Why don’t ‘AAA’ publishers put out more ‘B budget’ games?

destructoid.com:

Way back in the year 2008, my first ever front-page post for Destructoid asked if ultra-expensive, realistic-looking AAA games were where the industry was going. Flash forward 15 years later, and most of the enduring, popular new intellectual properties since then haven’t come AAA at all, and instead hail from what you might call “B budget” developers. Human Fall Flat, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Genshin Impact, Among Us, Fall Guys, Fortnite, Vampire Survivors, and Rocket League are just a few of the non-AAA games that went on to find big, sustained audiences since then.

The list of games like this to both launch well and continue to perform well is a lot longer than the list of new, multi-million-dollar, AAA franchises that achieve the same goals in a similar timeframe.

We don’t know how much all these “B budget” games cost, but we can guess that if Fortnite originally cost $300K to produce, the likes of Among Us were likely much less. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, one of the most played games of all time, started off as a fan mod fer cripes sake! And some of the few new AAA IPs that did manage to take off in the last decade largely found their footing thanks to goodwill built up from their developers’ work on less-than-AAA budgeted games. Elden Ring would have never taken off without diehard Souls fans, Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn’t be anywhere without the loyalty of fans of the original Witcher games, and so on.

From that perspective, the days of single-player, hyper-realistic games with long expensive cutscenes or other barriers to actual gameplay could be over. Some of the most well-known games in the world in 2023 aren’t trying to muscle attention away from casual shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores like Toys ‘R’ Us or