Det er ingen hemmelighed, at spiludvikling er mere risikabelt end nogensinde, især i AAA-sektoren. Projekter koster hundredvis af millioner dollars at producere og tager år at færdiggøre, hvilket betyder, at dårlige salg kan få katastrofale konsekvenser for den pågældende udvikler eller udgiver.
Med dette in mente fik vi under vores ophold i Portugal for DevGAMM mulighed for at tale med den svenske veteranudvikler Marie Mejerwall, som har erfaring fra Warner Bros. og Capcom (blandt andet på Dead Rising 5) samt en række andre store virksomheder. Da hun har et indgående kendskab til AAA-udvikling, spurgte vi Mejerwall om sektoren i dag og om, hvordan produktionen har ændret sig over årene.
"Well, I think just looking at it, these productions have been growing and growing and scaling in budget, and the risks are too high," begyndte Mejerwall. "I mean, what we saw from Ubisoft, for example, they had to make a deal where they put some of their IPs in a new entity, in a partnership entity that they had instead, because the risks are just so high. So it's not really sustainable for a lot of companies to take these risks anymore."
Hun bragte derefter samtalen videre til de skiftende og udviklende teknologier, og hvordan AI faktisk kan hjælpe med at lette presset på gavnlig vis.
"But with the revolution of tools and AI, for example, programming is a field that uses a lot of AI - also in animation, we've always used AI for a lot of these things - and these tools are just getting better and better. And with that, we can create more with smaller teams than what we had before."
Ud over dette mener Mejerwall også, at co-development-teams og udgivere, der er mere åbne for at overlade deres IP til andre studier, er en anden måde at reducere risikoen ved AAA-produktion på.
"And I think also another thing that we're seeing is the shift to co-dev teams. So a lot of actually the co-dev teams have been growing exponentially almost during the last three years because the ones who are owning the IP, they don't want to hire a bunch of people. And then... you almost see that three games and three IPs to keep a big studio afloat, and that you hire people and they always have something to do. And that's a little bit risky. Whereas you can just take a co-work, you can give the one IP to a co-dev instead, and they can make something good with that together with you. And then you can still have some central resource teams that help all the different projects that you're working on. So publishers can kind of work a little bit smarter and with a lower risk. And I'm seeing that more and more."
Du kan se hele og lokalt undertekstede interview med Mejerwall nedenfor for mere om spilindustrien, skabelsen af intense boss-kampe og meget mere.