In an interview with Gamespot, Denis Dyack, former Silicon Knights boss, stated that the AAA part of the game industry is not fine, comparing it to the movie industry in the early 1920s.
AAA is not fine. I think our industry now is in a position exactly where Hollywood was in the early ’20s – the golden era of films. Making movies like Cleopatra or Ben Hur where everyone was employed and they had thousands of staff. And they made fantastic movies; those were great movies; I still watch them today; they’re amazing. But studios looked at it and said, ‘We’re not making money. This is not working
He doesn’t think that big studios will disappear though, but they will have to adjust.
And then those [film] studios didn’t disappear; and it’s not to say that it’s going to be over for EA or any of the studios. They’re still going to be around. I don’t think anyone should kid themselves about that
But what did happen is they changed the way they worked and it went more towards the model that we have. Which I would call…a micro-studio or a very focused studio that grows and expands but are not employees of this one group, where it’s basically not internal development. It’s much more efficient that way. I think that’s where AAA may go, or at least game development can go.
Admittedly, this is already starting to happen. Many small studios have been created in the last year, especially after the Kickstarter boom, and it really does seem that the industry might be changing in this direction. Dyack is currently working at Precursor Games on Shadow of the Eternals, labeled the “Eternal Darkness spiritual successor” and currently on a Kickstarter campaign for crowdfunding.
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