Same thing happened with music.

It doesn't mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry's total profits than they used to.

More of people's disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more "indie" and cheaper versions of both. It's a good thing, honestly, for people's tastes to be more diversified and unique.

Good! Fuck that generic sludge being pushed out by shit companies ran by sociopaths.

I bought like 4 games last week for under $20.

AAA Gaming needs to get with the socioeconomic times.

Like when BG3 came out and other devs whined about being unable to deliver such a game? Maybe they shouldn’t be considered AAA studios if all they do is waste their budget.

What's driving this trend? The enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it's death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over just drives me further into the arms of indie developers. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.

You know what this is called? A healthy and competitive market.

Yeah, I get there's layoffs, but that's mainly at AAA studios and is a symptom of a previously unhealthy, highly consolidated market. The job losses suck, but now diversity and competition is coming back, and that's generally a good thing for consumers.

I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.

EDIT: Added release year after @Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned age.

EDIT2: And country of origin, while I'm at it.

EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe "availability" would be more interesting than "release". World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.

PC players are always going to lead the trend because we have the most options. Microsoft and Sony are in a race to enshitify their ecosystems, while Nintendo is actively hostile towards it's customers and fans.

Meanwhile I'm playing through what was originally a Playstation exclusive title that I got on sale on Steam, and run on Linux.

I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:

• Don't go outside
• Don't read billboards, bus wrap advertisements, bus stop advertisements, ignore advertisements in sporting arenas and uniforms, etc
• Use adblockers online/ignore online advertisements
• Mute the television when ads are on
• Don't have television subscriptions
• Pay for streaming services at a level that removes ads
• Watch like no advertising shows like award shows or late night/daytime talking head interview shows
• only watches TV for the finals of a sporting league championship and when advertisements comes on mutes the TV or focuses on their friends or phones
• Don't discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
• Show up to the movies late to avoid advertisements
• Generally have an anti-consumption/anti-advertisement attitude even if they are consumerist. Being advertised to is an annoyance enough to buy something else
• Throw away mailers immediately without reading
• Ignore people trying to advertise on the street/passing out flyers
• Don't answer the door
• Don't answer the phone
• Generally has no idea when anything new is coming out and mostly exists in a social bubble
• Practically no monoculture
• Doesn't read emails unless they specifically searched/expected it
• Etc

Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it's all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It's not a big deal.

"OMG it was advertised all over time square." Responded with: "I live in Wichita." "I live in India." "I'm from NYC and tourist just look at them, they don't read them. Fuck no I don't read them. I don't fuck with times square."

It's actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted

I feel like this doesn't account for people who play older games. Like I'm currently playing the God of War reboot. That would count as playing something that's outside the current top 20, but still very-much AAA.

Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.

And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.

The industry only has themselves to blame for this.