AAA games don’t have a production quality or even a development time problem. They have a far more existential one. A gameplay focus problem. These are games made with profit as first priority, not fun. They have confused engagement and addiction with gameplay quality. Live services poisoned their design language. This is why they want more, faster, at higher budgets. The fallacy is that more, faster, more graphically demanding, will magically make them all the money.
I want less games, with lower budgets, that take longer to make, have less graphic and animation fidelity, that pay better to their devs to do their job well. And I mean it.
The video games market is already overflowed for its size, yet somehow these companies are inflating their budgets like balloons instead and charging ever more and more for shittier games that somehow cost more to make. This isn’t sustainable. AI won’t fix any of these issues.
If you truly break it down, you’ll notice that AAA only actually makes two or three games, open world third person action RPG with parkour, open world shooter with looting and crafting, and live-service coop/competitive shooter with loot boxes. Every iteration of these same ideas are just varnishing the same bored gameplay concepts over and over with different coats of theming and slightly different stories. I only ever find original and stimulating gameplay on indie projects and the occasional small studio. They’re the only ones actually experimenting with innovative game design and varied concepts.