this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Whole industry has been saying that for a while. It's unsustainable and to a large extend large studios have fallen to the sunk cost fallacy since they are often on 5-10 years development cycles (!), with very rigid schedules (since they rotate development teams).
Now the big studios are going bankrupt/getting sold to MBS while Expedition 33 is doing tricks on their grave (at least relatively, in absolute numbers their sales numbers aren't high with normies who only play CoD and FIFA).
I think the big studios lost reality with what the gaming market is. It's a hit based business, you need a level of volume that they've been backing off on. It's not that the expedition 33 devs were so much better, they just happened to be the lucky ones that put out a solid game that got traction.
E33 did not just get lucky. They used a completely different formula.
~10M€ development cycle with 30 full-time devs + outsourcing is one order of magnitude smaller than what the big studios consider to be the "standard". AA vs AAA.
30-40 hours of main story and no open world keeps the development resources focused and gameplay/story loops tight in a way that can't be achieved in an "expansive" open world without unfathomable resource expenditure. But modern games from major studios literally cannot get greenlit if "open world" is not in the feature list because execs see it as "standard".
Smaller budget also means that they did not pour 50 %+ of their capital into marketing, which allows mores resources to be put into the game and lowers the barrier to profitability. That's an understated issue; AAA games can't afford to fail, which is why they all end up bland design-by-committee.
Those parts above were not risks Sandfall took, they were actually basic risk mitigation for an indie studio that big studios aren't doing based on the overstatement that bigger = more chances for "THE hit game" = better.
Where E33 took some risks was with the strong creative vision and willingness to ignore genre trends and focus group feedback (going turn-based and not lowering the difficulty to "baby's first video game"). But for the cost of 1 Concord a big studio could afford to make 10 E33s at which point it's really not a matter of "luck" for at least one to be (very) good. E33 would have been profitable with 1 million units sold, it did not even have to be that good.
The industry has absolutely noticed that E33 wiped the floor with their sorry asses, and I predict that in ~5 years we'll see many more AAs popping up.
There's plenty of games that you could say the same about that didn't get the traction. It's still a hit based industry. It's not a knock against the game, it's a reality of the industry.