Holy moly that was tl. I did r, but I regretted it. The big problem with this article is cherrypicking examples. Even though it contains a list of 120 game com

Holy moly that was tl. I did r, but I regretted it. The big problem with this article is cherrypicking examples. Even though it contains a list of 120 game companies (yes, tl) that folded between 2006 and 2012, it doesn't set them in context. How many companies are there of which these are a subset? How does this failure rate compare with historical norms? How big are these companies really? Other lists of large budgets, large layoffs, large numbers of units required to break even make similar non-points. The larger point is that game art is expensive. Will Wright was making the same point with Spore, I would say. The art was so expensive he outsourced it to the cheapest laborers he could find, players. It turned out the tools were better than the game itself; nevertheless I think you have to feel he was on to something. There is not going to be an asset apocalypse in a world with a Minecraft mod API (Real Soon Now), the Steam Workshops, and procedural generation. Unless you mean the kind of disaster that kills off dinosaurs. Is AAA gaming unsustainable? Of course it depends on what you mean by AAA. But I think the big studios have an eye on their wallet at all times. They make big games because at the end of the day they are profitable on the average. There is just a wide variance. If a smaller studio has all its money on black on its AAA title, you might wish them luck, but not be completely surprised when their success is raked away. The AAA titles that succeed do so through solid gameplay. That is unlikely to change no matter how shiny they become.