#aaa game development

In any sufficiently-large team, the likelihood is pretty good that there will be some non-trivial number of workers who are dissatisfied with the decisions of the leadership. It's quite normal for 5-10% of a studio's staff to choose to leave each year even without job cuts. This is one reason most game studios are always hiring senior devs, they need to backfill positions that open up through normal attrition. When a company is looking to lower costs gradually, they go on a hiring freeze and let enough workers eventually churn out to get to their target headcount.

I am also not discounting the claims of "Incompetent Leadership". It's entirely possible that the leadership of the Halo Infinite team made some really frustrating decisions along the way, and most of us game devs are very opinionated when it comes to development decisions. Sometimes the leadership makes a call and it's a bad one. I've seen it happen and had to support those bad decisions to the best of my ability. It's certainly a morale hit when that happens, but no can hit 100% with every shot forever.

I don't think Halo Infinite is particularly unique or different in their situation. It's a AAA game built by an enormous team that was generally positively reviewed, but clearly had its flaws. That puts Halo into the same bucket as most major AAA games - Call of Duty, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, and so on. I would actually be more surprised if there weren't any former devs from any of those games calling the team leadership incompetent. The real question isn't whether there was incompetence in the leadership (there probably was), but how much incompetence was there?

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Publishers try this from time to time to varying degrees of success. Here are a few examples of some smaller budget games from AAA studios using modern tools and the like:

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Far Cry: Blood Dragon

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light/Temple of Osiris

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, India, and Russia

Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

You've probably heard of some of these games. You may have even played some of them. Generally speaking, these games tend to get mediocre receptions at best. I suspect that a large part of that is the expectation level that players have going in - these games are built using the same tools and reusing assets from the big budget AAA titles, but don't have the sort of scope to create all new high quality assets so the players actively feel the content reuse and smaller scope of the smaller-budget title within a much larger-budget franchise.

This isn't to say we won't continue to try, but the player expectations on games in this style set us at a disadvantageous position from the start, and with good reason. When they come from our big budget game to our lower-budget offering, they can see and feel that change quite keenly. Instead, publishers generally get more value from having the smaller teams create high quality paid DLC content instead of stand-alone games in part because DLC doesn't have the kind of expectation and stigma associated with a stand-alone title built from reused tools and assets. Once we finish our DLC support of the title, the team can then transition over to the next full-sized AAA iteration of the next game in the franchise.

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There's always room in the market to make more AAA games. Players like having more games to choose from over less. The issue isn't that, it's that AAA games have really big scope. AAA games aren't AAA games if they don't have impressive visuals, significant amounts of content, depth and breadth of game systems, and so on. Just think about Call of Duty for a moment. Try writing down as many of its game features as you can think of. Think about the depth of its animation systems. Consider the number of game modes it has. How many maps did it ship with, including the single player campaign and the multiplayer maps? How many different weapons and items? How many cinematics were there? 

Every system, feature, and piece of content has to be built by somebody.  Building all of that is a lot of work - animators, riggers, character artists, environment artists, VFX artists, prop artists, technical artists, animation programmers, engine programmers, gameplay programmers, AI programmers, system designers, level designers, scripters, item designers, narrative designers, cinematic designers, and an army of managers, producers, and QA to grease the gears and keep everybody tasked out and the project continuing forward. We're talking about a team of at least a hundred developers working for at minimum two years. That necessitates a minimum budget in the tens of millions. For a franchise as huge as Call of Duty, you’re looking at thousands of developers.

Unless the small team has somehow discovered the secret of each team member somehow doing the work of ten experienced professionals in the same amount of time, this minimum scope requirement basically excludes small teams from participating unless you start stretching the definition of "small". It's theoretically possible if the dev team outsources huge amounts of its work to contractors and third party studios and does not count those contractors as "team members", then it might be considered "small". But generally speaking, AAA games are built by large teams because they require so much total aggregate work that they can't be built by small teams.

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We measure engagement for single player games the exact same way we do it for multiplayer games. You know how you have your PSN, XBL, or Steam account with the achievements and stuff? Do you notice how even single player games offer additional content like DLC and cosmetics? Single player games also communicate with our servers, they just do so more intermittently. It's how single player games get their live updates and new content.

Further, have you noticed that a large number of the most successful and beloved AAA single-player titles have already changed gears to be long-term open-world huge content affairs designed to be played for weeks or months? Just think about this list of extremely high-selling single player games and consider how many of them are also open world and/or long term engagement games:

GTA5

Skyrim

RDR2

Spider-Man

God of War

Witcher 3

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Ghosts of Tsushima

Cyberpunk 2077

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Breath of the Wild

Pokemon Sword/Shield

None of these games are "beat it, enjoy it, and move on". The common thread is enticing the typical player to continue playing these games for weeks or months, and they are beloved for doing so. This has been happening for years now. It is not a recent development at all. Engagement is still the goal whether it’s a single player title or a multiplayer title.

That said, short-form finish-and-forget single player game experiences are not going to die, but they are also not worth the modern AAA development cost - not when the development cost is so high and return on investment so low compared to high-engagement games like the above list. There exists some equilibrium point where a publisher and/or game studio can afford to build short form single player game experiences that are profitable for the development cost, but those are absolutely not at the AAA production level. Lowering the budget and the sales/revenue expectations are the main path to getting sustainable short-form single player games.

