Project Wingman is the second highest selling game on Steam right now.

It’s notable that it’s genre is considered “niche” and that this was made by a 3 person Indie team.

AAA is stale and neglected genre’s and new ones are craved. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rb-d2/project-wingman

Tool chains have vastly improved in game dev. You can do a lot with very few people.

This is in stark contrast to AAA approach of hundreds of people on a team.

AAA teams will downsize in future, but currently middle managers and lower execs too busy protecting “turf” to do so.

However those AAA teams still doing “playable movie” games will continue to bloat as that form of game is incredibly expensive to create.

They, in turn, require even greater marketing budgets.

This is why AAA is attracted to mobile. They haven’t figured out what gamers on PC really want (Indie’s got this), and they see the “Legalized Gambling” fortunes to be made on mobile.

While mobile dev budgets are small, marketing coasts are huge and sales tactics predatory.

In a way, it is far less risky for a Billion dollar game company to throw money at the big future returns of mobile gambling than it would be to fun new, niche or risky games.

After all, they feel they can just buy any breakout indies that succeed, and cover both bets.

But after they buy these innovative studios, they inevitably destroy them or turn them into IP megahouses that whore out IP and...introduce gambling mechanics to maximize revenue.

DIablo Immortals will not escape Activision’s drive to milk it dry on mobile.