How Close Can Indies Get To AAA Games?

If there were then there had to be naysayers too who would love to point out that the AAAs would just make use of it too.

Joking aside though was there even a mentality of "AAA" and everything else back then?

 

It was probably more about access to the market back then. Before the internet became a thing and anyone would reasonably easily get shareware out to an audience, you had to have access to publishers. So it isn't so much that there wasn't AAA, but that there wasn't an indie to compare it to. Unless you count all the games we typed into our Atari 800s from the pages of 3-2-1 Contact magazine. They still had to approve your game to publish it of course, but the standards were far lower than getting a game into a store.

 

Yes there was! for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Play_the_Game would come close to it, all things considered...

 

I suppose MicroProse would be another. I played a ton of their games back in the 80s. It was founded by little known developer named Sid Meier. ;-)

 

You mean in the era when AAA meant moving out of your parent's basement?

 

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

Back then, sales of actual hardware were small and userbase was small, so it was indeed technically possible for a single person to become AAA, given an advance by publishers and so forth. Often contracted out were loading screens, music etc...

This was "high economic risk, with high levels of sales required to obtain profitability", of the day. It seems difficult to apply now since, well, inflation on a massive scale, however that was AAA in that period. Most likely we would be discussing arcade machines

And it's pretty HARD for anyone here to beat an arcade machine, even an old one. Or even Elite on 8 bits. Again, forget the visuals, most won't even get the code complete.

It's not bad what I'm advocating. I'm trying to avoid people being depressed or developing mental illnesses that can arise from obsessions. You don't need to be creating anything near AAA to create something totally stunning.

 

I'd like to add in my 2 cents as a composer of 10+ years with this...

With music, you can do even BETTER than a AAA team can do using samples. It all depends on your composer. SFX and AMBSFX are the same way, just purchase them and they'll be as good as AAA quality.

Mechanically, I know it depends on the team, but mechanically (programming) just don't compete with AAA titles when you're indie....but of course it depends, because you have your poor Micheal Jordan programmers in the rough also. It's just depressing when it comes to how much less time you'll end up having...

Graphically, probably not, just because people are so insanely good and $$$ so often means quality visually (Los Angeles/San Francisco studios can literally just go to deviantart and get top quality painters over there or something), and that's the place in where creating a polished beautiful product is the toughest challenge. I suggest going artsy with it, like doing low poly or watercolor or using lighting and color fx to compensate.

But of course, among us poor people, again you have your Michael Jordans buried underground...Usually creating vids on youtube and livestreams with like 10 hits.

 

I've had a fair few goes at massive RPG games, this is usually how it ends up:

- Plan Story.. Check.!
- Base design documents.. Check.!
- Basic combat development / UI / Information system.. Check.!
- Generate massive terrain via world machine.. Check.!
- Procedural placement algorithm for SpeedTree and terrain.. Check!.
- Create two base characters with a boat load of morphs, animations, AI derivative profiles.. Check.!
- Loosely hook it all up so I can wander about.
- Import thousands of meshes that took years to create.. Check.!
- Slap all my stuff on the terrain AND...

Watch the engine fall to pieces......... Double check.!

Here's the issue, there isn't an engine available to indies out the box that can deal with a decent sized game.. So first thing is you need bare metal access..

I mean from the get go I might get 20FPS on what's essentially a high end workstation machine and somehow I have to make it 50X larger before it ever enters the realm of massive budget releases. On top of that then I somehow have to get it working on mid range PC's or even console..

It's easy to find articles on big game dev's who spend a month extracting 0.5MS from the CPU and GPU pipeline.

This is before you even start to have a game, it takes knowledge of multiple different systems and methodologies which takes many years to learn. That's even before we start to consider what tools you'll need and you'll need a lot of engine integrated systems that are up to the job and relevant to your project.

Let's say you create a game like TLOU, static lightmapping and static occlusion may work absolutely fine.. In a game like W3 they are useless.

