Oddworld Inhabitants founder and CEO Lorne Lanning, who is currently working on Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty, is never one to mince words when it comes to the hazards of publishers dictating the direction of projects. Speaking to Games Industry International, Lanning talked about the stress of AAA developers and the benefits of indie development.

“Every game dev that I know that’s still doing triple-A retail products is trying to figure out a way to get out of it. Those deals are just getting worse and worse, even though your expectation of the money is getting higher and higher.

“Labour’s getting more expensive and the rewards are getting smaller. So that’s why we decided to stop playing for a while until we could start getting our games up digitally, see if we could build our own business. It’s working, it’s funding new content.”

The prime director of Lanning and his team, who invested “a couple of million” of their own money into their recent games, is to eventually fund new IP. “It’d be nice to be getting paid again. That hasn’t been happening for me. It’s all going into the product.”

The advantages are nonetheless manifold. For indies, “quality is going to be their lifeline” and there will never be a case where a game is released in a buggy unfinished state to appeal to shareholders. “When shareholders are more important than the customers, how long is your business really going to last?

“Trust is the most endangered commodity, it’s the rarest commodity today.

“You’ve got to answer their questions in a sincere way, even if it’s not what they want to hear. You have to say ‘you know what? You’re right, we f***ed up like this or we f***ed up like that, but this is where we’re at, this is why we’re doing it, this is what we’re trying to achieve.”

Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty is in development for PSN, Wii U, PC, Linux and Mac.

Avalanche Studios founder and creative director Christofer Sundberg recently spoke to GameSpot about today’s AAA development scene. The Just Cause creator, who is now working on Mad Max for current and next gen platforms, believed that the environment for such developer is “really not healthy at the moment,”

“Games have evolved, technology has evolved but as businesses we’re still stuck where we were 15 years ago. As budgets grow, risks increase.

“The publishers are nervous because they have to project a game being a massive hit three years into the future and the developers are frustrated because they need to be flexible to every move the publishers make. It’s impossible to make everyone happy in the current equation.”

As it stands though, not many AAA titles end up profitable. “Very few traditional $60 games make any money, and what used to make sense doesn’t any more. Publishers and developers very rarely see a return of investment from a 5-8 hour long game.”

As for early sales numbers for the PS4 and Xbox One, Sundberg was happy – since Mad Max is coming to both consoles – but stated that, “It’s a bit early for me to feel comfortable though. The investments in a AAA game these days are huge and even if everyone of those two million people bought a copy each, most big games would not break even if they were next-gen exclusives.”

However, Sundberg believes that publishers are working hard to come up with more than just your typical experience. “I hope and think we will see improvements over time,” he stated, and added that he was “really excited” about upcoming titles like TitanFall and Destiny.

What are your thoughts on Sundberg’s views? Let us know in the comments.

The number of A-list and AA-list titles over the years has dwindled though, with only the most premium of the AAA games remaining.

With the developer recently coming off a wave of lay-offs, former Trion Worlds CCO and Redwood studio general manager Scott Hartsman (who left the studio back in January) recently stated to Massively that, “I think what’s become broken is the traditional AAA style of development and distribution, MMO or otherwise.

“We’re approaching the point at which AAA projects need to be blockbusters just to sustain everyone in the ecosystem: the developer, the publisher, the manufacturing and physical goods cost, the distributor, the retailer, and in some cases, the platform/console owner. ”

“The movie model worked when companies could absorb missteps and teams could hopefully learn from their mistakes to fight another day.

“As the absolute costs go up, fewer and fewer companies are capable of doing so. That’s what’s broken. When it comes to who pays the piper in that list a couple sentences ago, it tends to get paid left-to-right, beginning with the developer.”

Of course, there are plenty of high level developers who prefer to not be straddled with that mode of development. Brian Fargo, Chris Roberts, Tim Schafer and, heck, even Peter Molyneux are quickly turning to methods like crowd-funding to make the games they want to make, for gamers who want to play them.

“More product creators realize that, and more are choosing to step out of that ecosystem entirely. Stepping away gets easier every day in a world that now contains things to help you operate independently at a far lower cost, faster than ever before, from funding to accelerating your development, helping you host, helping you bill, helping you distribute, helping you analyze, and so on.”

AAA blockbusters will still have a place in this world though, with Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto V and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag all releasing this year.