56 minutes ago, haanuman said:

Does that mean that things are going down the hill now?

I guess gaming industry just near begin of big changes. It just a cycle of evolution. Any technology have a limit after wich it no sence to increase funding and scales of implementation becouse it not increase a quality and speed of production decreased. At this point usualy new technology become to market and sweept out old expensive technologies. And it happends not a first time with gaming industry. It cycle has begun from Wolfenstain 3D that has open a epoch of 3D gaming engines and has been a hightech innovation on his time. Something like it will happend in close future. Some tiny teams will eat stacks of sharks that not able to  produce or shift to new technologies. Than  its new technologies will become must have and again start grow generraly into scale of implementations instead of innovatios until next barrier. And so on.  

3 hours ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

I guess gaming industry just near begin of big changes. It just a cycle of evolution.

Certainly.  Just like other popular human undertakings. Consider the classic examples of the music industry: it has gone through many corporate/independent waves, each usually driven by technological developments in which the independent creators push the edge with their art and then the international corporatists move in and take control in their borg-like fashion flooding the market with mediocre but popular product and milk the bottom line on their quarterly reports to shareholders.  Or even consider religion:  it starts with the One True Religion and as the usual crowd of organizers and controllers take over and interpret things in their favour until schisms develop and there are many One True Religions splintered off.

It's human nature.  Nowadays AAA just means a release by a large corporation, probably with multinational ties, which spends a significant if not majority of the budget on marketing and distribution and possibly franchise and intellectual property fees or other things involving rooms full of high-paid lawyers (quick! they're all in one place! it's an opportunity to one-shot the mob!).  It does not refer to the technical qualities of the assets, programming, or storytelling or even the generated revenue.

Perhaps I'm a cynic but I would speculate that it might be possible to correlate the popular perception of what makes an AAA title and the proportion of the total budget that was not spent directly on development.  It would make an interesting paper, if there was someone willing to fund such research.

25 minutes ago, Bregma said:

Nowadays AAA just means...

I would argue that "nowadays" might be wrong. In the romantic days of gaming there was no big budget involved (except for the console market). What defines our era is that most games sales revenue is AAA. (For good and for bad)

I specifically remember that when COD MW II it made more money than any summer blockbuster. That was the moment that I understood that the gaming industry has changed. It had made the transition into "industry".

25 minutes ago, Bregma said:

It would make an interesting paper, if there was someone willing to fund such research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

6 hours ago, SillyCow said:

Here you go. I swear that I googled this link only after I wrote my reply above, but look who's on top? . And also look at how much more they spent on marketing!

But it also plenty companies with tiny teams oriented to high-tech, while  team founders keept majority of shares. Thay already has make a lot of money in past on innovative games and development and design technologies, but prefer to keep development teams tiny and innovations-oriented, and enlarge a support and PR teams.  And those companies already able to drive billions to marketing budgets in case of needs, but again their first games on wich thay made a primary capital still a idol ever after years after initial release, so gamers keep watch for any news from those companies about sequels. I guess its companies will explode  market soon.

6 hours ago, SillyCow said:

I would argue that "nowadays" might be wrong. In the romantic days of gaming there was no big budget involved (except for the console market). What defines our era is that most games sales revenue is AAA. (For good and for bad)

I specifically remember that when COD MW II it made more money than any summer blockbuster. That was the moment that I understood that the gaming industry has changed. It had made the transition into "industry".

It's unclear to me which days were the "romantic" ones, but I did want to try and put some numbers on budgets over the years. Luckily, some guy at Kotaku did the legwork already: https://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649. I should mention that some of these budget numbers are direct budget and don't count things like the effort put into building a publisher-shared engine, and often times the marketing budgets can be quite large.

There's never been any doubt that budgets have inflated massively over the course of the game industry's evolution. The definition I was given around 2007 for a AAA title was simply, a game expected to sell more than a million copies. (Successful indie games might sell those kinds of numbers, but that was not usually the expectation.) If the term ever meant anything about the innovation of said games, that went out the door at least 20 years ago.

19 minutes ago, Promit said:

some guy at Kotaku did the legwork already: https://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649

It clearly shows dependense - then higher budget then worse a game.

12 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

It clearly shows dependense - then higher budget then worse a game.

Which is why every masterpiece costs $1 dollar to make.

7 minutes ago, Lactose said:

Which is why every masterpiece costs $1 dollar to make.

Popular joke here:  customer ask a service engineer - "is it realy cost 100 rubles to drive a single screw for half of turn"?  engineer ansver - "no, it costs, 0.01 rubles, rest is cost of knowledge wich same screw require to be driven".

31 minutes ago, Promit said:

It's unclear to me which days were the "romantic" ones

I would define this as the time when small passionate teams (sometimes one man teams) accounted for gaming blockbusters. This was a time when noone thought you could ever make billions from video games, so noone thought a multimillion dev budget would be justifiable.

Think about a hit like Prince of Persia. It was a game with unbelievable production value for it's time. I'm not talking about innovation, just production value. And it was largely made by one entry level programmer. I think in those "romantic" times it was expected that a small passionate indie team *could* publish a polished hit and compete with the big guys.

It was probably the same earlier on (in the Atari period), but I started gaming the 80s. So I am not sure.

Today I don't think any indie thinks they can compete with the production value of a AAA title today. Sure, you can strike gold with innovation ( ex: minecraft ) but there will be no indie "Call of Duty". If you compare blockbuster indie developers Crytek to ID software, you will see that Crytek needed a much bigger team to make a blockbuster then ID did. Whereas ID where just "a couple of kids", the very talented Yerli brothers needed an established team around them (and a AAA publisher) to break out.