Cliff Bleszinski, co-founder of Boss Key Productions, recently addressed attendees at the Reboot Develop Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia about the current state of triple-A game development and the concerns that he has with the sustainability of the model.

He began his speech by comparing most triple-A game developers at this point to chain restaurants in the United States.

Triple-A is starting to get to this point where it feels like the American restaurant scene. You have a lot of these restaurants like your Applebee's, your Outback Steakhouse, your Cheesecake Factory, and your Olive Garden. They're not bad, but they're not great. They're just kind of there.

He compared this to a group of triple-A games like Madden, Uncharted, Call of Duty, and Battlefield saying:

It feels like it's just this category of eight games that we're getting repeatedly over and over again. They're good games but they're costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make and market.

Cliff continued by saying that most of the reason why it has become this way is because of name recognition. Titles like Madden and Grand Theft Auto have established brands that consumers are already aware of. They decide to purchase the successive games in these franchises purely because they're familiar with the previous entries in the series. Consumers are less likely to buy games that are of a new IP because there's no name recognition or nostalgia tied to that product in the same way that a franchise like Halo that has been around for over fifteen years.

Using Horizon Zero Dawn as an example, Cliff says that a company like Sony has the resources and money to allow a developer like Guerrilla Games to work on their game for over five years whereas developer Irrational Games shut down after releasing Bioshock Infinite due to the game not bringing in enough money compared to the amount of time it took to make.

At the end of the day, this is a nearly unsustainable model unless you are one of these established brands or companies like an Activision, or a 2K, or a Sony.

His proposal for how to fix this current model centers around an idea that he calls "double-A". Some examples of games that fall into this category according to Bleszinski are Rocket LeagueWarframe, and Rust. Using his own game Lawbreakers as an example, Cliff said that the key moving forward is to give gamers a triple-A experience with the price point and value of a double-A game. Funding these games is what's hard however, and Bleszinski suggested going to foreign companies like Tencent and Nexon who are looking to partner with western developers.

Bleszinski touched on a plethora of other topics throughout his talk ranging virtual reality and how to properly care for game developers. It's a great conversation from one of the veteran developers in the industry. If you want to watch the whole unabridged address, you can find it here on Twitch.

Bleszinski and Boss Key's upcoming game Lawbreakers is currently in development for PC and is slated to release later this year.