You'd be suprised at the amount of time it can take you to do silly little things, like properly defining inverse kinematics with a ragdoll subsytem / collision so you can push people out the way for example or using similar systems to define camera position for dialogue and NPC interaction. Sure it's not specifically difficult in itself, but tweaking it so it looks right takes time and the whole rinse / repeat add near infinity.

Speaking of dialogue, just sitting there having the UI pop in and out for all the gum flapping is a full time job.. Some of these games have 30K+ lines of speech, ask yourself this.. How long will it take you to go through every single audio file just to make sure it's right and set up blend shapes for every single target in engine? I mean c'mon..

Unity is just simply not up to the task, even one of my "smaller" adventures had Unity's editor literally grinding to a solid halt.. The Phsyx system, Umbra, Enlighten I mean just about every single part of it would need to be upgraded / re-iterated / removed and the whole entire structure and toolset would need some serious work. Which we don't have access to most of it so we can't do it (even if I did I'd be lost in 5 minutes anyway)..

Firstly Unity is capable (generally with the help of the asset store) of making many types of games of varying size and complexity.

Secondly there's no incentive for Unity to try and tackle fringe cases like mid to massive sized openworld games, I mean Unity is already the most popular engine, I've NEVER seen an indie pull it off (or come close for that matter), big projects with massive budgets use either Unreal (like Squenix for FF7 etc.) or in house engines and the fact Unreal exists which is dedicated to bigger projects with a massive gain on toolsets and features.

It's a lot of work for next to no return, so why? Why would they even bother?

Y'know this has been discussed a fair few times, all I can say is give it a go and see where you get.. If you have to ask you don't understand what's ahead of you. Which is fine, at some point you will.!

 

I really don't think you can say "cartoon-ish" isn't AAA. That would throw out almost every game Nintendo has ever made, and I don't think anyone would debate that they create "AAA" titles. Realistic graphics certainly don't guarantee a good game, nor will they ever. It's just a lateral, stylistic choice.

That being said, I'm a bit of reductionist, so I don't really use "indie" and "AAA" the same way most do. The terms basically just mean "independent" and "backed by a corporation with a lot of funding" and whether you're independent or wealthy has little bearing on whether you create a quality title.

All that matters to me is if the game is enjoyable, and if it is, then for how long. I've played many AAA games that are absolutely trash/milquetoast, and likewise I've played some independent (and sometimes independent + early access) games that are far superior to anything a AAA could, or would, produce.

Take Project Zomboid as an example. It's by far the most detailed zombie survival game I've ever played. No AAA can match the gameplay. Sure, a AAA can put a bunch of FMV/cinematics in their games, but as far as the games themselves I tend to get bored of them rather quickly. Dwarf Fortress is another (more extreme) example of this. No AAA would dare try to create something like Dwarf Fortress, and it's one of the most detailed, involved simulation games ever created, highly enjoyable for hundreds of hours.

I could also easily fork off into how (in my opinion) nobody should refer to themselves as "just an indie" because that would be like if you were starting a restaurant and told your customers "hey, don't be too rough or expect too much, we just microwave macaroni and cheese here." You sell yourself short, set expectations for yourself too low when you should be shooting high. I think everyone should have a bit more of a "fake it until you make it" mindset and less of a "look how mysterious and starving of an artist I am" mindset. If you write you're a writer, if you create games then you're a game developer. I look at AAA as more of a lateral alternative than a gold standard to be achieved. To me, AAA just means cinematics and quicktime events that cost a lot of money, and a TV commercial.

It should come as no surprise that the reason we see more disjointed stuff come from small developers is because, on the whole, they more often don't know what they're doing. Heck, a year ago I was stupid about some things that have prompted a code rewrite that I'm doing as we speak, and I've been at it in Unity for many years now.

