14 DAY TRIAL // David Goldfarb, a renowned developer who worked on Battlefield 3, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Payday 2, has recently stated during an interview that AAA game development can seriously restrict creativity.
The developer has gone indie and founded a brand new game studio called The Outsiders, and is currently working on his next game. For the time being, everything surrounding the other members of the studio and the content of the upcoming video game is surrounded in a shroud of mystery.
However, Goldfarb has mention that he is really tired of the AAA video game development scene, even if he has fond memories from working at Battlefield maker DICE and Payday creator Overkill Studios.
He says that AAA development is in an unhealthy state where creativity is hampered due to the huge budgets and feature checklists involved, and that he wants to take a break from it all and focus on some of his own projects, rather than work for someone else.
"I think the risk/reward for the companies that can spend the marketing money and that have big successful franchises, for them it's still worth laying out that investment. But for people who don't have that kind of capital, you're not really in a practical success loop. AAA is the equivalent of the One Percent right now. It comes with all these caveats. You can't make the crazy stuff really," Goldfarb tells GamesIndustry.
Mid-tier projects can turn out really awesome
He also mentions that, unlike other pessimistic developers who see the impending doom of mid-tier studios, he foresees a bright future for studios situated between the indie and AAA scopes.
He further points out that big studios are held accountable for big-budget projects, which means that there isn't much room for experimentation, and whenever you want something done a certain way, you have to really fight for it, without always succeeding, which gets tiresome after a certain point.
Although he acknowledges the good times he had while working on Payday or Battlefield 3, Goldfarb is enthusiastic about working on his own thing, and excited about the potential of mid-tier video games, that lack the visual fidelity of AAA games but have a certain style and quality to them that make them perform well in the market, citing Paradox Interactive's games as the perfect example of gameplay-first design.
