trust the designers!). In far too many AAA studios the producers/PMs have the decision making power. That's Cringe.
• Pushing Social/Political Views - Gaming (and the gaming industry) attracts the subcultures, the neurodivergent, the otakus, the creatives. I get it. I personally ran a Pokémon fansite when I was a teen and was more interested in gaming/the internet than partying. But we've gone way too far in pushing our own social agendas and political POVs in games, and players are over it. A perfect example is the backlash in tech with Google's new Gemini model - what even is that? That's Cringe.

And that is just scratching the surface. I didn't even mention the cringe operations management that led to record breaking layoffs (15K so far this year btw) or predatory monetization practices (to makeup for the insane budgets!).

So from now on, careful when you say you're in "AAA" cause what you really could be saying is -- I'm cringe! ??(Especially if you're a startup founder!)

In all seriousness, AAA gaming brings us worlds and experiences that no other medium in human history has accomplished. Something like Elden Ring is our modern day Roman Colosseum - experiences like this can only be crafted by very large teams with very large budgets. And its unlikely players will lose their taste for epic experiences like that anytime soon, if anything it'll increase.

But we are definitely in a transitionary period where a lot of the ways we built game studios will have to change, particularly in the west.