Why Did Big Publishers Stop Making Small Games?

Many of today’s games take too long to make, cost too much on release, and come with sky-high stakes. Smaller games are fun, too, so why have the big companies abandoned them?

We’ve Been Waiting a Decade

Grand Theft Auto 6 is on its way. I’m not going to play it, since I’ve never been a GTA fan. Yet this is easily one of the biggest games in gaming, and its predecessor continues to be one most popular games today. That’s in spite of GTA 5 originally hitting shelves back in 2013.

GTA 6 has been in development for most of the time since, and yet with a late 2025 release date, we’re still close to a year away from the game’s launch. Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get delayed.

If you were born when GTA 5 launched, you’re in high school now. GTA isn’t alone here. When Halo first hit the Xbox, Halo 2 came just three years later (and Halo 3 just three years after that). As we reach the modern era, there were six years between Halo 5 and Halo Infinite.

Are you a Mario Kart fan? By comparison, Halo fans have it good. Mario Kart 8 may have received a bunch of new tracks, but that doesn’t change that this game came out back in 2014. I skipped the entire Switch generation, but the last Mario Kart I owned on the Wii U is the one everyone’s still playing.

Though, if you feel Mario Kart isn’t as good as it used to be, you might consider this a good thing—at least it hasn’t gotten worse.

Game Releases Can Tank a Company​

These games take so long to develop because games have become incredibly complex. In the past, to provide a moving story, you only needed to hire a writer. Now you need voice actors and motion capture artists. You need virtually everyone it takes to make an animated movie, except for some games you’re producing many more hours of footage. You might as well go buy a small island. It’s cheaper.

Game budgets have gotten so big that if a game bombs, it can take a company down with it.

Sony’s Concord made headlines as one of the biggest commercial failures in gaming history. This was a live service multiplayer game that cost Sony millions but was shut down mere weeks after launch, with everyone who bought the game getting a full refund. That means Sony made zero profit off this title. It was the only game developer Firewalk Studios, founded in 2018, worked on before being closed down.

More recently, Ubisoft’s stock price has continued to take a hit following the less than stellar sales of Star Wars Outlaws, a game that was meant to turn the company’s fortunes around. The game is so big that more than 10 Ubisoft studios worked with developer Lucasfilm Games to bring it to life.

Bring Back the Mid-Tier Games​

Games don’t have to be this big or this risky. When I look back at the games I remember fondly, many of them were not the triple-A first-party bangers that everyone still knows today. My favorite game for the Nintendo 64 was Rare’s Jet Force Gemini. I remember spending hours with quirky, weird platformers like Rocket: Robot on Wheels and Glover. I would love to see more new games like Banjo-Kazooie without having to actually buy Banjo-Kazooie again.

I played Final Fantasy VII on the original PlayStation like any other JRPG fan, but I also played lesser-known releases like Legend of Legaia. This is a specific enough genre that almost any game I name will sound niche, but it’s also the case that the original PlayStation was flooded with new JRPGs at a scale fans of the genre don’t see today (here’s a primer for those not fluent in the different types of RPGs).

Some of the most well-known titles on the Dreamcast were quirky hits like Power Stone and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing. Even if you stick to Sega’s first party titles from that era, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Super Monkey Ball, and Shenmue were all new IPs (that last one in particular was a game ahead of its time).

Companies just threw stuff at the wall to see what stuck. This originality was a big part of why so many of us think back to the Dreamcast fondly, even if we never owned one.

These days, we primarily get this creativity from indies. If a big publisher buys a small studio, that’s almost a sign that a development team isn’t long for this world, and that their originality will be sucked out if they continue to exist.

Let’s See a Shorter Release Cycle

Life Is Strange is currently my favorite video game franchise, and Life Is Strange: Double Exposure is the first game in years I’ve played on day one. I’m grateful that, for a while now, new entries in the series have come out every three years.

In the past, this was partly due to two different teams working on separate Life Is Strange games at the same time. It helps, though, that each Life Is Strange game plays very similarly. While the story changes and a new special mechanic gets introduced each time, the fundamental controls remain the same.

I think this is great.

It’s fine with me if developers reuse as many assets as they can. It’s not going to hurt my feelings if a new Life Is Strange game repeats similar character models or some of the furniture looks the same. If this is what it takes to keep up the current release cadence, then I’m here for it.

While we’re talking about Square Enix, let’s take a moment to think back to the early Final Fantasy games. Look at screenshots of the first three Final Fantasy games. How different do they look? How similar did they play? The same can be said for Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX. Starting with Final Fantasy X, each entry has been revolutionary, but personally, I would have loved to see two more entries that played like Final Fantasy X.

It was, after all, my personal favorite Final Fantasy game. I would have been happier if Square had tried a little less hard and spent a little less money. By the way, 2023’s Final Fantasy XVI came nearly seven years after XV!

Not Every Game Needs to Be a Film

It’s okay for a game to just be imaginative and fun. Sadly, though, a game can score well on both of those marks and be considered a failure by the big publishers. Hi-Fi Rush was beloved by reviewers and amassed a couple of million downloads, yet Microsoft still shut down the development studio behind the game despite its success.

This story has a somewhat happy ending, at least, since PUBG publisher Krafton later acquired both the studio and the license to Hi-Fi Rush.

The thing is, wave after wave of similar-sized studios are not having their happy ending right now. The middle is being hollowed out.

Surprise 2024 hits like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown from Ubisoft and Kunistu-Gami: Path of the Goddess from Capcom show what we can get when studios usually tasked with big sprawling games get to make something smaller and more focused.

As much as I love indies, the industry would be much better off if publishers would invest more in games that are less grand in scope, not as costly to produce, and can be considered successful even if they don’t change the world.