AAA Game Development, Its Challenges and Ken Levine’s Thoughts

The gaming space is changing, or at least that’s what publishers keep telling us. AAA Game Development is high risk and high reward, recently a few companies have felt the sting of the risks. Kevin Levine the creator of Bioshock weighed in on the current AAA predicament. 

As shared by the folks over at PCGamer, Ken Levine recently sat down with the people from GamesIndustry.biz and shared some of his thoughts on the gaming industry. The AAA space is a hot topic at the moment, several companies are claiming that players have changed and that games are becoming more and more expensive in the pursuit of higher fidelity. 

To summarise Ken’s thoughts, there is a distinct push within development and publishing houses for improved graphics and better realism. Which is causing development costs to balloon. Those costs increase the pressures on developers and their games to be massive successes. Failure to do so can be catastrophic.

“Everything’s getting more expensive, especially in the big AAA space because they’re spending the most money. And when you’re spending all this money, naturally you have people concerned about [commercial viability].”

What’s more, Ken made the point that several of these modern AAA games attempt to play it safe. Perhaps trying to moderate the risk they undertake, however, when that occurs players can lose interest. Why buy a new game if it’s more of the same? 

“The problem with AAA is if you don’t innovate,” Levine argues, “especially in games, you start losing people because they’ve seen it before. And so we have potentially an overreliance, in some cases, on franchises … It is hard to do new things. Quite often even if you take those risks, sometimes you’re going to fall flat on your face. And the more expensive it gets the trickier it gets.”

So, the real question is: Who is the driving force behind the ever-growing push for higher fidelity? Publishers and developers claim it’s gamers but games like Balatro, Hollow Knight, Fortnite, PUBG, Animal Well, Dead Cells, Hades, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are all games that would be lacking by modern graphical standards. But somehow these games have been incredibly successful, almost as if it had little to do with increased fidelity and everything to do with innovation and refinement. Those games range from small to large and each has been a success in its own right.