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Comment by NeverEnough | Hacker News Reader

there isn't any reason to suspect that a small company doing one thing better will walk all over AAA, that's hyperbole. AAA's culture is good enough and their other large advantages give them their market share.

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What are the advantages AAA studios have? There are no patents or secret know-hows, there is only reputation they have built themselves. If you have a superior process why cannot you do the same? For example, a small company id Software started developing games in C when everyone else had been doing Assembler and pretty soon not just established itself as a AAA studio but effected everyone else to switch to C as well. This is how a superior process works in the games industry.

> What are the advantages AAA studios have?

Shitloads of money. Massive institutional knowledge of public relations and marketing. Direct lines to Sony and Microsoft. Every kind of benefit of economy of scale you could want.

You seem to be confusing publishers and studios. If you are so good with development practices you can sign the same contract other AAA studios do and get the same access to the benefits of economy of scale you attributed to studios.

Um. Publishers own the majority of these studios (or they self-publish, generally after a spinoff or long working relationship under a publisher). That's why those advantages apply to them. Otherwise, how exactly do you propose to "sign the same contract" without having money in the first place to build the infrastructure and already having spent a shitload of money to be in a position to be considered for it?

It's not like the idea of a barrier to entry is a new concept.

Some studios are owned by publishers, some are not. The statement I argued was made about every AAA studio, BTW. But if you cannot compete with a publisher owned studio then go after ones that are independant like Epic or Bungie or Insomniac or Arena or Telltale or Riot etc. etc. If you want how it's done look no further than Respawn. The studio was just founded in 2010 , signed a publishing contract without long relationship with the publisher and infrastructure, shipped a game already. It is how almost every AAA studio started (there are few studios that had been seeded by publishers, but as far as I know, none if them exist now).

It's pure meritocracy here, if you are good then getting a publishing deal is not a problem.

So you have a list of studios that all either got big when the barriers to entry were much, much lower than they are now (Insomniac did not spend a hundred million dollars on Spyro the frigging Dragon) or were founded by people with significant industry contacts and kicked off with direct lines to Sony and Microsoft and to publishers right in hand because of who they are? Are you sure you're proving what you think you're proving?

The core of an "AAA studio" is a big fat wallet. It's essentially definitional. You're not actually saying anything with respect to them in any of your posts.

So who were Riot's founders? Who were Media Molecule founders? Did the barriers for entry suddenly rise between 2008 and now? From what I see it's much easier to publish a game even for consoles. There are tons of indies doing that regularly. In 2008 you had to have a secured office and 20K in cache to get a devkit, today you can get a loaner at home if you cannot manage 2K price.

AAA do get a lot of money but it's the effect of them making games that sell well. There are dozens of startups in SF that cannot make even mobile games with their piles of cash and hundreds people. Money do not make you a AAA studio.

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