And even then, not all those big releases are new. Publishers are so risk averse in the modern age that remakes are now big business, companies clearly preferring the safe money to be made in restoring a proven classic than trying something original. So yes, the year did also see major releases like The Last Of Us, a game that...came out in 2013 and had already been remastered once before.
Throw in an ongoing obsession with turning the few released games we do get into a live-service experiment, publishers hoping to sell content for them for years after release, and you can see not only how we ended up in this AAA drought, but why it’s going to only get worse (or at least weirder) in the years to come. Assassin’s Creed is leading the charge here; what used to be a flagship series that released every one to two years is about to become a platform unto itself. But it’s also visible everywhere from Call of Duty’s persistent Warzone to Fortnite’s seasons. Big games aren’t just not getting released anymore; the ones that are will never go away.
Yet for all this change, that scaffolding—the structures of hype and commercialisation erected to encase the AAA business model—remains. Even as the very thing they’re built around starts to collapse. Look at GameStop, previously a store that sold boxed video game releases, now an NFT clearing house and meme stock placeholder. Look at big trade shows like E3, whose bread and butter—major reveals and huge press conferences—have moved on and downsized. These vestiges of the old world remain, but the sand on which they’re built is starting to wash away.
I want to be clear and say that, unless you run E3 or work at GameStop, this is not a bad thing! Smaller games rule, mid-tier games rule, smaller studios and more agile publishers rule, phone games rule, and millions of people (and millions more each year) are very happy playing video games every day in ways that don’t involve spending $70 on a box that says “PlayStation 5 exclusive” on the front.
But for anyone involved in that creaky framework, or even emotionally invested in the idea of standalone AAA game releases—people still writing down E3 press conference times in their diary, I’m looking at you—these must be troubling times. Because while 2022 may look like a barren year for blockbuster video games:
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