What's driving this trend? The enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it's death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over just drives me further into the arms of indie developers. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.

I'd pay the $70 or even $100 for a AAA title...if it released complete, relatively bug-free, and didn't try to soak me with microtransactions and subscriptions.

But that's not what's they're selling.

to me, aaa = mark of inferior quality, barring some exceptions

You know what this is called? A healthy and competitive market.

Yeah, I get there's layoffs, but that's mainly at AAA studios and is a symptom of a previously unhealthy, highly consolidated market. The job losses suck, but now diversity and competition is coming back, and that's generally a good thing for consumers.

Like when BG3 came out and other devs whined about being unable to deliver such a game? Maybe they shouldn’t be considered AAA studios if all they do is waste their budget.

Do they still make AAA games anymore? They take so long to develop and lots of them get cancelled at the very end or a month after release.

I'm too lazy to find my 3 year old comment but it went something like "AAA games are about as AAA as the mortgage bonds were in 2007".

The era of the AAA gold standard is long gone. You no longer need a million dollar studio bankrolled by a big name publisher/console to make a groundbreaking AAA game.

Most if not all of those studios have been cost cutting for the past decade to maximize profit which is how we reached the current market of UE5 slop and DoA live service games.

There's even an entire YouTube channel dedicated to showing how many current "AAA" titles have regressed in graphical optimization and quality from older game engines due to the lack of proper development, despite the advancement in consumer hardware.

Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.

And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.

The industry only has themselves to blame for this.

They don't seem to understand not every game needs to be a red dead.

It all costs too much now, and my backlog will hold me over until I die of old age. I'm at the age now where I don't care about the new stuff.

I'd love to play AAA games- Crimson Desert and Spider-Man 2 are on my wishlist. But now that they've been optimized for frame generation, my 3070 can't play them to my standard.

If I'm going to stare at a pixelated mess, I'd rather it be curated by an indie artist than technical difficulties from DLSS compression

The only AAA game that I have legitimately enjoyed and played more than once is Red Dead Redemption II. Other AAA games are okay, but they feel a bit hollow and lack the immersion that RDR2 has. Then again, RDR2 was showing off a bit with what the industry can do.

Good, nearly all AAA games provide is pretty graphics and little to no substance. Those that do are the very rare exclusions. Like CyberPunk2077, its story was good, graphics if you could run them good, but the gameplay was hollow until a lot of reworking.

The last 3 games I bought were from indie devs. Road to Vostok being the last one purely based on the fact I wanted to support the guy and look forward to its continued development.