Ar¢tos
Member
Sony AA games =/= indie AA gamesSony doesn't need to fund AA games. They get a tonne of AA games from independent 3rd parties. There's no shortage of them.
AA games can be self-published by the studios, which comes with significant benefits for the studio in question, e.g. IP ownership and a bigger share of the profits.
It makes more sense for Sony to focus their FP publishing dollars on AAA games which is a category that's entirely unreachable by AA indie devs. And it especially makes sense for Sony to fund historically AA devs moving up to AAA development. NOBODY else is doing this, and with the slow attrition of AAA devs across the industry, if successful AA devs aren't being backed to take on larger AAA projects, then we'll see fewer and fewer AAA games until all that's left are the AAA first party studios and those 3rd parties under big publishers that shit out annualized sequels.
So again, I don't really see any issue.
The production values and quality are (were) waaaay different.
I did playtesting for a couple of Sony AA games in the ps4 era and the difference to testing other games, including AAA games from 3rd parties was huge.
Even their small games had builds for testing that were basically finished and polished, while others... *cough* Ubisoft *cough* were a massive shit show.