Pulling focus: Must AAA pander to the distracted? | Opinion

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the effect that the inflation of development budgets has had on the industry. As budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars have become common, cracks have emerged in the foundations of the entire model for funding new games. Attitudes to risk have been warped in strange ways under the weight of those financial expectations; a desire for the certainty of proven IP, twisted around by a reckless willingness to take huge swings at incredibly slim chances of equally…