AAA games may never die, but ex-WoW veteran predicts a rise in AA games like his new mini MMO: "Most AAA devs who have joined our team really do not want to go back"

gamesradar.com:

Former World of Warcraft class and systems design lead Chris Kaleiki, who's now heading up Notorious Studios and working on "mini MMO" Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, predicts a rise in AA games that sit somewhere in between indie and AAA.

GamesRadar+ had the chance to sit down with Kaleiki for a pretty wide-ranging conversation about Legacy, the tricky process of trying to fit it into any one genre box, and the middle category of games that are big enough in scope and budget to exceed what qualifies as indie but not quite big enough to be considered AAA either. In case there was any doubt, that's exactly where Keleiki puts Legacy, and it's a space where he expects to see significant growth in the future.

"If you think about games as a market, we always talk about indie and AAA," he says. "Indie is incredibly saturated. There's so many indie games. Most of the games that come out on Steam are essentially indies, right? AAA, there's actually not that many games that come out. There's certainly more, growing over time since I was a kid, but there's not that many because they're incredibly expensive. They've become more expensive to develop, more complicated, more complex, development times take a lot longer. So you've been seeing this real stretch between indie and AAA."

In Kaleiki's view, there's an "underserved" market for games that are "more substantial than indie" but aren't necessarily going to "make billions of dollars," or at least not overnight. He also predicts a world where all three categories of games co-exist. There will always be demand for low-budget indies as well as big-budget AAA tentpole releases, he acknowledges, but he's hoping Legacy sits comfortably between the two in a burgeoning new market space.

"I compare Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and some of FromSoft's games to the modern-day Colosseum," he says. "It's really thrilling as a game dev to work on the Colosseum. Holy crap, what a story that is. So that will keep continuing. I don't think that's going