Im mostly going to copy paste this from the RoF:

Full super long GDC presentation here. I will post a summary and excerpts.

http://www.hellblade.com/?p=16972

So Ninja Theory struggled last gen despite putting out some pretty well reviewed games. Heavenly Sword, Enslaved and DmC all reviewed well but didn’t sell enough. They couldn’t retain the IPs because they were always at the mercy of publishers, but things somehow got even worse at the start of this gen.

The common wisdom from publishers was that any game genre, art style, gameplay concept that would not all guarantee 5m sales would be dead. We’ve variously been told point blank that single-player story games are dead, that any art style other than realism is not commercial, and that melee games do not sell.

So 5 million+ units need to be sold for a game to be considered successful by Publishers. NT disagrees with this obviously, but Publishers are the ones who greenlight the games so their opinions are what matter.

Here are a few games that were rejected by the publishers. The coop melee games looked awesome.

We pitched a novel horror game that we worked up with Alex Garland, the writer, producer of 28 Days Later, the Beach and Sunshine and collaborator on Enslaved. Only to be told that we had to add melee combat in it because that was what we could sell. Then told that melee combat wasn’t popular enough and neither was horror. A spreadsheet was shown to us that demonstrated this.

We also pitched with Alex, a co-op story based game set in the real world with real characters only to be told that super heroes and space marines would sell better so “why don’t you set it on Mars?”. That was the end of that game.

Every concept we came up with came back with a sales sheet showing how similar games didn’t reach 3-5m units and some frankly ludicrous suggestions. l

n 2010 two movies came out that made the same amount of money. Black Swan and Clash of the Titans. One was creatively risky but low budget and made $327m post budget and one was big and dumb and made $368m. I asked one publisher outright which kind of bet they were more comfortable with. It wasn’t Black Swan.

Their procedural generated coop melee shooter gameplay test.  

http://vimeo.com/103043079

Gorgeous looking environments.

http://vimeo.com/103042049

In the end, they are going with a self-publishing model. Will be releasing a single player story focused melee combat game digitally at a reduced price. They aren’t going all out meaning they dont have 100 people working on it. They have other similar smaller projects in the works that still have the production values of AAA games.

The end if mid tier games is here. this is the same kind of bullshit we saw with Squeenix' unrealistic sales predictions for Tomb Raider. I wonder if some companies who strive for creative, original games might try other avenues.  Dare I say some might ask Nintendo for help.

I love their work, but given their publisher skipping I have to imagine they are absolute dicks to work with, which in this business is really saying something.

Maybe. But if a studio like Sony, who stands by devs liek David Cage and David Jaffe etc... through their downtimes could not see the value in maintaining them it's an indicator they may not be the easiest to get along with.

I can see why Capcom and Namco would drop them (japanese outsider culture).

gamingeek said:

This is why I can't understand the AAA console warriors. This is what the industry has led us to.

Well having a wide variety of types of games is great but come on the usual AAA publisher/dev teams make far better games than anything a mid tier developer like NT makes. If one has to go it should absolutely be mid tier.

Dvader said:

Well having a wide variety of types of games is great but come on the usual AAA publisher/dev teams make far better games than anything a mid tier developer like NT makes. If one has to go it should absolutely be mid tier.

But there is no choice anymore, it's their way or the highway. According to this, publishers will only greenlight dudebro realistic shooters. People keep buying them expecting games to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Regardless of the cost, so projects become more and more and more expensive. So risk is higher and innovation goes on the back burner.

In the end we get boring identikit games repeated each and every year. Thanks.

I'd rather some people went out of their AAA bubble and bought games like Endless Ocean or Elebits at full price instead of waiting around like stinking vultures to pick them up at hobo prices. Seriously, people hang off the coatails of whatever EA or Activision say you should buy.

Great point Foolz, guess they'll have to riff on indie games innovations, but when 90% of those games are 2D that's not going to help. I've been pretty put off by AAA over the last few years and by AAA and mean the third party definition of.

There are people out there who have a massively different tolerance to repetition than me, to them AAA is fine and tasty. I would rather try different restaurants but there are some people I know in real life that will insist on going to the same damn place for every stinking meal.

What I find eye rolling, is the "new" IP which is just different characters and a story overlaid the same design someone else has already done 10 times.

AAA is far and away my favourite. I also like mid-tier. There's the odd indie that I enjoy but for the most part they don't really do much for me.

I also love Micheal Bay movies.

Come at me bro.

robio said:

I wanted to write something intellligent, but after 10 minutes that's just not working out for me. So this is all I got:

AAA = boring repetitive crap

Mid Tier = dead

Indie = sucks ass

Why do I even play video games anymore?

Not you. Dont become them.

Dvader said:

Not you. Dont become them.

Nahhhh. I'm just grouchy because I've got a birthday coming up, and I don't really care for those. But I will admit to being really disenfrachised with just about the whole industry. Death of mid-tier, movement to mobile platforms, Nintendo with their heads up their ass, etc. Plus for the first time in ages, I don't see any games coming out in the next 6 months that I'm genuinally excited about. Kind of a wasteland out there.