Q: Double-A games are dead.
A: Yes they are.

Q: And triple-A games have become so hit-driven that millions of sales are needed to return a profit.
A: Yes, agreed.

Q: For the medium itself – is this a good thing? Is it good that the biggest and perhaps best survive?
A: No, no I don’t think so at all. Certainly as a gamer I don’t think what’s going on is a good thing. Triple-A is as much about marketing these days as it is about production values.

Take a game like BulletStorm, for example. That game was supported and well reviewed but just didn’t break out. It wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a success that could fund a series of projects either. That’s a game that I think people loved but it’s not one that gets the $100 million marketing budget, because that amount of money is only spent on a few sure-fire hits and annualised sequels.

If you look at the movie business, as an analogy, if you can make twenty movies that can make roughly $50-100 million, if three or four are giant hits that will pay for the other ones. Problem is, people can’t afford to make a single movie or game of that cost.

That’s too bad. There’s a lot of great games out there that don’t take off. How many games have you loved that sell less than three million units? There’s probably dozens. Those games can’t get made in today’s games economy. So no, I don’t think it’s a good thing that the middle-class of games have gone away.