The problems with AAA game development
AAA is dead. Long live AAA.
In May of 2009 I graduated college and was pursuing a career in medicine. In my final undergrad semester I had taken the MCAT, which is a requirement for applying to medical school. Like most things in my life at that time, I kind of half-assed it. Back then the test was made up of 4 sections, 2 of which I did well on, and 2 of which I didn’t. However I was in luck—if I took the test again, I could take the best score on each section and use that in my application.
So I spent the next few months preparing, or at least that’s what I told myself. I actually spent the next few months partying and catching up on all the fun I missed out during the long lab days required of my Neuroscience degree (for all the good it did me). Once I had gotten all of that out of my system, and my final care free summer as a young man came to an end, I signed up to take the test again in January of 2010. The day before I drove down to a hotel near the testing site and began studying. At around 6 PM, I decided to take a break and get some food.
While eating dinner, I discovered that Epic Games had released the Unreal Development Kit for free to the world. I had always been into games, but never really considered making them. So I decided to download the tools on my new gaming laptop, and returned to studying while it downloaded. This continued until about 11 PM when I decided to take a break before bed. Lucky for me the UDK download had finished, so I set about installing it and playing around.
What felt like 20 minutes later, I heard my alarm go off. It was 6:30 AM, and time to get up and take the test. In an instant I hopped in the shower, got into my car, drove down to the testing site and kept on driving. That morning I decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and it wasn’t medicine.
Since that day, I’ve pursued a career in game development at all costs. I got my first internship working QA on Fieldrunners 2 in 2012, and from there my first paid gig doing QA on Aliens: Colonial Marines (sorry). Then I joined a new indie company and shipped Rack N Ruin in my first development role. Since then I’ve worked in AAA and AA (or Triple I as it was briefly called) in both the US and the UK. Throughout my career I have seen game development at the largest and smallest scale. I was even lucky enough to work for 3 well funded and successful companies, any of which I could have stayed with until I retired.
But this wasn’t enough for me. In my decade of working in games, I had seen a lot of the same problems, but never quite had the opportunity to fix them. I decided it was time to do something about it. So finally in 2022 I decided to get serious about my long time goal of founding a studio, just as everything was about to change.
The AAA industry as it was
Starting with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the industry I had grown up in changed almost overnight. Where once hundreds of millions of dollars was seen as a reasonable budget for a AAA game, suddenly even hundreds of thousands of dollars were hard to come by. Game companies, especially AAA companies, seemed wholly unable to adapt to a world where the gatekeepers they used to rely on no longer exist.
And there is good reason for this! Think of any major success in the video game world of the last decade from Minecraft to Stardew Valley to Demon’s Souls to Balatro and you’ll often find one thing in common—it was the developer’s first game. People who didn’t know what was or wasn’t possible, had little to no budget, didn’t psych themselves out worrying about the time something would take, or concern themselves with matching what other games had done. They just had an idea, and the will to deliver on it. Video games are a hit driven industry, and now that tools and distribution were easily available to everyone, the access that had enabled major developers to dominate the market made the situation untenable.
AAA development is broken
The AAA industry isn’t dying—it’s dead. Like the final scene in Kill Bill it’s got another 5 steps before it hits the dirt, but the deed has been done. While a few studios will ultimately survive, expect there to be very little in the way of good news over the next 5 years. In 2025, the best case scenario is that layoffs slow down, but they aren’t stopping by any means. Who knows what the future holds beyond that, but one thing is certain—AAA development is not coming back. At least in it’s current form.
I love AAA games. I love playing them, I love making them, I love talking about them. And still to this day they still make most of the money. While it is true that as a category the indie world is about as big as AAA, that profit is split by far fewer games on the AAA side. Even then, on the indie side we’re seeing more ambitious games (with increasingly multi million dollar budgets) win the day. For all it’s faults, the AAA industry is my first love, and I’m not willing to give it up.
What is a AAA game?
What makes AAA games special? Why are they worth the effort? If you told me that AAA games are just about big budgets, I would say that is a fair criticism. And that is what I would call it—a criticism. Saying that AAA is just about budgets is to confuse the means with the ends. At one point AAA games didn’t have these sky high budgets, and in the future they won’t again. We need to refocus on what it means to be a AAA game developer, and what makes a AAA game special. It’s easy to think that we should make AA games instead of AAA, but to do so would be to assume that it’s the budget that is primarily responsible for the quality of the game.
AAA games are about fidelity and ambition. AAA games do the kind of things that no one has thought to do before, bigger than has ever been done, or in a way that stands out. Graphics are part of it, sure, but the essence of AAA development can be found in the no cut camera of God of War (2018) or the fully climbable world of Assassin’s Creed (2007). You can find the spirit of the AAA game in the grenades that drop from elites in Halo and react seamlessly with the game’s broader sandbox. Before AAA was about budgets and expectations and genre, it was about the magic of computer games.
Where we go from here
Right now, the model by which we make these games is too expensive, too slow, and everyone I’ve ever met who works in AAA absolutely hates it. We’re all aware of the fear that permeates the industry, and the hyper specialization that leads to the problems we see today. A good friend of mine is an art director at a major AAA studio, and recently he told me how surprised he was to learn that no one who works in his building actually makes the art that goes into the game. We’ve gone from leaders and innovators to automatons on a factory line. Multi hundred person studios comprised of managers managing managers managing outsourcers. We try to solve every problem by throwing money at it.
It’s time to do things differently.
We need to find ways to take a game that currently costs 250 million, 6 years and a 1,000 person team and make it for 2.5 million in 6 quarters with 10 people with no reduction in quality and no reduction in scope. This is the mission behind Systems Heavy, and I’m sure it seems insane, when in fact inevitable.
The journey starts here
This article is the first in a series discussing the problems we see in AAA development today. Throughout each of the coming articles, I will focus on one of these problems, and what we are doing about it at Systems Heavy. Throughout these articles I will try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. While I will outline the particular prescriptions we will employ at Systems Heavy, the main focus will be on ensuring a clear understanding of the problem and it’s consequences.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, and were able to get something from it. Any thoughts you have on my thinking here are most welcome, and I look forward to speaking with you soon!