Same thing happened with music.
It doesn't mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry's total profits than they used to.
More of people's disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more "indie" and cheaper versions of both. It's a good thing, honestly, for people's tastes to be more diversified and unique.
Except almost no one can live with music now, with the spotify model.
I pirate my music and keep it in my local storage.
I mean, it's ok I guess, but as a musician myself that's not helping much either. Buy some stuff on bandcamp (85% goes to the artists, cheap and often pay what you want) or if you need streaming get Tidal, they give 3x than spotify and didn't give 100 millions to joe rogan.
Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you've bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.
Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.
I got into music piracy back in the day because it used to be that record companies paid artists badly so I spent money on concerts and merch, now Spotify pays artists badly for the record companies. Anyway, if used at all piracy is best used to find artists you really love and then spend your money on legitimately purchasing their music.
Hell you can still buy CDs direct (rarely) do that too. Great for display if nothing else.
I love Bandcamp. It does not have much of a filter so I get to find small and under the radar artists.
Personally I buy 90% of my music either on Bandcamp or as a CD in my local store.. rip it.. throw it on Jellyfin for easy streamikg
Can I suggest occasionally buying stuff through something like Bandcamp? You get digital music and support the artist. Or, just buy some merch I guess.
Live shows and merch have been the way artists make money since before streaming was a thing
I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:
Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it's all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It's not a big deal.
"OMG it was advertised all over time square." Responded with: "I live in Wichita." "I live in India." "I'm from NYC and tourist just look at them, they don't read them. Fuck no I don't read them. I don't fuck with times square."
It's actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted
You forgot
- Don't discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
This one is big and I never noticed it until a few years ago. My wife and I never got cable when we moved into our own place. One time my mother in law was talking to my wife about some commercial and my wife just said she hadn't seen it. My mother in law got really weirdly upset or something, like my wife was trying to be condescending or something. But she was talking about it the same way people might talk about a funny skit from a show. It wasn't until being away from it for years that I realized how odd it is.
This is the way.
I'd pay the $70 or even $100 for a AAA title...if it released complete, relatively bug-free, and didn't try to soak me with microtransactions and subscriptions.
But that's not what's they're selling.
Exactly. AAA is supposed to be pushing the standard forward and compete for my attention by making a better product.
If i can get an equally good or better game for less money i will obviously go for that.
I bought like 4 games last week for under $20.
AAA Gaming needs to get with the socioeconomic times.
| Rank | Title | Release Year | Country of Origin | Free-to-Play |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Roblox | 2006 | US | Yes |
| 2 | Counter-Strike 2 | 2023 | US | Yes |
| 3 | League of Legends | 2009 | US | Yes |
| 4 | Minecraft | 2011 | Sweden | In China |
| 5 | Fortnite | 2017 | US | For modes other than Save the World |
| 6 | Dota 2 | 2013 | US | Yes |
| 7 | Valorant | 2020 | US | Yes |
| 8 | World of Warcraft | 2004 | US | No |
| 9 | The Sims 4 | 2014 | US | No |
| 10 | Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 | 2025 | US | No |
| 11 | Escape from Tarkov | 2025 | Russia | No |
| 12 | Overwatch 2 | 2023 | US | Yes |
| 13 | Marvel Rivals | 2024 | China | Yes |
| 14 | PUBG: Battlegrounds | 2017 | South Korea | Yes |
| 15 | World of Warcraft Classic | 2019 | US | No |
| 16 | Grand Theft Auto V | 2013 | UK | No |
| 17 | Diablo IV | 2023 | US | No |
| 18 | Wuthering Waves | 2024 | China | Yes |
| 19 | Genshin Impact | 2020 | China | Yes |
| 20 | Apex Legends | 2019 | US | Yes |
I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.
EDIT: Added release year after @Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned age.
EDIT2: And country of origin, while I'm at it.
EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe "availability" would be more interesting than "release". World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It's almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it's actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn't help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don't bother with working on performance.
Maybe I'm just grumpy that I can't play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
I appreciate the nicely formatted table. :)
Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.
Way too many American games in there :(
Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.
And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.
The industry only has themselves to blame for this.
Good! Fuck that generic sludge being pushed out by shit companies ran by sociopaths.
Who can afford £70? Especially given the price increase consoles and PC components are seeing. Like many people, I wait a few years until it's on sale.
Not only that, buying £70 of a broken game on initial release.
Do they still make AAA games anymore? They take so long to develop and lots of them get cancelled at the very end or a month after release.
PC players are always going to lead the trend because we have the most options. Microsoft and Sony are in a race to enshitify their ecosystems, while Nintendo is actively hostile towards it's customers and fans.
Meanwhile I'm playing through what was originally a Playstation exclusive title that I got on sale on Steam, and run on Linux.
And then there's the F2P-P2W/ad-riddled-and-sustained hellhole that is most of mobile gaming.
What's driving this trend? The enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it's death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over just drives me further into the arms of indie developers. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.
I feel like this doesn't account for people who play older games. Like I'm currently playing the God of War reboot. That would count as playing something that's outside the current top 20, but still very-much AAA.
This is revenue. How many people are buying those games now? Older games are also usually heavily discounted so that’s even less money. And if the game was bought second hand then it’s entirely irrelevant.
The last 3 games I bought were from indie devs. Road to Vostok being the last one purely based on the fact I wanted to support the guy and look forward to its continued development.
I'm too lazy to find my 3 year old comment but it went something like "AAA games are about as AAA as the mortgage bonds were in 2007".
The era of the AAA gold standard is long gone. You no longer need a million dollar studio bankrolled by a big name publisher/console to make a groundbreaking AAA game.
Most if not all of those studios have been cost cutting for the past decade to maximize profit which is how we reached the current market of UE5 slop and DoA live service games.
There's even an entire YouTube channel dedicated to showing how many current "AAA" titles have regressed in graphical optimization and quality from older game engines due to the lack of proper development, despite the advancement in consumer hardware.
EA: hold my A key.
Other than cyberpunk, armored core, and elden ring I can't remember buying a new aaa game. Usually humble bundle keeps me busy enough.
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