While big-budget, triple A games are becoming riskier and riskier due to skyrocketing development costs, could this trend be dying out soon? Assassin's Creed 3 creative director Alex Hutchinson thinks the latest installment to the franchise might be one of the last "Triple A dinosaurs."
In the latest issue of EDGE (via CVG), Hutchinson states that this level of production is dying out.
We're the last of the dinosaurs. We're still the monster triple-A game with very large teams [and] multiple studios helping out on different bits. There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out.
We really felt like this was a rare opportunity We had an experienced team, who had worked on the franchise for a while; we had the full backing of Ubisoft to make something huge; we had almost three years to do it, which is a rarity these days; the tech and the hardware platforms were both mature, which allowed us to start running instead of building base features; and the installed user base for all platforms is massive. Many of these factors are about to change, by choice of circumstance…so a lot of us truly believed this was a once in a career opportunity.
Just for reference, Assassin's Creed 3 has approximately 600 people working on it worldwide. I admit, I love triple A games, but what I don't like is when one of these games flops, a studio closure or mass layoffs are sure to follow. Here's to hoping next-gen brings a more stable budget to sales ratio.
Do you want less triple A games when next-gen rolls around or do you want more innovative and experimental games to proliferate?