I dunno about anyone else. I don’t wanna pay 100 for a half finished buggy as fuck game. Wait a year for bugs to maybe be fixed. Only to then pay another 50 to get the 3 dlc’s to make it the complete game. So I can finally buy the same game the for 67th time as cause it’s got a new skin or some shit this year. All while the dev calls it staying power.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.
I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.
I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.
Crazy. I want to play a game with staying power.
I want the game that I look at and go "When did I get 1000 hours on the game?" Because I keep coming back to it.
But this is where we agree. I want to play games that are fun.
Seasons, dailies, battle passes, etc aren't the things that I see as "staying power", that's microtransactions to a sunk cost fallacy.
Staying power to me is like Terraria, where I go in, build a world. Run around. Then wander off to something else... to wander back and play more Terraria.
I mostly agree with you, I feel like most games with staying power, are games that fundamentally will have you playing because you enjoy it.
I don't think I can write off seasons in multiplayer games though, some games do benefit from having larger changes that happen at the end of these seasons.
Battle passes can at best be fine(if they at least pay for the next one), I don't think any are particularly good as a metric for staying power, you still need/want to enjoy playing the game to progress the battle pass.
For me the best staying power is a game that has complexity and depth to mechanics. So I have something to improve on and chase(like lap times in sim racing)
With staying power I thought of games like Factorio.
Bought it once, played it for thousands of hours. A decade later or so it gets an extension which basically quintuples the content, am playing it thousands of hours more.
Factorio, rimworld, stardew valley, and project zomboid are the games I'm likely to be playing at any given time of year since they came out and every time there's an expansion or update.
These weren't expensive games to develop, I even played them for years when they weren't yet finished.
I'm still of the opinion that the best games are the ones that are developed in a way is friendly to the mod community.
Mods literally made MechWarrior mercenaries, Minecraft and GTA5 into Great games rather than merely good ones.
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.
They also just got lucky. No matter how you cut it, you could do everything right and still have a flop.
They were always going to receive at least some critical acclaim. This is a AA game from a well-known and respected publisher (Kepler Interactive), so it couldn't have gone entirely under the radar. They had a decent enough marketing budget and initially were included in the Microsoft Gamepass specifically to secure the studio's financial future in an uncertain market. The game was objectively good so with all that help, by release day there was no way that the game was going to be a complete dud à la Concord, and I recall Broche saying in interviews that profitability was essentially expected even though the stratospheric success was not.
Also they did get "unlucky" because the Oblivion remaster not-so-coincidentally shadow-dropped a couple days before E33's release. It's not much of a stretch to say that Microsoft knew the game was good and (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to drown it out.
If E33 was going to truly flop, it would have been earlier in the development process IMO. They could have relinquished voting shares to investors and been forced to "ubisoftify" the game into bland nothingness. Key creatives could have left. Going all-in on UE5 might have been a technical quagmire. But when the game went Gold, there was very little that could have impeded an at least modest amount of success.
Where the industry is truly unforgiving is single A games. There's too much to keep track and it's entirely possible for the "media" (journalists, youtubers, streamers, etc.) to miss a very good game. Single A doesn't pack enough of a punch to force enough eyeballs on trailers to get a critical mass of fan following, and in that context I fully agree that even a perfect game can still be a complete flop.
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.
Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?
and rest of the budget on ads
This is what happens when you chase trends instead of just having a solid idea.
Newsflash: You aren't going to turn random horror IP into the next Dead By Daylight. DBD is already Dead By Daylight
You aren't going to make a multi-player online shooter that is the next Fortnite. Fortnite is already Fortnite.
Actually now that I've said that aloud it seems like the problem is that they're trying to be the next big multi-player experience when they should be focused on a solid single player
Fortnite is a great example. It started as a co-op tower defence game. Then they saw the success of PUBG and borrowed their game mechanic (and some developers too I think).
Then epic coined it in selling skins.
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I firmly believe we are entering the dark ages of AAA games, with the cost to make and GenAI they are going to be shit.
Support indie devs.
Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation's system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.
I don't know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you're not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.
Fighting your tool is how you figure how what you actually want to make to a large degree. Limitations is how you are pushed to actually decide what is actually worth it to you. Otherwise you just create endless slop with got bits mixed in cause your never challenged.
Sure after a long enough time you can still get there but it takes so much longer if you have no challenge.
I work in embedded my whole life so I'm no stranger of fighting over scraps of resources and spending days trying to squeeze in something that doesn't fit. It made me better at fighting this specific hardware limitations, and now instead of spending 10 times more time on making something that takes no time at all on a capable hardware, I spend only 5 times more.
I don't know if for creative work it does something, but for programming it's like chopping wood with one hand behind your back. Sure you can do it, sure you can get better at it, sure it forces you to adjust your ways, but it doesn't make the wood better chopped, it just makes you slower and more prone to mistakes for no reason
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That's because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!
I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur's Gate 3.
Pretty good tbh.
BG3 is technically an indie game if you go by the literal definition of the term!
About half of every triple A game is actually indie by the strict definition. Look at world of Warcraft for example. But the strict definition it's indie :P
Self published is a bad metric to go by and means basically nothing. There's a good reason the term has lost basically all meaningful definition and is just a vibes based measuring stick nowadays.
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Hey, remember when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, was pretty excellent, mostly everyone loved it, and then all the AAA studios started whining that it was an unrealistic standard to be held to?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I remember that.
I really wish society had class conciousness because if we did. That would have been enough to never ever support another AAA dev again
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We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.
If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!
This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.
For the last little while now, I've been finding that my most played games have been on my old 360 that I decided to plug in again, and my old old PS2 collection that I ripped and loaded to an emulator because the old hardware broke a long time ago.
Third place is "new to me" games that I finally buy when they go on a good sale years after they were "new" (is. RDR2 and Cyberpunk)
I haven't bought a new AAA title in years on console because I can't justify the cost.
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Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.
But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.
It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.
Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.
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Who would have thought that the long years of constantly pushing hard for monetization/profits from leadership while not giving a fuck about making a good game would end up eroding their reputation and choking their golden eggs goose. They released too many AAAs that were really AA$$.
It's okay, we can just not play AAA games.
Games are ok, meaning there are good ones. Trying to release more and more to get more and more money - that's going to fail, yup
Also, look out the window: we have so much more to spend time and resources on
How about you stop releasing unfinished live service shit and put out something that is genuinely fun to play and not just another money trap for unsupervised children.
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So copy what Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Baldur's Gate did and make good replayable games.
Also stop listening to the C suite and start listening to the gamers.
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They aren't bad, they just aren't doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is... EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won't leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.
It's no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony's been doing well because the games they're publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that's only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.
Everything's turned into a live-service game because they're the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.
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