AAA’S Decline

Triple-A studios are responsible for some of the most iconic and memorable titles in gaming, such as Call of Duty for Activision, Far Cry, and Assasin’s Creed for Ubisoft. These games brought joy to billions of people across the world, but for some reason the gaming community today seems to be moving away from triple AAA studios and towards AA or, “indie” studios. 

It is almost impossible to find any self-respecting gamer today who plays or even doesn’t actively complain about AAA corporations and their games. This is a monumental shift from the 2010s when gamers were buying up every new COD (Call of Duty) or AC (Assassin’s Creed) as if their lives depended on it. In contrast to previous years, the 2024 Game of the Year award has a significant chance of going to an indie game, such as Helldivers 2 or Palworld. 

But why are these games so successful in spite of their resources and former titles? And why is AAA so hated?

Well, the gaming industry has always been lucrative, and when that much money is involved there’s always going to be a point when games are viewed less for their cultural value, but rather their value as investments. A gaming studio is considered AAA when its game/s reaches what gamers refer to as “blockbuster” status, this success raises the studio’s funding and allows the next game to have more developers work on it, and have improved graphics and animations as well as new features and innovation. However, when a game brings in so much money, the next one is destined to be more popular and have high expectations, making it a great investment. This attracts business moguls in the industry such as Microsoft or Sony, who offer larger manpower and funding towards the creation of the next game, in exchange for equity of the game and a change in management, making these major corporations have the final say on decisions regarding the game, not the developers whose vision made it possible. 

In the 2010s, people understood that when their favorite games were acquired by giga-corporations such as Nintendo or Epic Games it meant the sequels would have a much higher budget, likely meaning improved graphics (the visuals), animations, and performance while simultaneously maintaining the soul of what made the games special. However, for games released in 2024 – such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – most gamers notice that it costs $70 in exchange for a game that has no graphical improvements from Modern Warfare 2 and an extended campaign which reuses assets from older games and has a story that is seemingly written by ChatGPT. This is really disappointing to most fans considering that this game is essentially a remake of the original Modern Warfare series from 2007, meaning that Activision does not bear the burden of new character design, backstory creation, or story development. All they had to do was create a solid campaign with new assets, setings, and fun gameplay, which should be rather simple with a budget of 1 BILLION dollars! Call of Duty: MW3 is the worst rated Call of Duty of all time, and if you choose to play it, it becomes obvious that the original 1 billion dollar budget did not go into making any significant improvements. 

This routine change of leadership is arguably the root cause of the decline that AAA gaming has seen over the last few years. Raising game prices and lowering quality has caused the gaming community to turn against the giga-corporations which hold their favorite legacy titles hostage. 

However there is some hope for the gamers who feel that they have been starved of good games for the last few years, indie games are starting to make a comeback.

In the last 10 months, during the worst year of AAA’s decline, multiple indie games that have been years in the making, have been released to a shocking degree of success.

Indie games:

One of the most notable success stories in indie gaming this year has been Arrowhead Studios’ Helldivers 2.

Helldivers 2 was released on February 8th, 2024 as a cooperative third-person shooter game in which players work together to secure planetary objectives in order to serve the interests of humanity’s Super Earth. This was a game that was developed by a team of just over 100 developers over the course of 7 years, quite feeble in comparison to most triple-A games with thousands of developers working on them at times. And yet Helldivers did something astounding; it sold 12 million copies in only 3 months. 

But how did a game made by a small indie studio not only outsell Call of Duty but also need to upgrade its server capacity to accommodate up to 460 thousand active players?

Well, Helldivers 2’s unprecedented success is referred to as a cultural phenomenon, but to many, it is explainable by simply playing the game. For one thing, Helldivers 2 is graphically stunning, with vibrant environments and thrilling explosions, as well as satisfying gunplay where projectiles can take the limbs or parts off of the robots or giant bugs you are combating. For another, it is full of innovative features and interactions that add a certain life to the game that seems to be missing from most triple AAA games, which many attribute to the developers actually being gamers instead of corporate executives. The game also isn’t designed around draining your wallet, as it doesn’t direct you to any form of paid battle pass or have any content inaccessible through simply playing the game, a stark contrast to the Call of Duty formula in which you pay half the price of Helldivers 2 to look like Nicky Minaj. 

It’s very possible that Helldivers is only successful not because of its masterful graphics, gunplay, or mechanics, but the idea it presents that a game can be made to be fun and not to make money, in a time when the latter had seemingly dissolved all decency in the gaming industry.

Several indie games were released within the last 9 months with comparable success to Helldivers, and interestingly, during the time of writing this article, Warhammer 40k: Space Marines 2 and Black Myth: Wukong, two AAA games, were released and hailed as masterpieces. And on top of that among the most anticipated games for 2025 are GTA 6 and Ghost of Yotei. 

So are triple-A games all bad? Of course not, but there is an important pattern among those that are hated today. Games like Black Myth: Wukong and Space Marines 2 were both developed over the course of 4-6 years and anticipated games such as GTA or Ghost of Yotei are both sequels of blockbuster games that were developed over 3-6 years. GTA 6 has been under development since 2014, and Helldivers started development in 2017. Most AAA games that have failed in the past few years have been developed in the span of 1-2 years, which is arguably too little time to create a genuinely innovative game that isn’t simply a bureaucratic formula of adding guns to an environment with a certain storyline, riddled with paid content plugged into graphics engines that advance every year.

In conclusion, do not spend $70-$100 on a game like the new Call of Duty simply because it’s Call of Duty; a franchise being good in 2015 does not translate to being good in 2025. Before you invest in a game, consider if the price you are paying is going towards an experience you will enjoy, which is far more likely if the game was made with love and time rather than large funding.

Works Cited

Breslin, Richard Lee. “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s failure blamed on Modern Warfare 2’s budget.” GAMINGbible, 20 November 2023, https://www.gamingbible.com/news/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3-failure-budget-240373-20231120. Accessed 15 October 2024.

Bussell, Cat. “Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2 – what to know before playing.” TechRadar, 9 September 2024, https://www.techradar.com/news/warhammer-40000-space-marine-2-everything-we-know. Accessed 15 October 2024.

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_3. Accessed 15 October 2024.

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023 video game).” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_III_(2023_video_game). Accessed 15 October 2024.

“Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® III on Steam.” Steam, https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/2519060/. Accessed 15 October 2024.

Gupta, Anuj. “How much is Modern Warfare 3? MW3 cost by edition.” ONE Esports, 12 April 2024, https://www.oneesports.gg/call-of-duty/how-much-is-modern-warfare-3-mw3/. Accessed 15 October 2024.

“MW3 budget??? : r/ModernWarfareIII.” Reddit, 24 February 2024, https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernWarfareIII/comments/1az531z/mw3_budget/. Accessed 15 October 2024.

Sawyer, Will. “How long is Space Marine 2?” GamesRadar, 23 September 2024, https://www.gamesradar.com/games/third-person-shooter/space-marine-2-how-long-length-time-to-beat/. Accessed 15 October 2024.

Takahashi, Dean. “How Space Marine 2 stays authentic to the Warhammer 40K fanbase | Tim Willits interview.” VentureBeat, 4 September 2024, https://venturebeat.com/games/how-space-marine-2-stays-authentic-to-the-warhammer-40k-fanbase-tim-willits-interview/. Accessed 15 October 2024.

“Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Space_Marine_2. Accessed 15 October 2024.