AAA video game studios are more or less navigating their internal landmines right now from lay-offs, strikes, video game flops, and many other issues. It was only a matter of time before the industry imploded. Hence, industry experts now predict that video games and their respective studios will undergo a mass downsizing in expectations, with smaller games and smaller studios abound.
The analysis came from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson. According to them, certain publishers and devs are already starting to focus on smaller development scales.
“There some publishers that are already starting to move away from those big 100-hour games and now start to do smaller experiences. Some of them have been canceled, and maybe that’s a conversation at a later date, but I think that’s probably the direction that a lot of publishers do want to go in,” Tom Henderson revealed in a podcast.
Meanwhile, Jason Schreier has interviewed some of these publishers and developers. One of the most notable was Nate Purkeypile, a former lead artist on Bethesda’s Starfield. Purkeypile eventually quit Bethesda after continued frustration about its bureaucracy and bloat.
The Developer Exodus Has Begun
After quitting Bethesda, Purkeypile started his development studio with a focus on smaller teams and more manageable expectations. He further stated that Bethesda’s “scale of production is not necessarily enjoyable for a lot of people. You’re very much a cog in the machine.”
Many other developers like Nate Purkeypile have since followed suit, most of them coming from large AAA game studios and publishers. With the current Ubisoft and Activision landscape, even more of them might just join this kind of shift in the games industry.
“Small studios are not burdened by stockholder expectations, who have little regard for the ebb and flow of game development costs and profits,” according to Renee Gittins. Gittins is an alumni board chair of the International Game Developers Association.
What that eventually means for gaming as a whole is that we might see more indie games in the coming years and even smaller titles with only a few dozen hours of gameplay. As for the AAA publishers and developer studios, time will tell if they will follow this budding trend.
