Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.
And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!
Also Unreal Engine has 24/7 support from the engineers at epic through Unreal Development Network which costs quite a bit of money.
You’re right about all that.
Marketing and payroll are always the two biggest, and yes they can get to those numbers easily at AAA scale. AAA games are as big of productions as big budget movies these days. Hundreds of people involved. Graphics of that level are also extremely expensive and time consuming. Everything has to be motion captured, and the fidelity just takes a long time. Every single piece of trash on the ground has to have a full PBR material stack.
With graphics it’s kind of an exponential thing. The closer you get to absolute realism the more time it takes exponentially. That’s why so many indies are embracing retro graphics these days. It lets you spend a lot more time on the gameplay and content. AAAs are expected to look this good as a baseline, and that already pigeon holes a lot of design choices with the deadlines they’re working with. A truly innovative game that looks AAA quality would take more years to make than these studios are willing to devote to them.
And finally there’s the marketing. Mainstream casual gamers, which are who these companies are usually targeting, is the most expensive group to market to by a long shot. They can really only be reached by huge marketing campaigns on TV, social media, and physical signage. Those types of campaigns can easily get into the millions. They’re also probably spending a large amount on having influencers play the game on stream. The big guys I’m sure cost hundreds of thousands, though I have no idea the actual numbers.
Wait, didn’t EA had their in-house engine Frostbite? They botched Mass Effect Andromeda because they moved from UE to frostbite (not the only reason) .
Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.