After being announced by Microsoft to be acquired for $68.7 billion, Activision Blizzard has also ushered in a new move. Recently, Activision announced that the "Call of Duty: Warzone" under development will launch a mobile game version, and played the slogan on the official website that "we are creating a new AAA mobile terminal work to bring players the exciting, smooth and large-scale game experience in Call of Duty: Warzone".
Although it is common for game manufacturers to do mobile games, it is rare to do "AAA" mobile games. Coincidentally, at the recent spring new product conference, in order to show the strong performance of the new product, Apple chose the "Original God" produced by Mihayou as a demonstration game, and marked it as a "3A game" in PPT. Therefore, many people in the industry believe that Apple believes that "Original God" is a 3A game, and Activision wants to develop a 3A-level mobile game, which may mean that mobile games are about to usher in a new era.
But a very interesting phenomenon is that the traditional game manufacturers have said that the development mode of traditional AAA games is unsustainable, but there are giants such as Activision that have turned their heads to develop AAA mobile games. For Activision to develop a 3A-level "Call of Duty: Warzone" mobile game, and Apple certified "Original God" as a 3A game, the first reaction of some players is "Mobile game Which AAA game?" ”
In fact, AAA games are the concept marketed by the European and American game industry at the end of the last century, the so-called 3A, is "A lot of time", "A lot of resource", "A lot of money", that is, a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources stacked products, but also at that time European and American games in the gameplay of the Japanese game crushed, and made countermeasures. In other words, as long as a lot of resources are invested, even if the final product does not have a highly realistic picture, exquisite social networking, and huge content performance, it can still call itself a AAA game.
After understanding the concept of AAA games, I think everyone will know why traditional game manufacturers now think that the AAA model is unsustainable. In fact, the gameplay of the AAA mode is simply "high cost and high return". More than two decades ago, european and American game manufacturers with stronger capital took advantage of this form of arms race to drag down the Japanese game industry almost step by step, and let Japanese games be in a long-term downturn after entering the new century.
However, the development cost of AAA games has risen, and former Sony PlayStation executives have said that in the early days of game development, some of the world's larger works only cost more than $1 million in development costs, but now, most AAA games often need to spend $80 million to $150 million, which does not even include the ensuing publicity costs. However, the price of the game itself has remained unchanged for a long time about $60, which has also led to the need for tens of millions of sales to achieve profitability, and finally more and more game manufacturers have found that turning to service-oriented games, abandoning the online game logic of "first full delivery" is the most profitable.
Since AAA games are just a marketing concept, AAA mobile games are of course possible. Many players think that a key reason why mobile games cannot be "AAA" is that the functions of mobile platforms have long been far weaker than that of hosts and PCs, and mobile SoCs are difficult to support a game with a sufficiently refined screen and a sufficiently diversified gameplay, and touch control is also difficult to bring a better game experience.
Until recent years, the performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Tianji, and Apple A-series chips has become stronger and stronger, and even some have begun to rival desktop-level CPUs. For example, the NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor equipped with the Nintendo Switch is equivalent to the A9 chip level on Apple's iPhone 6S. And with the promotion of competitive games such as "Peace Elite" and "Glory of Kings", mobile gamers have become commonplace for external controllers.
At the same time, thanks to the mobility of engine technology, such as linear space lighting, HDR pipeline, TOD day and night changes, animated lighting GI effects, etc., the technology used in desktop game development has also begun to be widely used on mobile. Therefore, with the development of hardware and the introduction of development technology, the mobile terminal now has almost no obstacles in the process of mobile game 3A in addition to the problem of screen size.
However, the technology is not mature in 2022, as early as two or three years ago, the industry had a mobile game 3A sound, until the popularity of "Original God" proved that in the mobile end, a lot of time accumulation, large-scale team development, a lot of capital investment can be successful. In fact, an important reason why big game manufacturers do AAA is that AAA games are a concept that differentiates and differentiates from independent games.
In the more than two decades since the concept of AAA games was proposed, which independent game teams have gradually grown from small and medium-sized studios to game manufacturers? In fact, such examples basically do not exist, just like the mobile phone industry, large manufacturers will gradually raise the threshold of flagship machines, no doubt let small factories give up the intention of doing such products. The same is true in the mobile game industry, in the past decade, the explosion of mobile games has given birth to a considerable number of mobile game manufacturers from scratch, and they have also been able to rise rapidly with their fantastic ideas, such as Mihayou, Lilith and other companies.
When the ceiling of console games and PC games is already visible to the naked eye, mobile games still have a wide room for growth. As a large manufacturer with strong strength like Activision, it wants to make a difference in the field of mobile games, and the development of AAA mobile games is obviously the fastest way to achieve results, after all, if the big factories fight with independent teams to create ideas, they will almost fall into the trap. So perhaps after Activision, there will be more game manufacturers who will announce that they will do AAA mobile games and move the host experience to the mobile terminal.