Thread 717801980

At what point did AAA become all about money?

>>717801980 (OP)
the moment consoles got built in wifi and stores (ps3/xbox 360)

>>717801980 (OP)
>libtard doesn't realize products are made primarily for profit

>>717801980 (OP)
mid 2010's was the end point. The beginning was unfortunately the early 2010's. Gaming peaked with AAA in the late 00's early 2010's.

>>717801980 (OP)
Since the very beginning

When you gave devs the ability to update games post launch

>>717801980 (OP)
When it became AAA

Any non-private corporation is literally illegally barred from giving a fuck about anything other than MAKE LINE GO UP FOREVER

you see the shoes
you see the money

>>717801980 (OP)
always was

>>717801980 (OP)
When EA did their online pass shit in the middle of 360/pS3 generation

This was the point of no return. There were earlier attempts of course (Horse Armor, etc) but Valve cashed in all its credibility to make the concept palatable to the mainstream audience and gave other companies a map to follow.

>>717801980 (OP)
dlc, mobile games, mtx, gacha.

>>717801980 (OP)
The moment AAA became a concept

>>717801980 (OP)
2006-2009ish. AKA when modern AAA became a thing

>>717801980 (OP)
They always were. There were two showstoppers, though.
1. Gamers weren't cattle. They started being cattle after they made Modern Warfare 2 a success after it shipped without dedicated servers.
2. They were hindered by:
2a. Physical media being the main format of distribution, which limited gargantuan sizes as we see them today. It is well known that games have those sizes to take away space from the competition in your hard drive, and to discourage any attempts at uninstalling, since most people wouldn't feel like downloading 250 GB again.
2b. Lack of adoption of Internet, which limited how much they could milk gamers.

>>717802869
Valve also invented the battlepass and destroyed physical media.

Always? They were just catering to a smaller more diehard audience before. Now it's the lowest common denominator of the whole world

>>717801980 (OP)
When they started using AAA to describe expensive to produce games, with Final Fantasy 7 being the first to get the title and was the most expensive game ever produced at the time.

>>717802869
Multiplayer skinhead goycattle does not reflect on actual video game enjoyers

>>717803179
Actual video game enjoyers aren't playing AAA though, which is what this thread is about.

>>717803179
Nobody's talking about actual video game enjoyers.

>>717802860
Absolutely. That was the corporate trial balloon-test the waters with online passes, see how many people bitch and still pay anyway. Once they realized gamers would grumble but still buy if the content was gated right, they went full ham. That gen was the start of monetization metastasizing into every aspect of game design. Look at where it got us-battle passes, mandatory online, deluxe editions with 3 different tiers, and $70 base price tags.

>>717801980 (OP)
the moment they realized they could get away with selling a half finished game, then release the rest of it disguised as DLC and patches

>>717801980 (OP)
The seventh generation i.e. the "HD" era. It became about selling a spectacle and marketing games as equivalent to movies.

>>717801980 (OP)
Consider the first generation of video games climaxed with Magnavox suing Atari, and the rampant clones that rose out of the early arcade market, I'd say from the beginning.

>>717801980 (OP)
When they saw how much money COD 4 made.
And then it got worse when they saw how much money gacha shit made.

>>717808401
>marketing games as equivalent to movies

>Don't watch the movie, play the game!
>© 1995, ORIGIN Systems, Inc.

>>717808513
cod and world of warcraft yeah. It was really easy to do the math and see how much money 12.5 million x 15$ makes in revenue a month

>>717801980 (OP)
Probably when GTA III or Vice City showed publishers how much money could be made.

>>717808401
>marketing games as equivalent to movies

>Don't watch the game, play the movie!
>© 1995, ORIGIN Systems, Inc.

>>717801980 (OP)
>At what point did AAA become all about money?
Since forever? Do you think companies invested a bunch of money into make a video game "for fun"? No, it was always to make a profit.

>>717801980 (OP)
Ever since shareholders became involved.

>>717801980 (OP)
Always atari was greedy as fuck putting out low effort ports and games they knew was garbage. EA has been pulling its shit since the 90's. It just got worse in the 2000's when most companies started going public and forced to listen to shareholders demands to maximize profits at the expense of everything else.

Truly the fastest way to turn what was a good company to shit is going public. It is 100% guaranteed that their products and services will become substantially worse and more expensive.
The modern stock market is a clown casino.

>>717801980 (OP)
in the worst videogame generation, aka the 7th gen

100 employees

>>717802976
>It is well known that games have those sizes to take away space from the competition in your hard drive
>hard drive
>I have assloads of games installed, and am never pressed for space
Maybe stop being poor.

>>717802101
>le falseflag psyop
kys

Google, Capstone.

>>717801980 (OP)
wii

The fact that people think anything in game dev behavior is new shows how many underage LARPers there are.
>Nintendo forced strict censorship rules, despite being the only game in town
>developers have always pushed graphics above all, and you didn't live in the bit wars with blast processing and the virtua processor and shit
>game developers have always shipped buggy, unfinished games like pretty much everything for the VCS, Ultima 9, and Daggerfall (which had a fucking literal virus in early discs)
>they tried to eliminate physical gaming early with picrel, which is functionally game pass for how they rotated games
>they were PROUD of bloat in games. They advertised how many megs Genesis and NeoGeo carts were. Phantasmagoria being 7 CDs was revolutionary, not gay.
>true moviegames came with CD, but there were a lot of cinematic-heavy games in the point and click adventure era
>expansion packs were always welcomed, not bitched about because "muh cut content DLC whatzit" bullshit
>they shipped malware without realizing it (daggerfall above, and others)
>they installed rootkits on your PC (StarForce and later versions of SecuROM)
This is all old shit, but /v/ doesn't play video games, so they don't know about it.
It's not an excuse for this type of behavior, but it's not new.

>>717801980 (OP)
>casually forgetting Capcom re-releasing street fighter 2 and the overwhelming amount of mega man games

>>717808653
hahaha that fucking lion looks so fucking stupid its dumb ass face should be a meme by now

>>717801980 (OP)
The 2000s. They decided to stick with consoles, despite them being increasingly left behind by affordable home computing.
You can also directly see them realizing this was a shit idea back in 2007-2009 due to all the games starting to shift increasingly towards multiplats, since the audience growth was smaller than expected.
By 2011 AAA completely stopped existing.
>>717802869
This was ultimately still just a response to Microsoft's dickwaving, since Microsoft was already trying to normalize paid updates and tiny asset packs for 15-30$.
>>717802980
Physical media is a meme. If the DRM is weak or non-existent, then it's much better than physical media with strong and invasive DRM.

>>717821107
For a game with a budget lower than my weekly grocery budget, they did a pretty good job with fursuits.

>>717801980 (OP)
Horse armor in '06 Oblivion was the first horseman of the gaming apocalypse. Overall, a changing corporate ecosystem, and a large enough critical mass of consumers that were hard to lose. A lot of the franchises that rake in huge profits are generally legacies from the 00's. Call of Duty, League of Legends, etc... There are exceptions of course like Fortnite, that's a contemporary money making juggernaut, and FFXIV. Microtransactions, lootboxes, premium shops, battlepasses, color sets, FOMO "premium" cosmetics, etc... The list goes on, are all archdemons of avarice. It's even easier nowadays with post-launch support to release an unfinished game, where as before a game would die if it was a buggy piece of shit on launch.

>>717803179
AAAs shoehorn paid cosmetics into singleplayer games now, even first person ones where you barely see them
used to be if there were any skins, they were unlockable bonuses