As the gaming landscape continues to evolve, many players have begun to express concerns that AAA games are declining in quality. A few years ago, when the critically acclaimed Elden Ring burst onto the scene, it rekindled conversations around gaming standards, especially during the pandemic era. While Elden Ring stood out as an exceptional open-world title, the increasing prevalence of open-world games and sequels from large franchises raised red flags for some gamers. The sentiment expressed was that while games like Elden Ring were heralded as masterpieces, the overall quality of AAA titles seemed to be diminishing.

This notion leads us to an intriguing hypothesis: As developers strive to meet the expectations of modern gaming with the advent of new console generations, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of open-world titles and sequels from established franchises. However, does this trend correlate with a decline in quality? The underlying question then becomes: Are AAA games truly getting worse as they lean heavily into open-world designs or franchise continuations?

To investigate this hypothesis, we must first look at the data. The Internet Game Database (IGDB) offers a comprehensive dataset that compiles almost every game ever released, detailing their release dates, platforms, publishers, developers, and MetaCritic scores. For our analysis, we focused on games launched on Generation V or newer consoles since the PlayStation 1 debuted in 1994, resulting in a total of 124,917 games. This extensive list provides a solid foundation for evaluating trends in gaming.

Next, we needed to distinguish between AAA and indie games. The IGDB marks indie games with a specific tag, identifying 62,561 indie titles within our larger dataset. However, defining AAA games is significantly more complex. While it would be ideal to correlate development costs and marketing budgets to determine what qualifies as AAA, this information is often inaccessible for casual analysts. Fortunately, utilizing Gemini 2.0 Flash, we can effectively label games as AAA based on their IGDB entries. This process, albeit slow, yielded 3,396 games that met the AAA classification.

Graphing the count of games by year, we uncovered a notable surge in indie game releases beginning in the mid-2000s. Additionally, a distinctive spike in the overall number of games was observed between 1994 and 1995, coinciding with the introduction of the Generation V consoles. Analyzing just the AAA game counts shows a steady increase over the years, although initial figures were artificially low due to the generational filtering.

When we examine open-world games specifically, the IGDB categorizes them under the theme label. Out of our dataset, 2,166 games were identified as open-world. Interestingly, there has been a significant rise in AAA open-world titles since the release of Skyrim in 2011, peaking in the late 2010s. Conversely, when we analyze the proportions of open-world games in the indie sector, they consistently represented a small fraction of the total indie game output post-2000. This indicates that while AAA open-world games experienced a boom, indie titles did not follow suit in the same manner.

Turning to franchise games, the situation is equally illuminating. Some franchises, such as Assassins Creed and Call of Duty, seem to have an endless cycle of releases. To quantify this, we categorized games that belong to franchises with four or more titles as late-stage franchise games. From our dataset, we found 5,483 such games across 955 franchises. Notably, while there was a year-over-year increase in the number of AAA late-stage franchise games until the late 2010s, this trend also appears to have decreased in the 2020s.

Finally, we considered the quality of these games by examining their MetaCritic scores. Generally, open-world AAA games have maintained higher median ratings than AAA games overall, although there have been slight dips in ratings during the post-Skyrim boom and a downward trend since 2020. This suggests a complex relationship between game design and player satisfaction.

In conclusion, the data indicates that AAA games are not becoming more open-world or franchise-driven than in the past. In fact, the number of both open-world and late-stage franchise titles has decreased since their peaks in the 2010s. Therefore, the notion that AAA games are deteriorating in quality because of these trends may not hold water. Instead, one could argue that a broader evaluation of the gaming industry is necessary, perhaps indicating that the gaming audienceincluding myselfmight simply be evolving alongside it.