Avalanche Studios’ creative director Stefan Ljungqvist recently spoke to Gamasutra about the future of big-budget games. And while he doesn’t predict there being more of them – because honestly, with the closure of big studios like THQ and Avalanche, the field is just getting narrower – he does think they’ll be spread out among smaller titles.
“I don’t think big-budget games are going away. There’s going to be less of them.
“But that’s a good thing, because maybe we don’t need forty first-person shooters. I don’t want to play them all, but maybe we need one, two or three.”
“What I like now is that there are more opportunities to be creative. Maybe over the course of the past five years, developers have pitched creative or more artistic games, but publishers had been more careful of betting a lot on those games, because they’re associated with some risk.
“But maybe now they can [take more risks] because they need to be more unique in the marketplace.”
While that may hold true for games like Journey and The Walking Dead, don’t expect to see the end of Call of Duty any time soon.