AAA games before launch can be seen as high-risk speculative assets. The game gets a few rounds of investment and then when it's still not done, they go begging. Sometimes one publisher pawns the game off onto another, but internal politics equally acts to create horse-trading situations. There are attempts at cost control but they get overridden by the desire to hit every possible marketing bullet point. As the budget creeps up the desire to make back sunk costs rises, so further escalation acts as a way to stop cancellation. There's a lot of executive hot potato causing design changes, but the team's getting funding. So, in theory, at least, the game is shaping up to be "bigger and better".
Finally, the game launches, after passing through so many hands and getting a drop-dead deadline. Crunch is mandated in hopes of getting it somewhat release-worthy, but really, it's just a pile of assets that have been given little time in the oven. Reviewers marvel at the graphics and animation. Individual pieces of the game are polished to hell. The engineers get to give talks about their cool rendering optimization strategy, and the art directors and design leads likewise can talk about how they made art style or design decisions. But it's not representative of a holistic vision - it's enterprise software.
When a studio is bought, it often starts from a point of some coherence. And then the horse trading starts, and the original studio heads leave. So it just becomes another team. And it's hard to avoid that because the whole idea of AAA is to build up the assets and IP, not the teams and their ability to execute. You sacrifice the teams to get an IP, and then find a new team.
Finally, the game launches, after passing through so many hands and getting a drop-dead deadline. Crunch is mandated in hopes of getting it somewhat release-worthy, but really, it's just a pile of assets that have been given little time in the oven. Reviewers marvel at the graphics and animation. Individual pieces of the game are polished to hell. The engineers get to give talks about their cool rendering optimization strategy, and the art directors and design leads likewise can talk about how they made art style or design decisions. But it's not representative of a holistic vision - it's enterprise software.
When a studio is bought, it often starts from a point of some coherence. And then the horse trading starts, and the original studio heads leave. So it just becomes another team. And it's hard to avoid that because the whole idea of AAA is to build up the assets and IP, not the teams and their ability to execute. You sacrifice the teams to get an IP, and then find a new team.