As I’ve noted on the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast many a time, one of the biggest issues with the gaming industry right now is the focus on trying to “make the best games to make the most money” versus just “trying to make the best games that people will like.” Whether it’s EA, Microsoft/Xbox, Sony, Ubisoft, etc., it’s frustrating that they haven’t learned their lessons, especially after great games like Baldur’s Gate 3 proved that going a different path can lead to incredible success.
The team at Larian Studios has never been afraid to voice their thoughts on the gaming industry as a whole, and that pattern has now continued via a Twitter interaction.
The team’s publishing director, Michael “Cromwelp” Douse, was talking about a recently released AAA game and praising how the team made it stand out from previous entries, when a person replied, noting that it was a “lost art” to create a game that focuses on something and then does it very well. That was all that Douse needed to go off, and what he said was lovely.
Much of the industry has been aggressively data-driven for so long that over generations of talent the ability (insututitionally and/or intellectually) to lead with your gut has become a lost art. This is why AAA is becoming perversely fascinated by indie. Indie doesn’t have the data; must rely on gut. Sometimes you see games that are doing a very specific thing in AAA (following their gut, their heart) but it’s still confined to the institutional practise of parsing it all through available data.”
Douse continued to call out the data because it couldn’t predict certain things on the success or failure spectrum, and that would then force AAA teams to be more “safe” in their creations versus being bold, until the cycle repeats:
Hence: genres disappear, until indies create breakout hits and introduce new data: perverse attachment, etc etc.
There are numerous indie titles that prove that going with your heart/gut is the right way to go. Hades, Undertale, Deltarune, Hollow Knight, R.E.P.O., Date Everything, Peak, and even Baldur’s Gate 3 all point to this. Those games had impact and sold a lot of copies because they dared to be different while also ensuring that they were quality and fun. AAA developers/publishers need to relearn this way of thinking…and soon.
