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Comment by mushufasa | Hacker News Reader

That's a trend with oligopolies in the entertainment industry. The same reasoning propels movie studios to remake the same franchise movies every year. Costs for AAA are large already -- why take risks?

IMO this is a sign video games are reaching the stage of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," where popular franchises become part of the culture with life of their own.

As a consumer, I'd rather the large players invest in new creative ideas. Create new franchises and more diverse ideas.

But I'm not their audience for video games nor AAA movies...

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> Costs for AAA are large already -- why take risks?

You say that, but many of the games that Activision is focusing on, were new projects not too long ago.

Specifically, Hearthstone and Overwatch, are relatively new, when you compare them to the real old projects, like World of Warcraft, and the Diablo francise.

Them only focusing on these projects means that they have effectively given up. They will stagnate, with no new projects. Just merely rehashes of the same old thing that they have been doing for years.

Giving up on growth doesn't seem like a great strategy to me...

I would much rather have new properties as well. It's unfortunate that economic incentives don't align to make that more common. Although kick starter has helped a bit. Maybe new properties could be like startups and have lottery style exit strategies... I don't just thinking out loud. Great comment.

With the availability of Unity and other engines funded by AAA companies, that's enabled startups to pursue new game concepts using AAA efforts as a foundation. That's an ideal model. AAA games are both the standard bearer and the entry level. It's up to gamers to pursue and support a community built on top of that for more experimental games.

Wherever there is attention, someone will monetize it.

We don't need so many increasingly massive AAA games. All the best games we remember from the 90s were made by much smaller teams than work on big budget games today.

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