Livingstone, Molyneux expect triple-A to stick around

Two British games industry veterans have bucked the trend in prophesising a lasting future for big budget, triple-A game development.

Speaking at a Bafta Games question time event, as reported by Develop, Eidos president Ian Livingstone said triple-A is still showing the industry where to go.

“I don’t think triple-A games will ever go away because they are still leading the way in terms of production values, investment and R&D,” he said.

“It’s just how the next consoles are going to survive, will there be any hardware after the next-generation? Probably not, it’ll probably all be embedded in TV.”

Lionhead founder and former Microsoft Game Studios executive Peter Molyneux agreed, but said the focus may narrow.

“It is not going anywhere,” he said.

”There’s interesting research here comparing sales success with Metacritic scores. “Publishers are becoming more and more obsessed with Metacritic bands. I think that’s going to squeeze the number of titles that come out. I think at E3 there were about 500 titles and last year we had 1000. I wouldn’t be surprised if that shrunk to sub 100 titles.”