Former Santa Monica Studio co-head and director of product development, Meghan Morgan Juinio, who was a producer on God of War Ragnarok, says more AAA studios and publishers should invest in low-budget projects to "diversify" their portfolios.
Talking to Game Developer, Morgan Juinio said smaller scale projects don't need to displace blockbuster franchises like Call of Duty and God of War, which yield "potentially really large" payoffs, but argued, "there's an opportunity right now for all of us, at any level, to really look at the strategic long-term view." Specifically, she said there's a lot of potential in indies and AA games backed by major studios.
"I do also think there is an opportunity for those big players to also look to diversify into double-A and single-A, and then perhaps indie as well right?" said Morgan Juinio. "And what size, shape, or form does that take? I don't know [...] but I think we need to look beyond the knee-jerk reaction of the pandemic and post-pandemic couple of years and really think about who do we want to be? What kind of product do we want to put out? We need to plot out intentionally how we're going to get there."
Morgan Juinio pointed to Astro Bot and Split Fiction as examples of games published by huge companies, Sony and EA, respectively, which forgo AAA conventions in favor of shorter development cycles and playtimes.
"I think gamers right now are a little bit desensitized to beautiful graphics and size and scale and scope. It's almost a given, right?" she said. "If a game isn't fun, it doesn't matter how pretty it is. If a game isn't engaging or delivering some hook, then it's not going to connect with players."
Astro Bot and Split Fiction are both beautiful games in their own right, but there's definitely something to be said for creativity and innovation over visual fidelity. Speaking for myself, Donkey Kong Bananza is my favorite game of the year so far, and it doesn't hold a candle to contemporaries like Ghost of Yotei and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in terms of graphics and general scale. Regardless, I think we can all agree that having to wait 15+ years for Elder Scrolls 6 isn't ideal, and it sure would be nice to have smaller scale, imaginative releases from big budget studios to keep us busy in the meantime.
While we're on the topic, here are the best games of 2025 so far.
