The demise of the “AA” tier of video games is not a new topic of discussion; it’s something that has been pointed out and/or lamented for well over a decade at this point, with the Xbox 360 era often pointed to as being both the swansong and the beginning of the steep decline for lower budget, more quickly developed, and usually more rapidly discounted AA titles.
The gap this has left in the market, however, has been thrown into even sharper relief by a handful of recent events. The move to $70 price points for AAA games has made consumers very conscious of how many self-styled AAA games are actually just AA-tier games tottering around in heavy make-up and their older sister’s high heels.
Meanwhile the notion of an “AAAA” game has been trotted out by some executives (most notably at Ubisoft, although Microsoft seems to actually be responsible for the coinage), essentially responding to the same issue from the other side of the field by trying to differentiate titles in the increasingly overcrowded and broadly defined “AAA” category.
At the heart of the problem is the way in which the industry’s output has effectively been polarised; at one end there are AAA games priced at $60, and now increasingly at $70. At the other end there are indie games usually priced below $20.
There’s precious little in the middle – while some games do launch at mid-range prices, they’re relatively uncommon, and almost all projects from major publishers and studios find themselves bracketed in the AAA category. Whether that’s based on genuine market research suggesting that mid-range price points don’t work well, or simple vanity, is hard to say.
It’s probably a little of both in some cases, but it’s also fair to say that many developers aren’t happy with pressure to label everything they work on as AAA and launch it at a $70 price point. There’s strong interest in exploring other price points (with all that entails, including stricter budget controls on projects), but also a sense that doing so is risky – not just for the game, but for the future of the studio and its staff, who fear being unfairly pigeonholed for working on “sub-AAA” games.
Those concerns are real, and the desire for a studio to be seen as a high-end AAA developer is understandable – but the situation of having no path to market at a sensible price point for mid-range games doesn’t feel sustainable.
That’s a point hammered home by situations like the one facing Ascendant Studios, who were reported this week to have furloughed around 30 of their staff. The studio hadn’t confirmed the news at the time of writing but if true it would probably mean that it is now operating on a skeleton staff, only nine months after the launch of its first game, the EA-published Immortals of Aveum.
That game struggled to find its audience for a number of reasons, which we discussed with Ascendant founder Bret Robbins last February. Launching within weeks of titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t help, while a shockingly dull and uninspired marketing campaign utterly failed to convey what the game was actually trying to do.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to play the game and conclude that this is a product that should sink the studio which created it – a team made up of very experienced and talented people from the likes of Sledgehammer Games and Telltale Games. It’s free on PlayStation Plus this month, in fact – it’s worth taking a while to play through a bit and see where the bar is apparently now set for games that will fail badly enough to throw their entire studio into crisis.
It’s fine! It has some smart ideas about bolting Metroidvania mechanics onto an FPS game which it doesn’t quite stick the landing on, but are interesting nonetheless. It’s a good technical showcase for Unreal Engine 5 in places, especially with the character models, and the art and world-building has a strong Brandon Sanderson fantasy vibe that I liked a lot. I’m not setting out to review the game and certainly not claiming that it’s an overlooked classic or anything of the sort – simply that a studio making games at this level shouldn’t be struggling to keep its head above water.
And here’s the rub: for all the issues outlined above, Immortals of Aveum launched at $70. Ascendant founder Bret Robbins has opined that the game could have performed better and found its audience more readily if it had arrived at a lower price, and it’s hard to disagree with his reasoning.
Interestingly, Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch made a comment echoing that to some degree about his studio’s upcoming Space Marine 2 – a game that will launch at $70 despite his misgivings. I think the calculus for Space Marine 2 is different; it’s a sequel to a well-liked game and is attached to the Warhammer 40,000 IP, so it doesn’t face the same kind of challenge in finding an audience compared to a new IP like Immortals of Aveum.
Nonetheless, Karch is saying something many developers will privately admit to feeling in the past year or two – that the $70 price point creates a level of consumer scrutiny and expectation that just isn’t conducive to success for a lot of games.
There are some bright spots here and there – Helldivers 2 turning up at $40 and becoming the surprise hit of the year so far is a good one, for example. Generally speaking, though, the industry just doesn’t have a good space right now for solid, interesting games that lack the massive resources and polish of true AAA games.
Building that mid-range tier back up would take time and commitment, but it could change the economics of how games – especially new IPs – are created, by cultivating a market for titles with lower price points and consumer expectations set realistically for shorter development times and less extensive content.
One spark of hope for this kind of game – and for smaller studios who could have a much more stable and secure existence by working on a handful of mid-range titles in parallel rather than throwing all their eggs into one AAA basket – is that subscription services might resuscitate this segment of the industry.
Services like Game Pass need a steady flow of content; as Microsoft currently seems to be discovering, a small number of tentpole releases doesn’t sustain a subscription service long-term, with subscribers needing a steady flow of reasons to remain subscribed from month to month.
Look at the front page of your Netflix app: there isn’t a new season of something gigantically expensive like The Witcher there every month, but there’s something new just about every week, because that rate of content refresh is vital to keeping the subscribers engaged.
How do you accomplish that for a service like Game Pass? A new AAA game every week, or even every month, isn’t realistic, but there’s potentially huge mileage in bringing the AA game category back to life, giving players shorter and lower-budget but nonetheless fun, interesting, and entertaining games on a regular basis.
As subscription-focused titles they’d be free to be somewhat experimental, and players’ expectations should be set reasonably given that they’re not making a commercial calculation about buying the game. As with the big streaming services’ offerings, many of these titles would appeal only to specific niches, but it’s always been the case that mainstream success is best achieved through satisfying enough niches – a notion that’s increasingly eluding the industry as game budgets creep up into eight or nine figures.
Immortals of Aveum’s stint on PS Plus may be too little, too late for Ascendant, though I’d dearly love if it’s not – if the game can find its audience on PS Plus and whatever financial terms are involved in that placement are enough for Ascendant to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, that would be a wonderful and lately all-too-rare bit of good news in the industry.
In future, though, services such as Game Pass and PS Plus could be the key lifeline for AA-tier titles. Controlling the budgets for that kind of development would become an even more important skill for studio managers than it already is (and it’s already very, very important, of course), and designing games to fit within the constraints of limited budgets and timescales will also become an even more valuable skill.
These are not new skillsets, though – there are many in the industry who remember the era when the ability to deliver an AA game on-time and on-budget, with several of those projects on the go at once and each of them hitting their milestones, was a key badge of honour for some studios.
Returning that sector to prominence as a primary provider of games for subscription services would rescue a whole tier of creative output – and could give some much-needed stability to the development sector overall.
