10 Reasons 2025 Is Make Or Break For Triple-A Games
5. AAA Has Reached Peak Unsustainability
There's never been a stronger argument that AAA games in their current form are largely unsustainable, with developers often spending up to a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on new blockbuster games which ends up flopping commercially.
As a result of this and an overestimation of market growth during the pandemic, industry layoffs are presently at an all-time high.
Even just a month into 2025, we've already seen layoffs at a number of AAA developers, including Rocksteady, Splash Damage, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and BioWare, only further strengthening the argument that the existing AAA model desperately needs to be reworked.
Given that it's a common sentiment that graphical fidelity has plateaued in recent years, there's a strong argument to be made that new AAA fare needs to stop chasing cutting edge visuals altogether, instead focusing their attention on crafting distinctive art styles.
There's certainly no easy catch-all solution for fixing The AAA Problem, but reframing what AAA even means, and reigning in budgets and production scopes to a level that actually makes financial sense, would be a good start. The current paradigm simply cannot continue.