If you have people who are geniuses at planning game systems and knows how to implement them already in code, and you find an artist who "gets it" and so forth, you can create something slick and detailed like a AAA. You may not be able to brute force as much handmade content, but that's about it. And before you feel sorry for yourself about that, don't feel too bad - AAAs get lazy too. This is why so many of them in the past ~5 years or so follow the formula of "pick up glowy things in the open world, go into a talent tree to buy passive skills" to create content via grinding.

 

Hey, long time no see. Takes a AAA thread to get you posting again, eh? ^_^
I sense a slight decrease in your optimism for big projects, are you working on something smaller currently?

 

I wouldn't say I've lost optimism, I enjoy it therefore I do. Although I'm under no illusion it's a near impossible task with the amount of resources that are available to me. Which I'm fine with, sure it would be nice to get some money and create an even bigger more intricate sequel but when it comes down to brass taxes I do it for fun and time is somewhat irrelevant.

It's really that age old question, what do you want out of it? If the plan is a commercial release on a large project where deadlines are necessary then you really need money and staff (lots of both).

You also gotta ask yourself why? AAA often fail to get it right, never mind an indie trying to release the next Witcher.. Quality is in most cases preferable to quantity so personally if I wanted to release a commercial single player game, I'd avoid what I'm doing.. Stick within the boundaries of what the engine can achieve without major changes and go for something like TLOU..

Don't get me wrong, it's still a massive undertaking but it's at least somewhat plausible.

 

More on the AAA pcg fronts:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024029/-Ghost-Recon-Wildlands-Terrain
'Ghost Recon Wildlands': Terrain Tools and Technology

Pcg prototype proof: 4 artists 1gfx engineer (world machine, houdini, substance) 16km²

Most stuff are procedural but baked (even sound, river, road, village and building), artist only control rules, not direct placement of most stuff, and they had a bot to play the game automatically and report bugs and performances issues, but rules gave them more control in final. Still need to fill that world with detailed gameplay that follow strong design lol, and the final production is 140 material with 11 biomes to have the density they wanted. But they had a relatively small team in final (14+ people for the level and art). But it's a shooter with little complex npc and narrative too.

It's notable that horizon is runtime and also place some gameplay elements (not the quests).

 

I agree. My opinion? If you're creating a story game, make it episodic, create a game that's like 2 hours long (instead of the AAA 40+ or whatever).

If someone is creating a story based game that uses rpg text boxes upon text boxes with scrolling text...seems like you've gotta have like a timeline, an event manager or a custom scripting language. That alone could take 1000+ hours to set up. Then you've actually gotta MAKE the damn game.

To me, everyone's really just as talented as one another, it's all a matter of how many hours you've got. In junior high I can remember practicing the guitar more hours than my friends, getting really good, but then getting lazy and they got more hours in and they got better than me back. That's all talent is, as depressing as it is, hours and hours of our youth, when we could be outdoors hiking or something we're sacrificing our lives for making entertainment for kids in either white walls and cubicles, or our mom or dad's house, hoping that we get something back for making that sacrifice.

I was just reading this interesting article about how Tower of Guns took 3 years and just under 4000 hours to develop. That's not the most complex shooter in the universe, but that's the reality, an indie game can just take that much time.

The main problem I see is that if a AAA studio has 30 employees working full time and it takes them 3 years to make a game. In theory, if full time hours a year without vacation yield 2080 hours...

30 people:

62,400 hours a year to work with, a total of 187,200 hours.

Against like 3 people (in theory .....yeah...):

6,240 hours a year to work with, a total of 18,720 hours. (and of course people are gonna say 'well, work an unhealthy 60 hour work week, but that's only gonna tack on a total of like 22,000+ hours or so, so it's not worth it to waste your health and well-being for that, at least that's the conclusion I've come to, I don't know...)

This always depresses me, as these California AAA studios also so often are seeking out the absolute most skilled, talented, best people they can find, and they have all of the artists they need in the bay area and los angeles to work with. The only thing indie game devs have got going for them is the pre-made tools and plugins that do so much for them, repeating graphics/animations, making really impactful stories and/or characters, hitting people in the feels with really beautiful masterful music, and of course to get as good as one can get in programming to try to make insanely addictive [simple] gameplay.

