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.

Same thing happened with music.

It doesn't mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry's total profits than they used to.

More of people's disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more "indie" and cheaper versions of both. It's a good thing, honestly, for people's tastes to be more diversified and unique.

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.

I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.

EDIT: Added release year after @Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned age.

EDIT2: And country of origin, while I'm at it.

EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe "availability" would be more interesting than "release". World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.

Good! Fuck that generic sludge being pushed out by shit companies ran by sociopaths.

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.

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 bought like 4 games last week for under $20.

AAA Gaming needs to get with the socioeconomic times.

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.

PC players are always going to lead the trend because we have the most options. Microsoft and Sony are in a race to enshitify their ecosystems, while Nintendo is actively hostile towards it's customers and fans.

Meanwhile I'm playing through what was originally a Playstation exclusive title that I got on sale on Steam, and run on Linux.

I feel like this doesn't account for people who play older games. Like I'm currently playing the God of War reboot. That would count as playing something that's outside the current top 20, but still very-much AAA.