Denis Dyack says AAA development is not fine

Speaking to Gamespot, Denis Dyack shared his frank opinion that the AAA video game industry isn't where it needs to be at the moment and that sweeping changes are coming to how games are made.

In making this assertion, Dyack compares the game industry today to the film industry in the 1920s. He cites grandiose productions of that era, such as Ben Hur or Cleopatra, when budgets went overboard and the big studio heads realized that the model was just not working.

I did some reading up on the film industry in the 1920s and it certainly was an interesting time. This era was basically the making of Hollywood, as the big name studios, movie stars, and movie palaces were on the rise. This era also saw the introduction of sound, which was a difficult transition for the industry, killing off the careers of many silent film stars and closing studios.

Dyack thinks the end result of this will not be the dissolution of game studios, but rather a change in the way they do business. He thinks big developers like EA, Konami, etc., will start making games like Precursor is doing now. They will be microstudios, which will grow and expand on their own. Dyack makes a distinction between these kinds of independent studios and internal studios, which he thinks are eventually going away.

I don't think Dyack's analogy holds quite well. Lavish productions were a thing in Hollywood far before and after this era, and one can argue they didn't quite go away the way he says they did. Similarly, his assertion is clearly one made in good faith, based on the path he and his coworkers have had from Silicon Knights to Precursor Games, but it certainly doesn't account for the success of big budget productions from 1st party studios, like Halo and The Last Of Us, that arguably work in the current system.

It may be possible that what Dyack says will be true for the other AAA devs who are visibly struggling right now, like EA and Konami, but the industry has more nuances than this, and I don't think there are any quick fixes to what's ailing the big developers at this tiime.

Source: Gamespot