The brilliance of Unity is that you have so many resources at the asset store. Unity seems really like an indie devs dream come true. I would personally just save up and buy what's needed from the store.

The whole point of indie in the first place is less money = less hours, but more control, where as in AAA unless you're that rich dude in charge it's more resources, more social, can hopefully lead to better days career wise but less control.

For me, personally, the hardest part with years of this is the social isolation you end up going through (if you've been stupid like I've been and worked, again those unhealthy 50 or even 60+ hours a week). There's a ton more to be said about how you balance yourself mentally and emotionally when you're insane enough as so many are to work thousands and thousands of hours on something, and then you show people around you and they scratch their heads. It's all for the kids, though, I don't know.

AAA established studios, in my humble opinion, are just gonna have better looking games usually in this way, and more well put together games so often.....but again like it's been said it doesn't mean Fable is just this brilliant game compared to Undertale or something. I played Fable 2 and the gameplay was so simple and easy, even though it was so solid in other areas (visually and programatically) it just doesn't do as good a job as gripping you and addicting you like Undertale does, both in writing, visuals and in gameplay.

And that has got to be the upside, we're talking about a game that has like 1/10th the time spent on it. So stop trying to make AAA games, you have to win against the establishment as a rogue.

 

Then we'll point out to them that the studios work unhealthy work weeks too when they inevitably fall behind. One common problem with these sorts of threads about indies trying to reason out advantages that bring them ahead of AAA is that the AAA studios are often already making use of them.

 

I was just listening to this youtube vid on how Conker's Bad Fur Day had like a 10 man team (which is damn impressive), and they said they were working 15 hours a day with 1 day off, if even that, so yeah it's kind of tough to compete heh.

 

Y'know I think this is a topic to be discussed over a few beers (and a cheeky whiskey) because it can get rather long winded.

End of the day, just make games and see where it takes you.. If it's too much, do something else.

 

These things are kind of silly with semantics and definitions. Whatever you want to call it. The way studios have traditionally looked at costs and levels of effort have changed really dramatically.

I would bet that a solo, armed with maybe a budget of a few thousand dollars (not including time) could produce a game that more traditionally (ie: a few years ago) would have cost a few million.

I'm not saying I can do it, I'm not saying you can do it, but there are guys who absolutely can.

That said, I think the problem is that this doesn't scale. Although a very, very small effort can reach what would have cost a couple million, you can't just multiply everything by 10 and hit AAA levels.

To reach the same scale, quality and attention to detail of a top end $20,000,000 game of 2012 for example, you would need a very significant budget. Once you start adding more people, there are just costs and inefficiencies that add up exponentially.

Basically:
- Micro Team can produce a game that would have traditionally cost a million or two for nearly nothing.
- Micro Team*10 cannot produce a game that would have traditionally cost tens of millions. This team would still need millions to match a top end $20m project.

So like, at the very bottom end - you can perhaps reach 500x efficiency of a half decade ago. But as you scale up 10 times, you probably can't reach 10x the efficiency. There's a huge drop off.

 

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024081/Animating-Dauntless-Slaying-AAA-Animation
Animating 'Dauntless': Slaying AAA Animation on the Indie Scale

 

That talk really rubs me the wrong way. The guy says 'The "easy" choice would have been to choose realism [...]' instead of the stylized look they've gone for because of photoscans, mocap bla bla bla, and then proceeds to talk about how their game is focused on battleing fantasy creatures, that would take much much longer to model and texture at modern realistic AAA quality, than their stylized assets did.

My key takeaways from that talk were:
step 1: assemble your team entirely from very experienced AAA veterans
step 2: buy a 36k$+ mocap setup and permanently set it up in your big office space
step 3: team up with a second dev team, because apparently the workload was still too much to do it just with your team

How is any of this applicable to "indies"?

