Kotick has taken a dishonorable path. He should be first person out the door.
Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few times...
> I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier.
it's enormously difficult to make a game and not a repeatable business model.
> I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster.
To create the products they're making the big dogs are leveraging years and years and years of tech R&D development and tooling and enormous amounts of manpower.
To be able to create a hit AAA without any of this is relying on capturing lightning in a bottle.
If one stumbles upon some novel gameplay that propels your game to notoriety, the design will be copied by the big AAA devs next release cycle.
That's basically what AA games are, and are sometimes somewhat successful...but usually not as successful as AAA games. Then you have the indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed. So not only do you need a game idea that is attractive to gamers (AAA games are established franchise with decades of releases and marketing), it also has to be implemented well (see the failures of this years CoD and Battlefield) AND you need a huge marketing budget to get your game in front of eyes (maybe you could get lucky going "viral") to stand out from everyone else.
> indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed
An aside: I know this is a common opinion but it doesn't really mesh with my experience as a player. Quite the opposite in fact - it's not the low-quality Steam games that make it difficult to get noticed, but the overwhelming number of real gems. There have been so many truly excellent indie games in recent years (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, FTL, Factorio, Hades, Rimworld, Devil Daggers...) that I haven't gotten round to playing all the obvious must-play indie games I want to, let alone going looking for more. Either way, though, from an indie dev's perspective, it must be pretty difficult to get noticed.
Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few times...