Gaming is a strange ecosystem. At the top, mighty giants prowl the land, triple-A titles that command vast sales and take equally huge resources to make. Between these behemoths, smaller studios scamper and prowl, catching what they can. Big budgets don’t necessarily mean big sales, though. Those tiny little games, like Angry Birds, say, or maybe Farmville, can bring in the same huge numbers on budgets that wouldn’t pay for the donuts at a triple-A release party. The numbers are also showing big name game development will only get more expensive, while the profits remain largely the same. Check out this article about the perils that await triple-A game development in the future. Gamasutra has the story.
The big name games are necessary for gaming, I think. They stretch the technologies and techniques of game design, forcing us forward. At the same time, they tend to do the same thing, over and over, limiting innovation. The solution is to make top-tier games less expensive to make, but beyond vast amounts of shared graphical and sound resources, that seems largely impossible.
This tension is winding the industry up so tight you can feel it through the wires of the internet.