Imho the most interesting thing in the talk really is glossed over super briefly at the start: they just wanted to eliminate the overhead that comes with working in large teams, to be more agile in their decisionmaking.

 

I skipped it when I saw mention of "mocap". Does it have any insightful tips like Guilty Gear Xrd talk had?
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022031/GuiltyGearXrd-s-Art-Style-The

 

I haven't seen the GGX talk and I'm not an animation expert so I probably shouldn't be the one summing it up. Lot's of it was specific to working with mocap, like how to make biped mocap data work for creatures with different skeletal structure, or how to animate tails with dynamics simulation. The thing that sounded most practical and applicable to your work was to make "block outs" of animations by just keying a handful of poses per animation and using that for intense playtesting. The idea is that the animation just needs to visualize different states of the AI in combat and get the timing of events right, so that meaningful playtesting can be done and then only the animations that are really needed and will work in the context of gameplay will actually be executed to production quality by incremantally iterating over them and adding more keys. That seemed like good advice in general but I have a hard time imagining that no animator ever thought of that. I'd imagine something like that should be common practice in many places.

 

GGX talk provides a lot of tricks related to making 3d animation look 2d. It is very thorough. They also explain their texturing method which is aimed at making non-pixelated lines on character (regardless of texture resolution). It is worth checking out - but only if you're interested in non-photorealistic-rendering.

So, mocap-oriented. Got it.

 

It actually has some good info in it, like rough blocking early and quickly so animation doesn't become a bottleneck and shared, retartargetable rigs (we used this technique extensively). And partnering with a team is becoming more of thing than in than in the past (as opposed to straight outsourcing) It can be a good solution for distributed/small teams without having the traditional risks and inconsistency of outsourcing on a contract by contract basis. And some other good stuff in there too. Nothing super groundbreaking, but a combination of things to build an efficient animation pipeline.

But it also illustrates how the usage of the term "indie" is nearly meaningless these days. Indie doesn't mean broke or lacking of knowledge, but often people seem to think it does.

 

I got the impression from the talk that they came up with a good solution to tighten up the loop between the implementation and iteration. You're right, on various projects I've been on, there is usually some sort of early temp tracks or blocking to get early ground work, but often you end up replacing on each loop. And if there is post processing, or rig changes, or event syncing that is done after, locators or procedural/ik stuff, it gets messy, you dread the "hey, I updated the animation!" You end up with the Hulk using a normal human size rig because of rig tweak from the animators. (which incidentally, actually looks adorable) If they smoothed that work flow, that is pretty cool.

 

I provided the link as is after removing whatever comment they had, but they are 40+ team with external contractor, there is more people on this than the ghost recon game above! SO yeah indies is highly relative, I wanted to see reaction first! Since I'm not an animator, the bit about using key to rough out animation was very very insightful to me.

 

I'm using this process for my pipeline - although I am the pipeline.
It helps to get animated content into builds faster and allows for more iteration time, however initially the block out animations created were TOO rough and did not sufficiently represent final animations, so I had to add to the rough blocking animations enough to represent what final animations will eventually be.
Iteration is the key in this. Up front time iterating on how rough/blocky animations can be and still be accurate was a requirement. And I will still have to return to the animations to refine, and iterate on the passes until they are complete.
The benefit in doing so is stated by zombie - avoiding the animation bottleneck, to allow other areas to be developed and to be able to test often with rough animation content.
The game will eventually be feature complete with all characters/creatures in game with rough animations, allowing for iteration and polish on other features while I'm polishing animations.

 

I think one of the most ingenious things that's probably been mentioned is just that you can go to the asset store and buy fully completed games and put in your own graphics and everything, saving thousands upon thousands of hours of labor, so then like with any game creation system it becomes the graphics that you need to compete with.

