Call of Duty is Not a Crime

In response to Mason's post (as well as the discussion in class on Tuesday) I would like to provide some balance to this conversation. I'm not going to say that you should only play Call of Duty and avoid all games from Indie developers.  I just want to provide you with the fundamental reason why AAA games are they way they typically and why AAA games are necessary for the video game industry to continue to thrive and grow. I can answer both questions with one word: "money".

Triple-A games invest lots of money into developing, advertising, and publishing a video game.  When this much money is on hand, you have to play it safe to keep investors on board.  This is why all the top notch games appear to have the same story line with different characters. It works and it will continue to work.  Don't demonize these developers as capitalist pigs quite yet, some companies in turn use their funds from their top notch games to produce games with a bit riskier of a set-up.  This isn't always the case, but don't judge a company by their fore-running product.  Would you bet $20 on 1:20 odds? Maybe, if you felt adventurous. Would you bet your entire life's savings on the same odds? Probably not.

Triple-A games are kinda vital to the industry as well. By kinda, I mean there wouldn't be any video games if there were these games.  Triple-A games constitute the majority of video game sales. It is rare, but not impossible, that an indie game will gross near as much as a Triple-A game.  So take away Triple-A games and what do you have? With less money flowing through the industry, small and medium sized companies are going to have a much harder time finding investors to launch their projects.  Less people will be willing to purchase new consoles. Console development will shutdown and pretty much the whole video game industry will stall to a sad plateau.  I know that sounds like a slippery slope fallacy, but its not.  Its just how economics works.

Battlefield 4. Just look at those HD textures. Mmmmmm, right?

In short AAA games are like the fast-food of video games. Are they high quality? Depends on how you define quality. They certainly aren't good for you in the long run but they do certainly taste good and you can get away with having some a couple times a week. Take them away and there's gonna be a lot of people that go hungry for lunch. In fact, there are going to be quite a bit of people that starve to death.

I wouldn't want to live in a world without bacon cheeseburgers, would you?