This also doesn’t mean that short form single player AAA games can’t exist either, but they are basically limited to situations where they don’t have to be profitable. This is typically limited to one kind of situation - where a console manufacturer or new platform wants a system seller, so they essentially subsidize the development cost of system-selling exclusive titles like Uncharted because their goal is more system sales than it is individual title profitability. As long as the exclusive title sells enough copies and doesn’t lose too much money, it’s a success. Aside from those kind of rare situations, we’re basically beholden to the realities of development costs. Low engagement games don’t earn as much as high engagement games. That fact dictates how much we developers can afford to spend to build and market games.

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In my experience, the thing that distinguishes an indie game vs a AAA game is the size of the game's team. The size of the dev team is a direct factor of the game’s budget because paying people to work is the majority of the cost of any game. If the game has a team size of over fifty devs or so, it's probably AAA because it probably cost over ten million dollars to make. If it has a team size of under twenty, it's probably what we’d consider “indie”. This compares enormous-budget "indie" projects like Star Citizen to similarly-budgeted games like GTA and Star Wars Battlefront rather than up against small budget titles like Shovel Knight or Crypt of the Necrodancer. Ultimately, the budget is the best level of comparison I’ve found since it tends to compare the actual resources needed to build the game.

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Firstly, I can’t agree with your premise. Mid-budget games still very much exist. Franchise games like Street Fighter V, EA's non-Madden non-FIFA sports franchises (NBA, MMA, PGA, NCAA), the annual WWE game, the non-mainline second-tier Mario Activity games (Party, Strikers, Golf, etc.), Just Dance, Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot, and so on are all examples of today's mid-budget games. Their budgets are significantly smaller than the really big titles like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil, FIFA, etc. but their overall market footprint is also smaller. They have established and reliable niches.

Secondly, I think that what you’ll see from the big publishers is that major franchises (COD, GTA, FIFA, Battlefield, RE, AC, etc.) will continue to get regular sequels on a regular basis until they are no longer consistently profitable or sustainable. In addition to that, because not all franchises can reliably run forever, AAA publishers will, on occasion, green light new IPs, popular licenses, and more experimental AAA titles in hopes of discovering/establishing a new franchise to grow or at least sustain their business. That is the baseline. There are other compounding factors, like how a new console hardware generation makes it easier to establish new IPs since players are more willing to try out new things at the start of a new console generation. The financial situation of the publishers also affect things - if the company is in financial trouble or the economy is bad, they will tighten belts and stick to what is safe. If the economy  and/or company is booming, they will be much more likely to green light more experimental games.

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The larger the team, the smaller the overall responsibility each developer becomes. This is largely due to the size and scope of the game and the limited ability for humans to keep things in their heads. Further, we’re usually divided by discipline. A texture artist would know a lot more about the game’s art assets than they do game system constraints. Gameplay programmers know about the game system rules, but not necessarily each individual quest. Leads have a broader view of things, but that comes at the cost of specificity. A lead designer will likely know how all of the major quest themes and zones work together, but will probably not know the idiosyncrasies of each individual quest.

The devs who know the most details about the game as a whole are actually the devs who interact with those details most often - QA. Since QA is all about examining and testing the game, they have the most insight on the ins and outs of the user-facing game. They might not know how it works under the hood, but they know every single facet of the game as players would interact with it. This should come as no surprise, they spend the majority of their time testing the game and seeing all of the content and systems in action. Compare this to, say, a technical artist who’s job is to create shaders for the game and there’s a stark difference in responsibilities. The tech artist would be the foremost expert on all shaders since she spends 40+ hours a week working on those shaders, but probably wouldn’t have nearly as much insight into the rest of the game.

The type of game matters a lot as well. For example, even though the team sizes for Uncharted 4 and Spider-Man (PS4) are within the same ballpark, it is much easier for a single dev to know all of the ins and outs of an Uncharted game than Spider-Man simply because of the scope of game content (linear narrative vs open world). The more content overall there is, the harder it becomes to know everything. Imagine trying to know everything about World of Warcraft, for example. That’s a staggering endeavor.

And yes - we devs (particularly specialists like the tech artist I mentioned above) are often unaware of the big things in the game happening outside of our individual work areas. Not because we’re not allowed to, but because we just don’t have the spare time. Design tends to be better informed on what’s going on than art or engineering, but I’ve personally been in a situation where I was completely unaware of major storyline changes that were happening because I was just too busy crunching on new combat system related content. 

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The answer to your question is “it depends on what you want to do”. AAA teams are usually full of specialists, because that’s the benefit of having a large team size. We want cinematic designers working on cinematics, combat designers working on combat, engine programmers working on the engine, VFX artists working on the VFX, and so on and so forth. Three respective specialists at modeling, coding, and designing content will typically produce higher quality work in aggregate than three all-rounders who can kind of do art, kind of write code, kind of create content. AAA games have huge production values, but that comes ta a cost - individual devs on the team often only work on a very small, specialized parts of the overall game.

Most AAA studios don’t hire for generalist roles unless they are one of two things - interns because they have no specialty yet, and senior generalist positions because they have so much experience that they can fill multiple roles. If you feel that either of those roles suits you, then those positions are what you should apply for. If you don’t feel comfortable with either of those roles, then your best bet is to decide what it is you want to specialize in and apply for that. 

This isn’t to say that breadth of skills aren’t useful - they absolutely are. Understanding the basics of software engineering is very useful for a designer, game design principles are helpful to an artist, and art skills are helpful for engineers under the right circumstances. However, if your goal is to work in AAA dev and you aren’t a fresh-faced intern or an experienced senior developer, your best bet is to specialize in something that you like doing, and then look for dev studios hiring for that role in particular.

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