What does “fail” even mean? I do have a great distaste for “AAA” titles roughly post-Skyrim, but AFAIK most AAA games succeed financially. Even Fallout76, widely regarded as a flop in terms of critical reception and player sentiment, performed reasonably well, even if not quite as well as previous Fallout titles.
there have been a pretty large number of live service disasters in recent memory. from CA’s Hyenas being so terrible that it got shelved after a playtest, to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (blech) crashing out within a year, to Concord getting pulled off the Sony store within months, to most recently Highguard lasting a mere 45 days… and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. Every single one of those games was a flop, with Concord famously losing Sony millions of dollars.
all this amidst a sea of studio layoffs happening year over year, I think it’s fair to say that the western AAA scene is currently floundering.
I don’t think it’s fair to lump live service games in with all AAA games, that’s its own very specific kind of failure and a lot easier to explain with greed and shit management at the helm.
Look at other recent AAA failures and it’s a very different story, though still ultimately failure.
What does “fail” even mean? I do have a great distaste for “AAA” titles roughly post-Skyrim, but AFAIK most AAA games succeed financially. Even Fallout76, widely regarded as a flop in terms of critical reception and player sentiment, performed reasonably well, even if not quite as well as previous Fallout titles.
there have been a pretty large number of live service disasters in recent memory. from CA’s Hyenas being so terrible that it got shelved after a playtest, to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (blech) crashing out within a year, to Concord getting pulled off the Sony store within months, to most recently Highguard lasting a mere 45 days… and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. Every single one of those games was a flop, with Concord famously losing Sony millions of dollars.
all this amidst a sea of studio layoffs happening year over year, I think it’s fair to say that the western AAA scene is currently floundering.
I don’t think it’s fair to lump live service games in with all AAA games, that’s its own very specific kind of failure and a lot easier to explain with greed and shit management at the helm.
Look at other recent AAA failures and it’s a very different story, though still ultimately failure.