In my opinion one should aim for "interesting" to get out of the good : bad paradigm. That is, make it artsy in some way. I'm using 2d pixel on 3d personally. Games thank god are 10 times better a medium than movies to work with when you're indie because people are more excepting of artsy styles. Completed demos are extremely extremely easy to advertise, especially if you have access to like a university or something.

 

Reading through the posts I think one must define indie better.
It seems like some define indie based on available budget.
Others based on number of people or scope or experience.

Would very experienced AAA engineer, artists, producer. Still be considered indie if they were a small team or small budget?

Or is indie only inexperienced developers artists etc. With the limited resources.

I would say an inexperienced team even with unlimited budget would still have a hard time making a AAA quality game in a realistic time frame.
While an experienced small team would have a better chance but that the time required would be longer.

I think it really comes down to some of the man hour calculations mentioned earlier.
In its simplest form everything has a man hour cost. More experienced people can produce at specific level faster so the man hour cost goes down. This true for art or engineering.
And then the more people have you can shorten the real time required to complete those man hours.

This fits the same with pcg and mocap. Mocap can create a lot of animation fast but also requires a lot of cleanup after the capture. Just like I think pcg would need to get closer to hand crafted. Sure both can produce lots of content quickly at reasonable levels but is it something someone could not produce manually given enough time? I don't think so.

So to me AAA is really about the level of detail, scale, features and scope of a project and the being able to execute that plan in a reasonable time frame. This includes tools, software, experience which can help to lessen the man hours which is ultimately money.

I didnt mention quality because I think quality is a little subjective. Good quality is not limited by the size of the production. Both small and big productions can have high quality or even bad.

So I think in the simplest terms any team should be able to produce a AAA title given the right resources, time money.
But realistically no not everyone can because of this same requirements.

And the engine would only effect those man hour calculations not prohibit AAA.

 

Disclaimer: I only read the title & skimmed OP.

This is a silly question.

For the technical aspect, Indies can easily far surpass anything AAA regurgitates. The simplicity of most game systems & lack of innovation in AAA games makes it easy to surpass. All you need is a little bit of programming know-how.

For everything else, like art, Indies can do absolutely everything AAA can, if they have the talent.

EXCEPT marketing. Indies do not have multi-million dollar marketing budgets. Fortunately, marketing is entirely separate to the actual game.

Everything else can be accomplished in one way or another. It entirely depends on how much experience you have. If you have the talent to create the world's best art, you can compete.

It doesn't even necessarily have to take longer either. I have seen gamedevs make in a week, something that millions of $'s took years to make as they researched. (Compare successful indies who made their game quickly compared to studios who work for years only to scrap a project bc it isnt good enough).

Everything is relative to the talent & circumstance, except for marketing budget. And the latter is not always neccessary.

 

We should stop using terms like "indie" and "aaa" and just deal with dollar figures, experience and time.

Very large scale, high detail areas take both huge amounts of experience and huge amounts of time. You can reduce the time/experience/money requirements by reducing either detail or scale.

Basically it looks like this:

TimeAvailable = Money
TimeRequired = (Detail ^ Scale) / Experience

The kind of immense scale and immense detail that go into some higher end AAA titles (uncharted, witcher) cannot be matched without tons of money and tons of experience. Period.

There's a lot of work that takes vast amounts of attention, a lot of this work cannot be automated and simply requires man hours.

"Indies" can get massive press coverage just like anything else. Even with no marketing budget you can still get press if you work the system right. There are hundreds of games that became gaming media darlings that did not do so because of marketing budget.

 

Just an example...

Let's imagine for a moment that MoCap itself is 100% free, you have the studio, you have an animator to do cleanup who works for free, etc.

Work that still needs to be done:

• You still need to actually find the actors that specialize in physical movement.
• You need to do some kind of interview process to figure out which actors to hire.
• You need to manage the email exchanges while you work out the scheduling.
• You need to figure out times that work for you, the actor, animator, etc.

