Gaming
Games
Here's why 2018 was the year of the high-budget blockbuster game
Why were 2018’s AAA games so successful, and what could this mean for the gaming industry moving forward?
In retrospect, 2018 – the Year of the Blockbuster – began on June 12, 2017. That was the day of Sony's E3 2017 press conference, when we saw the PS4-exclusive Spider-Man trailer for the first time. In the following days, as the video proliferated over social media, it racked up over 70 million views.
The trailer was stunning and freewheeling – the ultimate in superhero wish fulfillment. Every thread of Spidey's uniform, every spark from each crumbling structure, every reaction to getting punched and kicked, was minutely rendered.
In fact, it was too good. It wasn't long before people started doubting what they had seen. Because it's one thing to show this footage in a closed environment, off a computer or some theoretical build, and quite another to play this footage on an actual Playstation 4 console, proving that what people are seeing is real, and not pre-rendered footage. One of the earliest examples of this "pre-rendered" marketing trick was the trailer for Call of Duty 2, a game that was released as an Xbox 360 launch title in 2005. Because players had little concept of what the new console was capable of, they were susceptible to being misled.
The Spider-Man speculation reached its height shortly before the game's release, when fans began comparing the early footage of the game to later footage, and noticed that some puddles on the ground were now missing. This was conflated to advance the idea of a graphical downgrade, and it forced In Insomniac to clarify, in a terse tweet, that, "“It’s just a change in the puddle size, there’s no downgrade at all.”
The only thing that would finally settle the debate would be to see the game in action. And once it launched, the controversy over graphics largely died down – not only because the solid gameplay rendered the conversation moot, but also because the game delivered on the graphics it had been promising the entire time.
The Spider-Man release is an encapsulation of how 2018 went for high-budget, AAA games; with fans proving resistant to any sort of change or promised innovation. They were skeptical of big promises. And despite this, the developers managed to deliver on most, if not all counts.
God of War changed from a hack-and-slash game to an action RPG. Fans, after initially showing resistance, lauded the game as one of the best of the year. Red Dead Redemption 2 was met with trepidation by fans who feared that the single player campaign would suffer due to: 1. The success of GTA Online and its microtransactions, and 2: The priority of launching Red Dead Online.
Instead, Rockstar created one of the most memorable single player campaigns in recent memory: a sprawling epic Western that will take most players 70+ hours to wade through.
How did these blockbuster studios hit such an impossibly high bar? Part of it is timing. We’re deep into the PS4 and Xbox One's life cycles, which means the developers have a better concept of what the consoles are, and are not, capable of. They are no longer restrained by the necessity of cross-generational play, of creating a game that can be experienced on both the PS4 and the power-inferior PS3.
Part of it is cost-benefit analysis; gaming studios are running a playbook that Hollywood perfected with the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes. Because those creative properties are so well-known and so popular, film producers were willing to put billions of dollars on the line to make billions more. The same is true for game producers; Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Call of Duty, Black Ops 4, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate are all reboots, remakes, or sequels. No one put up the money for these games without being reassured that the return would be proportionally massive.
And lastly, the studios were able to create these next-level games through the labour – the endless, long hours and unseen sacrifice – that went into them. These studios use their manpower, and their bankroll, to create the granular level of detail that we gawk over, that smaller studios, and especially independent developers, cannot. There are few "creative solutions" to this disparity; to create a massive world, you must put thousands of man hours into it.
And thus, 2018 was the also year that the gaming industry wrestled with the ethical cost of creating AAA games. How are thousands of workers compensated? What are the unsaid pressures of working "crunch?" And to what extent do we as players care about and advocate for the people who play test and design these games? What do development cycles look like when they’re more regulated and consistent? And what happens when the bubble bursts – when a studio risks hundreds of millions of dollars and sees no return on that investment?
These are difficult questions. But they’ll continue to define and evolve the gaming industry moving forward. Perhaps 2019 will be the Resurrection of the Indies. But make no mistake: the blueprint for multi-billion dollar financial success is there. The question becomes whether we can and should use that blueprint. If so, are there compromises to be made? And if not, is there another business model that should take its place?
