Honestly AAA studios don’t even exist anymore. Is there any gaming studio making multipe $60 games per year you can name where you would vouch for the quality of their games solely on the basis of who made it?
Maybe some first party console games(and even then only some series), but nothing for PC.
I’d like to think Firaxis and Sid Meier still hold water for Civilization at least, but I do get your point. Most of the games I go back to now and enjoy are nowhere near the ballpark of “AAA”.
I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.
Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…
They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.
For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.
Honestly AAA studios don’t even exist anymore. Is there any gaming studio making multipe $60 games per year you can name where you would vouch for the quality of their games solely on the basis of who made it?
Maybe some first party console games(and even then only some series), but nothing for PC.
I’d like to think Firaxis and Sid Meier still hold water for Civilization at least, but I do get your point. Most of the games I go back to now and enjoy are nowhere near the ballpark of “AAA”.
I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.
Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…
They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.
For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.
Devolver is consistent, but paradox has been all over the place lately