More supporting work:

• You need to figure out what animations are needed (seriously this can be a lot of work)
• You need to figure out how to judge if an animation is good or bad.
• You need to weed out the 'junk' animations and select the ones you want
• You need to figure out an organizational system to find the specific animations needed

Error Handling:

• You need to deal with mistakes or missing work.
• Rescheduling actors or finding replacements to fill missed items.
• Deciding if an inadequate animation should be recaptured or hand modified.
• Deciding when to make compromises (and which compromises to make)

Once you have enough animations that are required, you really need a dedicated person to these problems. Once the scale gets larger (or the desired level of detail increases) - you may need specialists who are dedicated to handling subsets of these problems.

This is not even "real work" this is just supporting/managing crap.

 

I think you forgot about team size here.

Money is fuel of the project.
The company working on it is the engine eating through that fuel. (Which depends on team size, etc).
And the road to the goal is amount of work that needs to be done.

The gotcha is that this is a total amount of work, and not work hours.

 

Money gets converted to man hours, those can be parallel or in sequence. Obviously that equation is mega simplified.

The real trick is understanding that there's an exponential relationship between detail/polish and scale. I really don't think a lot of people fully understand how the time and effort required explodes out as scale or detail/polish increases. Seems like people really think it's all linear.

 

Since a lot of people don't do gamedev, that's correct.

What I don't understand is why people occasionally appear to put "AAA" on some sort of pedestal on those forums, and ebcause of this discussion sometimes get derailed in a less useful direcion.

With all that in mind:

Yes. Indie stands for "independent" meaning someone operating without being funded by a publisher. However, AAA stands for high budget, and is not necessarily an opposite of indie

 

To me AAA means simply big budget. By this definition indies will never come close to AAA games because they by definition are working with far smaller budgets. If indies manage to get to today's AAA execution level than the REAL AAA will be already far ahead doing something much more advanced... and costly.

 

Polish/detail is really only the last 10% But as everyone knows (or should know) the last 10% takes 90% of the time.

 

IMHO the one thing that exploded in recent years to make AAA difficult to access to indie is Facial animation and the required acting, voice acting, and in engine cinematic engine.

While there is a lot of promising R&D to make facial cheaper (which don't solve the needed input of quality actor), nothing is ready yet (or has been absorbed by big company like face shift).

 

Sometimes in Unity the middle bit takes 90% of the time too

 

Nnooooooo!!!

Historically indies can meet and surpass AAAs. I like @frosted definition of AAA.
A better question is at what point do indies become AAA? Is it budget, earnings, publishing, number of employees?
Is Epic indie?

 

Sometimes design takes 50% of time too.

So that is 90+90+50= 230% for final release?

 

They don't. A game starts life as a AAA, that is the definition of AAA title. In some very rare cases a very successful smaller title may, in later releases/versions/sequels may become a AAA title, but that is so rare it's not worth considering as a practical option.

 

Just look at mass effect andromeda and you would know that number actually check up, all the waste and cut features surely make that number go beyond 100%

 

That's precisely what "AAA" is supposed to represent though. Having the highest development and marketing budgets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

Using specific numbers in my opinion isn't very effective because they change over the years. A AAA budget from a decade ago is considerably different from a modern AAA budget. Just saying "highest development and marketing budget" should be more than enough but some people like to pretend they can do "AAA" as an indie too.

 

Honestly, rating a game as AAA or Indie is nonsensicle semantics. Pointless baloney.

The company is to be rated. Are they Indie to AAA? A, AA, etc. That can be measured by finances, employee count, etc.

In that regard, it is a useful term but still useless for the game. I have seen huge studios release "LOL WUT?" levels of art, and Indie studios release art that surpasses most AAA.

Also remember that alot of big budget studios try for realism, which is harder to do. So an indie doing a cartoon game could have significantly higher quality than a game which fails at realism bc the tech just isnt there or the polish was lacking.

ex. Assassins Creed 3 is a great example. The lip sync fails in the intro scene - the first few minutes you run the game. So laughable. Then compare the user input climbing walls & running in AC3 with SuperMeatBoy. The latter dominates. The former is a freakin hundred million dollar joke.

