Blurring lines: How AAA and indies can benefit each other | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

As an industry, we're currently caught in a perfect storm of rapidly-evolving technology and the spiraling demands of modern AAA games, with a huge number of developers working for years to meet the level of scale and fidelity audiences have grown to expect.

These sizable undertakings are now routinely measured in hundreds of millions of investor dollars, increasingly complex to resource for and develop, and rely on the promise of shifting a mountain of copies in order to turn a profit. The numbers are big, the margins are slim, and the risks are increasingly high.

Something has to give, clearly. Player appetite for sparkling next-gen AAA games isn't going anywhere – hey, I wanna play 'em too! – but the financial and human cost of putting out these monster-scale games is getting higher and higher, and becoming an unsustainable model.

I'm writing as someone who's operated for a long time at both ends of the spectrum. I've paid my rent through releasing independent games, I've freelanced on bigger and bigger projects for almost a decade, and now I work as an associate design director on some of the biggest AAA games. I've opened (and reluctantly shuttered) independent studios, before landing in an exciting AAA co-development shop. I've truly seen it all.

Therefore, my experience across the whole breadth of the games industry tells me precisely one thing: the lines are blurring between the extreme ends of the video game industry, and the gap is closing. Delineating between AAA, AA, and indie – generally based on project scale – is becoming less and less useful.

I say good! Let the lines blur a little. Let's forget about the silos, and cross the streams. Video game development is an ecosystem, not opposing camps. When one part of our system flourishes, so too does the rest, and we grow and evolve together.

It already works in one direction, small studios have benefited enormously from trickle-down technology and platforms engineered and maintained by the big