AAA games can be profitable, but they also often come with a huge risk. Ninja Theory’s chief creative officer Tameem Antoniades indicates despite his company’s critical success with original games like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Journey to the West, the current retail model runs counter to innovation.

“We’re in this kind of AAA bracket, I guess you could call it,” said Antoniades. “The high budget, high stakes retail model – the barriers to entry for that are so high, so difficult, that we seem to be getting, being offered, decent work in that area. It’s hard to say no when you’ve got a team of 100 and you have to keep the payroll going. Another big project comes along, you tend to go for it.”

“There’s always an opportunity between projects to explore things, a lot of team members are hobbyists, they create their own iPhone games and things like that so I can see us kind of taking a punt with that. It can’t come soon enough. The whole digital revolution is happening now and it can’t come soon enough. The model we’re under, the big retail model, is creaking,” he continued. “It’s such an opportunity for fun creative games to reach a target audience, there’s this stranglehold that the AAA retail model has which I think is just crushing innovation and access to creative content. If you’re paying that much for a game, you don’t want to take chances. You want everything to be there, all the feature sets. You want it to be a known experience, guaranteed fun. That’s not healthy.”

Source: GamesIndustry.biz