So the correct answer: There is nothing worthwhile an Indie cant do that a AAA can, in relation to individual games. So again, a silly & useless question.

 

Sounds great on paper until you start considering the outliers. What happens when you have a large studio creating a game that is very clearly on a shoestring budget? Or when you have a tiny studio that developed a game on a similar budget only for it to massively oversucceed?

Having the highest development and marketing budget doesn't necessarily mean you're good at mananging it.

I'm going to respond to both of these sections of your post at the same time because the answer is basically the same for them. Nothing prevents an indie developer from creating an asset that is on par or surpasses an asset from a AAA develop.

What an indie developer cannot do is create the sheer quantity of assets that are expected for a AAA game. Definitely not within the normal time frame for a AAA game. You don't simply have a few dozen high quality assets for a AAA game. You have thousands if not tens of thousands.

 

If we want to get technical then AAA and Indie can be the same thing, since "Indie" literally means without a publisher. The entire concept of "indie" is outdated and the concept of AAA is largely outdated as well, as more and more "non traditional" studios pop up, many of which can have very deep pockets or can put together vast amounts of funding during production.

- When people are talking about "AAA" on this forum, they literally mean "best of breed console title".
- Others probably mean "game from well established long term publisher with deep pockets".

For example, my guess is that @zombiegorilla would consider Hearthstone to be AAA since it's a Blizzard game, and Blizzard is a well established and well funded gaming company. This despite the fact that Hearthstone's production costs probably didn't break $5m as the team wasn't even a dedicated 15 members until very near release. It wasn't until around 2015 that their team grew to 50+. So arguably, HS became AAA 2 years after release...errr... reflexively to many, AAA probably means "traditional long term studio" which is usually but not always associated with huge budgets.

All of this is kind of silly. All of these classifications are really kind of out dated with non-traditional funding, digital distribution, IAP and 'software as a service' models, etc. You can barely categorize "release" anymore with stuff like Early Access, and huge open betas that last years.

That's kind of a shame because a real discussion of what's possible for how much time and money is a really interesting subject.

 

Hearthstone started development in 2008. Hearthstone had a team between 12 and 15 members up until 2015 when they expanded the team. Previous discussions estimated the cost of a game developer at about $100,000 (includes all costs associated with that developer).

Seven years of development multiplied by twelve team members multiplied by $100,000 is $8.4 million. Working off of the Horizon Zero Dawn development budget of $47 million as being a normal AAA budget I'm going to call Hearthstone an indie game. That said keep in mind HDZ's number comes from a list of "most expensive video games to develop".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearthstone_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop (Horizon Zero Dawn figure from here)

 

Full development didn't ramp up the team to 12-15 until spring 2012.
http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Design_and_development_of_Hearthstone

For a good portion half the team was also running a different project (SC2 expansion). It's very likely that the cost of HS was less than $5m up to beta.

Even if it pushes $8m, like, is that really AAA in 2015? The major blockbuster games are pushing $100,000,000 budgets regularly now days. I would argue that in terms of actual production, a game like HS was much closer to a $2-3m indie game than it is to a $100m mega production.

 

It isn't in my opinion. That's why I called it indie.

By the way I would love to see a reference for this. Most of my research was reporting double digit millions with anything over that being mostly an exception rather than the rule.

http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649

 

All I know is that my all time favorite game is Mount and Blade, which was an honest to god indie title before "indie games" were a thing. They made a lot of sacrifices and allowed a lot of rough edges to make it through production in order to allow for more detail and scope where it counted most.

That game started out as an absolutely tiny effort (arguably solo). This was also way before stuff like the Asset Store, and the entire mini industry supporting indie dev popped up.

Good decisions, skill, and some luck can lead to great things.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop - part depends on if marketing is 'budget' or not. Although yes, the word "regularly" was probably misplaced